Have you seen these men? Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain (Photo: Focus Features)

Part of me does not even want to write about Brokeback Mountain. It is the part that figures you have heard everything there is to be said about it--Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal portray cowboys in love. Ang Lee directs them. Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway play their respective wives. Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana adapted the screenplay from Annie Proulx's prize-winning short story. In the service of clinical, yet junk sciences like award-season prognostications and cultural glory, Focus Features has underwritten not just a film, but the provision of a lab rat irresistible to film writers desperate for new phenomena.

And ostensibly in the service of their readership, those writers raced to deliver the perceptions that would demonstrate their alacrity with a scalpel. Rapturous buzz surfaced from festivals in Venice and Telluride by Labor Day. David Poland waved it off not once, but twice by the end of September. The hype machine whirred into subsonic range early last month when standing-room-only press screenings yielded one exegesis after another--take the New York Observer's Choire Sicha, who wrote that "Brokeback Mountain dismisses contemporary, over-therapized, narcissistic questions about love. ... (O)ne of New York's most jaded reporters admitted (after a screening) that he found it impossible to be cynical about the film--and this admission was somehow even more shocking than tears." The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson broke down the commercial mechanics of gay tragedy, while Caryn James crapped out a fags-fighting-for-Oscars trend piece that wound up influencing hackwork from The Telegraph to Liz Smith and beyond. Now Ledger and Gyllenhaal are on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and profiled in Newsweek--middlebrow organs of mediocre taste that never wavered from the wider mission to just get this movie.

And now you get me, straggling into the mix like the forlorn bastard playing an empty room at the end of open-mic night. I mean, I liked Brokeback Mountain, and I have plenty I could tell you about how faithfully adapted and beautifully acted it is. Like I said, though, you have heard all that before. You know it presents the relationship between Ennis Del Mar (Ledger) and Jack Twist (Gyllenhaal), who embark on a doomed 20-year love affair while working as ranchhands in Wyoming. You know that it cuts its poetry with heartbreak, its power with prurience. But forget how intimate and graphic Ennis's and Jack's sex is. In overwhelmingly perceiving Brokeback Mountain as a revolutionary gay love story, the breathless critical apparatus overlooks the nuances that make this as basic and relatable a romance as Romeo and Juliet. Ang Lee has not made a movie about men and men, or men and women--he has made a movie about souls.

"Sometimes I think it's of great importance, and sometimes I think I just opened a can of worms," Lee told The Reeler on a recent visit to New York. "The movie is indeed a provocation. ... Society has all kinds of thoughts, and thoughts get generated that are very different. They are not in unison, and they're coming from all different directions. They're bigger than the movie. I sort of have to live through it and handle it. I don't have all the answers, because most people want quick answers."

A fine mess: Felicity Huffman and Kevin Zegers in Transamerica (Photo: The Weinstien Company)

Years before writing and directing his feature debut Transamerica, Duncan Tucker had considered starting his career with a different project altogether. It was an adaptation of a book he adored and which maintained the road movie tradition he wanted to follow for his debut. He knew it would take some massaging for an independent filmmaker to handle it, but still--it never really left his mind.

"Lord of the Rings," Tucker told me Tuesday, just hours before Transamerica's New York premiere. "It's a road story. I love those kinds of quest-adventure-fantasy books, and I was thinking, 'Gosh, how can I make an adventure? How can I make Lord of the Rings on a budget?' This is before the movies were made."

And in the end, sure--the films all share the story of a burdened hero's journey far from home. Moreover, they share a history of high-profile buzz: Felicity Huffman's performance as a pre-op transsexual coming to sudden terms with her family and her future netted her Best Actress honors last spring at the Tribeca Film Festival, as well as a similar nod for next year's Independent Spirit Awards and no shortage of attention in many film pundits' early Oscar pools. Tucker also received recognition at the Berlin and Deauville film festivals. The Weinstein Company made Transamerica one of its first post-Miramax acquisitions in August, partnering with IFC Films for a release this Friday.

