See it in IMAX…that’s the all of it. The last feature shown in IMAX that really played with legs was Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks’ The Polar Express.

As things stand now (at 8:58 am), my luggage is in Los Angeles and I’m still in Seattle, at a Days Inn near the airport. I missed my flight back to LA last night, and it was definitely Alaska Airline’s fault. When I got to the check-in counter around 6:55 pm both the check-in computer and the Alaska Airlines rep said the flight would be delayed until 9:30 pm, and that boarding would happen around 9 pm. No prob…I went to the gate area, hooked up my computer in a cafe and did some work. Two hours later I went over to the departure gate at 9 pm…empty. Checked with an Alaska rep — “Oh, that flight left at 8:40 pm.” They have me on a flight leaving this morning at 11:30.

New Yorker critic David Denby on some of the curious and/or incomplete aspects of The Road to Guantanamo.

Deborah Scranton‘s The War Tapes (SenArt) is an Iraq War documentary composed of footage shot by National Guard guys doing their service. Here’s a description of a “deft little turn” in the film in David Carr‘s 6.19 N.Y. Times column, to wit: “Specialist Mike Moriarty is filming his squad leader, Staff Sgt. Kevin Shangraw, as they bounce along in a Humvee. He asks his leader for his take on the broader mission, and Sergeant Shangraw comes straight off the dome with a government-issue rationale. ‘Well, I think it’s a fantastic opportunity for the Iraqis to establish a new history in the country and be able to be a free and democratic society, which in turn should stabilize the whole Middle East and create a freer and more stable earth as we know it.’ Then Moriarty, unseen, asks, ‘Tell me how you really feel.’ Shangraw waits a beat as the bleak landscape flies by in the window before answering. ‘Then, after that happens, maybe we can buy everybody in the world a puppy.'”

Variety‘s Peter Bart on how the tea-leaf readers misunderstood the fate of The Break-Up.

In honor (once again) of John Scheinfeld‘s Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)?, which just played to enthused auds at the Seattle Film but has been snubbed by the L.A. Film Festival for some curious reason, three of Harry’s songs — “You’re Breakin’ My Heart“, “Maybe” and “Gotta Get Up“.

For those of you who never saw that 1978 “Saturday Night Live” skit that asked what might have happened if Superman/Clark Kent’s Krypton meteor had landed in a village in Germany in the 1930s instead of the Kent farm in Smallville…here‘s a transcript. The idea was that Superman’s gullibly nationalistic philosophy (i.e., equating “truth” and “justice” with “the American way”) would have conformed to the realities of Nazi Germany, and he therefore would have been Uberman/Klaus Kent, and he would have been able to easily identify Jews-in-hiding with his x-ray vision, etc. I wonder if this bit is viewable on one of those SNL DVDs? I’m assuming it is.

It was that silver nitrate black-and-white noir thing…right? The Hollywood Reporter’s 35th annual Key Art Awards ceremony last Friday night gave Dimension Films’ Sin City four trophies — for best action adventure trailer, best teaser trailer, best home entertainment-consumer audiovisual, and some kind of special recognition for “character banners designed for the film”…whatever that means.

“‘Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman’ reads the title of a piece that wins Lois Lane the Pulitzer Prize in Superman Returns, the latest bigscreen revival of comicdom’s strongest and fastest hero. Not only is she wrong in the context of the story (not to mention real life), but she’ll be wrong in the court of public opinion once the world gets a look at this most grandly conceived and sensitively drawn Superman saga. Sure to rate with aficionados alongside Spider-Man 2 and, for many, Batman Begins on the short list of best superhero spectaculars, pic more than justifies director Bryan Singer’s decision to jump ship from the X-Men franchise, and will pull down stratospheric B.O. around the globe.” — from Todd McCarthy‘s review in Variety. (The Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt likes it also.)

Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson (l.) interviewing “I Wake Up Screening” co-authors Laura Kim and John Anderson at a Seattle Film Festival panel discussion — Sunday, 6.18, 2:25 pm

(a) Lobby of Seattle’s W Hotel; (b) Good old early ’60s/Elvis Presley icon; (c) Snapped from confines of space needle restaurant where Golden Needles were passed out early this afternoon Sunday, 6.18, 1:35 pm; (d) Old poster image promising tour of Seattle’s shady district; (e) Mexican restaurant near Pike Street.

“Top-tier stars…stay on top by being true to their personas. We pay $10 to see Will Smith or Julia Roberts precisely because they don’t surprise us. It’s not that they’re playing themselves. It’s just that the force of their personalities swamps everything else. They’re more than actors — they’re brands. And yet Johnny Depp, 43, is almost pathologically unpredictable. He can be bizarre, hilarious, unsettling — even annoying. But he is never the same. He’s the anti-Tom Cruise. ‘Nothing against Tom, but Johnny may be a bigger star now,’ says director John Waters, who cast Depp in 1990’s Cry-Baby. ‘ Nobody is sick of Johnny Depp .'” — from Sean Smith‘s Newsweek profile of the Pirates of the Caribbean star. The piece includes a riff on the film itself. To me, Smith’s standout remark sounds thin: Pirates 2, he says, “promises to be a welcome blast of sunshine in a season when Cruise has crashed and burned, and The Da Vinci Code has proved to be a joyless blockbuster.” A goddam sunshine movie that’s good because it’s unlikely to resemble and/or repeat the box-office experience of M:I:3 or The DaVinci Code?

Winners of the 32nd annual Seattle Film Festival awards (called the “Golden Needles“) were announced about 90 minutes ago, and the audience award winner for Best Film went to Michel Hazanavicius‘ OSS 117: Nest of Spies , the French-made espionage spoof that’s been a big hit in France since opening there in early May. The audience award for Best Documentary went to Rickie Stern and Annie Sundberg‘s The Trials of Darryl Hunt.

There were several other awards I don’t have time to mention, but the jury bestowed a “special mention” upon Linas Phillips‘ Walking to Werner, a doc about a guy who’s half-imbued and half-weird (Phillips) walking all the way from Seattle to Los Angeles as a kind of tribute to director Werner Herzog. I respected Phillips for doing the walk and for shooting a mildly diverting, half-interesting record of his journey, but he is one weird cat and so is the movie.