Sock That Choppy

I loved Crouching Tiger and all, but it's no secret there are more ardent fans of martial-arts movies than myself.

I like aerial chop-socky the way I like musical numbers in a '50s Arthur Freed musical -- visually exciting and beautifully performed, etc., but if there's too much exposure to restricted worlds of this sort you can start to go a bit nuts. Sublime choreography, Chinese mythology, inspired cutting...I get it but all right already.

Kung Fu Hustle Stephen Chow performing obligatory single-hero-vs.-eighty-bad-guys fight sequence...done before by the Wachowski brothers and Quentin Tarantino, but never so hilariously.

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End of the Affair

I wonder (and I realize this is a vaguely cynical question) if ticket sales for Million Dollar Baby are going to go up or down this weekend because of the Terry Schiavo thing?

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Wino

If you have any kind of feelings about wine and the art of making it, or just the pleasures of taking small little slurps of the stuff, Mondovino (Thinkfilm, opening today) is two things: essential viewing and a delightful education.

You've probably heard it has a contentious side. A recent New York Times piece began, "If you want to start a fight, mention Mondovino to people in the wine business and step back."

Jonathan Nossiter (in white) in Sardinia during filming of Mondovino.

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Sin Peeks Out

I'm moderately cranked about seeing Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez's Sin City (Dimension, 4.1) tonight, and doing the junket tomorrow on Saturday.

I've also been feeling a tiny bit wary, like before any comic-book movie. Does each and every one have to be about breathtaking visual coolness above all? That's been the basic deal all along...but if this was the core attribute of the original graphic novels, would they have such loyal followings?

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9/11 Pitch Meeting

This is going to sound odd, but Universal Pictures and Double Feature partners Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher are planning on dramatizing the wrong 9/11 story.

I don't mean it that way, exactly. How could "wrong" apply to a true-life story about surviving the World Trade Center disaster? But Shamberg and Sher are focusing on a generic rescue saga instead of (and this only a portion of it) a mind-bending divine intervention story that happened only a few dozen yards away from the subjects of their movie, and at precisely the same time.

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Too Fast Farewell

It can sometimes take a while -- two or three days, I mean -- for the real soul of a place to be felt.

I've met several more good people at the Mar del Plata Film Festival since arriving here last Thursday evening (and composing Friday's column, which took a while), and the warmth -- not just the efficiency or commitment to the staging of a first-rate event -- has been seeping through.

Close to the beach in Mar del Plata -- I know not specifically where.

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State of Siege

I've been thinking and calling around about Steven Spielberg's "Untitled Munich Project" for the last couple of days, and decided it's in the cards for it to be something more than a revenge flick. I'm thinking it pretty much has to be.

It's about the 1972 murders of Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympic games, partly...but mainly the response to this atrocity by Mossad, or Israel's CIA. And the moral and ethical mucky-muck that results, I gather.

A member of Black September standing on balcony of Israeli athletes' condo in Munich's Olympic Village during September 1972 hostage stand-off.

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Dreams May Come

The shooting and projecting of movies on 35mm film is a dying practice, and it won't be long before everything is digital this or that...no argument there.

But when will digital projection really be here, and from what digital source or delivery system will movies be obtained and projected -- satellite transmission, fibre optic cable, pirate-proof DVDs?

I don't know how long it will all take, but probably a while. Five years, ten years. Big changes in the way things are done never happen until economic conditions demand them...until the captains of industry feel the flames licking their feet. Read More

Blam Blam

It's unusual for a 44 year-old guy from the fringe indie or straight-to-video world landing a directing gig with a mainstream studio like New Line.

Unusual because of age-ism (i.e., generational tribalism and the belief that new directors have to be in their late 20s or early 30s with two or three MTV music videos to their credit), and because of an unwritten stipulation that if a director hasn't gotten on-board with a high-profile producer or distributor by age 40, he/she is probably "done" and been relegated to the sidelines.