Not a bad showing for a micro-budget gender- and genre-bender that Tucker describes as a "sheep in wolf's clothing." Huffman portrays Bree, a male-to-female transsexual who discovers a week before her operation that she is the "father" of a troubled teenage son. Despite Bree's protests, her therapist (Elizabeth Peña) insists that she travel to New York to reconcile her relationship with Toby (Kevin Zegers) before the surgery can occur. Bree poses as a Christian missionary to spring her son from jail, but her revulsion at Toby's drug-addled street hustling triggers her maternal (or paternal?) instincts to pluck him from his squalor and relocate him to his late mother's home in Kentucky. Toby has other plans--namely, gay porn stardom in Bree's hometown of Los Angeles--and their pairing soon hits the highway in a sort of bizarre hybrid of comedy, drama, buddy movie and, of course, road flick.

Ron Hogan had a problem. While researching The Stewardess is Flying the Airplane!, his exhaustive new book about 1970s American cinema, he discovered he could not watch the films fast enough. There were hundreds of them--backed up everywhere, taking over his life. Or at least his home life.

"I spent like six months watching nothing but '70s films, pretty much," Hogan told The Reeler earlier this week. "Which means that for six months, my TiVo was filled with nothing but '70s films. But actually I shouldn't say 'my TiVo,' because it's actually my wife's TiVo, so that led to some testy moments over the course of the research period. It's like, 'Can we get rid of some of these trashy movies?' I tried to watch through them as much I could and not affect Laura's taping too much, but yeah. It would get to points where there were like a dozen cheap horror films mixed in with, like, The French Connection."

That is not to say that Hogan's book is some catch-all for every low-budget genre film that emerged from the decade--that has been done. Rather, Stewardess is a more of an elegant compendium of history, profiles and photos--lots and lots of photos--recalling a decade that many cineastes like to regard as perhaps the greatest era of American movies. But whereas previous '70s resources such as Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and the documentary A Decade Under the Influence venerated a relative handful of the period's vanguard, Hogan evaluates everything from genre to celebrity to motif in threading films as disparate as The Muppet Movie and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest with the 1970s' overriding ethos of risk and exploration.

"I just knew from growing up in the '70s that there was so much more going on during that whole decade," Hogan said. "And if you wanted to talk about how these guys transformed Hollywood, let's look at some of the results of that from what everybody else was doing. So I wanted to look at the disaster films, the blaxploitation films and at what was going on in thrillers and new portrayals of sexuality. There were just so many different things to write about and so much of that story just hadn't been told yet."

The new kid comes to Columbia this weekend

From just about the moment its Web site finished downloading on my desktop for the first time, the brand-new Journal of Short Film joined concepts like Movioke and Cinemasports in the slowly swelling canon of Things I Cannot Believe I Did Not Think Of First.

I mean, sure--DVD short-film collections are out there: You have got your Full Frame documentaries every year, a couple of volumes of Shorts! and maybe a half-dozen irregular compilations scattered around the indie netherworld, just for starters. But then you have the JSF, which will have its New York City premiere Saturday afternoon at Columbia University's Dodge Hall. First, there is publisher Karl Mechem's quasi-manifesto about "a plurality of voices" and challenging the principle that "corporate media have deemed short film to be commercially unviable." Then, when it arrives in your mailbox in its decidedly low-key mock-up of a leather-bound literary journal, and when you imagine the potential to see a whole shelf of these things--comprising hundreds of peer-reviewed shorts that you would probably never see otherwise--you suddenly get it.

"I just wanted more options for filmmakers and for film watchers," Mechem told The Reeler last weekend from his home base in Columbus, Ohio. "There are just so few methods of distribution for short film. Short film festivals aren't cutting it--there just aren't that many out there. And I get so frustrated with short films online, because there are a lot of them there, but they're totally unjuried, and it's just so hard to know what's good. Inevitably my Internet connection doesn't fight the good fight, and even if it does work, you're a watching it on a tiny little screen.

"And so it's a pretty simple idea. It's modeled off a literary journal, where filmmakers submit their films. And they just want exposure. They want to be published, and there are people out there who would like to see these films. Again, I'm not reinventing the wheel or anything--its model is well-established, but for some reason had not been applied to short films."

All about the "symbiosis": Dying Gaul director Craig Lucas with star Peter Sarsgaard (Photos: STV)

Craig Lucas just has to make everything difficult: His dark, challenging (and brilliant) new film, The Dying Gaul, slinks into theaters Friday; he equates the process of adapting his plays for the screen to "drinking his own urine"; and in referring to him, nobody can really agree exactly how much emphasis they should place on the "first" in "first-time filmmaker."

OK--maybe it is not that abstract. "It was my first time directing a movie, so I was extremely nervous," Lucas, 54, told The Reeler last month while promoting Gaul in New York. "But also, I was at the mercy of everybody because I didn't know things. So I kind of said to all the actors and crew and everybody, 'Please tell me if I'm wrong about something, or I'm missing something or I'm not doing something I should be doing. Or feel free to go, "Don't you need a close-up of that?"' The three of them probably could have done this movie without me."

By "the three of them," Lucas means Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard--the Gaul principals who scheme and scam their ways through Lucas' finely honed morality noir. Yet by invoking their formidable talent, Lucas provides only the latest in a career's worth of clues indicating he is anything but a rookie. A 30-year veteran of award-winning stage and screen work including Reckless, Prelude to a Kiss and The Secret Lives of Dentists, Lucas has been attuned to the Hollywood game since the late 1980s--when he and director Norman Rene battled the establishment to make the groundbreaking AIDS drama Longtime Companion.

The Dying Gaul, in fact, has much to do with that period's struggle (well, sort of, anyhow-- and pardon me stealing my own synopsis from the film's premiere event last June): Scott portrays Jeffrey, a closeted Hollywood producer who seduces Robert (Sarsgaard), a screenwriter to whom Jeffrey has paid $1 million for his latest script. The catch: Robert must "commercialize" the script by replacing the story's central homosexual relationship with a heterosexual one. Jeffrey's and Robert's trysts intensify even as Robert settles into a close friendship with Jeffrey's wife Elaine (Clarkson). When Elaine discovers their affair, however, she launches a perverse cycle of emotional blackmail against Robert.

Between Jeffrey's and Elaine's duplicities and Robert's self-betrayal, there is enough wrecthedness to go around for at least a couple of films. When she assumes his dead lover's persona, Elaine elevates Robert's chat-room fanatsies to the level of religious experience. Meanwhile, Jeffrey's professional fantasy bleeds over into everything great and awful that Hollywood has to offer. "To me, that's a film about something so obvious in today's world," Sarsgaard told me at last month's Lunchbox Auction launch. "One little lie, one little deceit, one little moment where you’re pushing the truth, but you're basically lying. You can end up having a real tragedy on your hands because it only takes one time to set you in motion going that way. That's the way great tragedy is, and I think that's the way this movie is. Whereas in the beginning, all you really did was sell your script for a million dollars and change it fundamentally in a way that's personally horrible."

Arthur "Killer" Kane (R) reunites with David Johansen in 2004 in Greg Whiteley's New York Doll (Photo: Seth Gordon)

It was January in Park City, and Greg Whiteley had just made it. He had finished cutting his documentary New York Doll the day before its Sundance premiere, dropped off the print and crashed into a seat at the Holiday 3. At which time--with no work left to consume him--his mind wandered.

"It's this tiny theater," Whiteley recalled to The Reeler. "But they just pack as much seating in it as you can, so you get about 250 people to fill it. And then I look around and I realize that the theater is absolutely packed. And then I'm just filled with this anxiety that I hadn't felt before. I wondered if people will like this movie. It hadn't really occurred to us: 'Is this going to be any good or not?'"

In typical Sundance fashion, Whiteley did not have to worry long. Audiences surged and distributors came calling for New York Doll, which recounts the life story of '70s rock star-turned-Mormon librarian Arthur "Killer" Kane with the sort of revelatory, casual complexity that marked some of this year's other accomplished festival alums (Brick, Murderball and The Dying Gaul probably chief among them). In tracing Kane's 2004 reunion with the New York Dolls--the glam-trash icons with whom he was the original bass player--Whiteley bounces from Los Angeles to New York to London with his subject, never wavering from a humble sense of belonging in Kane's miraculous journey. That feeling trickles into interviews with formidable rockers like Morrissey, Mick Jones, Bob Geldof and Chrissie Hynde, whose own Dolls reverence provides an instant accessibility for viewers more accustomed to the cheap gloss of rock-docs like VH1's Behind the Music.

Whiteley admits wanting nothing to do with hagiography, acknowledging that his long-standing friendship with Kane would have made such an approach impossible anyway. The two became acquainted as attendees of the same Mormon church in L.A.; a fan of bands like The Clash and The Ramones, Whitely recognized the New York Dolls name from posters in Kane's apartment, but he relied on Kane himself to fill in the backstory behind the band's legend. All the rock and roll mileposts were there--drug and alcohol abuse, self-destruction, alienation, poverty--but Kane's faith restored his tales with a sense of hope that he might someday resume a music career, especially reuniting with surviving Dolls David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain.

Filmmaker Marc Levin (L) with National Alliance chairman Shaun Walker in Protocols of Zion (Photos: Blowback Productions)

Maybe it is just my obviousness or some sluggish dearth of imagination, but every time I walk out of a documentary these days, I revisit the same question in my head. And the better the documentary--especially the more intimate, sprawling and/or complex--the louder the question's echo: How do documentary filmmakers know when they are done with their films?

In the case of Marc Levin's new doc Protocols of Zion--a highly personal glimpse at an enduring source of anti-Semitism in the wake of 9/11-- the answer was almost as engrossing as any of the clashes or introspection portrayed onscreen. "I have to be honest with you," Levin told The Reeler during a conversation earlier this week. "The film isn’t done. It asks a lot of questions that aren't answered. This process and whatever I do next is part of it. No film is ever truly done if it provokes a dialogue. Some people are frustrated--they say: 'You never told us in the end what we're supposed to do, how we're supposed to feel. And I'm frustrated, and I'm upset at you that you didn't come up with a solution.' And I'm like, 'Hey, beyond "Go do good," I don't know exactly where to start."

Indeed, Protocols does end on the three-word phrase emblazoning his grandfather's gravestone, while Levin and his father stand together in the snow considering the impossible magnitude of such a simple admonition. But Protocols thrives in deconstructing the abstraction of goodness; Levin himself breaches insular man-on-the-street ideological chatter among Muslims and black nationalists, extreme-right talk radio, white supremacy organizations and a range of others on the social margins who perpetuate anti-Semitic myths as a sort of reflexive self-defense. In this case, their hate stems from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a century-old work of Russian czarist propaganda that purports to outline a Jewish plot for world conquest. Long disproved as a fake, the book nevertheless persists as a cornerstone of a different type of "good"--a movement for which inhumanity masquerades as progress, fear as faith.

Pairing a vagueness and specificity you would find in a mediocre horoscope, The Protocols reacquired significant cultural resonance after 9/11. Rumors stirred in the Arab-American community saying no Jews had died in the World Trade Center attacks; in fact, Levin's first encountered the resurgent Protocols while in conversation with an Egyptian cab driver who told him that Jews had been warned to avoid the WTC that Tuesday morning. A culture of skeptics evidently attributed their survival to the plan laid out in The Protocols, a book Levin had read years before but had since regarded as a kind of a historical curio.

Filmmaker Rodrigo Garcia with producers Julie Lynn (L) and Kelly Thomas at September's Nine Lives premiere (Photos: STV)

Let me just be honest for a second, because I think my appreciation of Rodrigo Garcia's Nine Lives boasts a little more substance when anchored in its source: I wanted to hate this movie. I had low expectations from the moment I heard about it--a movie comprising episodes from nine women's lives, all shot in unbroken takes, stitching a "grand tapestry of universal resonance," if you are the type who takes press-kit promises at face value. Which I don't.

However, where I anticipated some gimmicky, estrogen-drunk ramble through indie melodrama, I was surprised to find a surprising, thoughtful, exceedingly well-acted piece of work. I probably miscalculated to expect much less from a cast that includes Holly Hunter, Sissy Spacek, Glenn Close, Amy Brenneman and others alongside penis-packing counterparts like Aidan Quinn, Joe Mantegna, William Fichtner. Nevertheless, while neither Garcia nor his cast will fool anybody with some of Nine Lives' smugness and spells of irrelevancy, they offer an inviting curio that at least tries to cherish its resources. When the fluid camera, its subjects and their director strike a balance--which occurs more often than not, especially in the film's second half--the result is some genuinely striking cinema.

Moreover, even if a few of his actors accede to showiness, Garcia's style clearly rewards the most proficient in his cast. "Coming from theater, it's kind a nice because you can have an arc and you don't have to stop," Close told The Reeler during a press event during last month's Independent Film Week, when Nine Lives was feted with its premiere (the film opens Friday in New York). "I really liked it. Each segment ends in quite an emotional place, and it actually allowed all the actors to get there in real time. The daunting part was just the technical aspect and everything they pulled off: camera movement, focus pulling. That was one of the things that intrigued me about it—that challenge."