“I think we have a really hard time culturally with what happens to love after the first year,” says Away From Her director Sarah Polley in N.Y. Times piece by Katrina Onstad. “It is difficult, and it is painful, and it is a letdown. [But] that first year is so much less profound than what happens when you’re actually left with each other and yourself in an honest way. It was interesting to me to make a film about what love looked like after life had gotten in the way, and what remained.”

The ballad of the sad arthouse — i.e., the struggling and (for now) still-hanging-in-there Brattle Street theatre in Cambridge, as reported by the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell.

Go the the N.Y. Post site and Reed Tucker‘s laundry-list piece about summer threequels — neutral attitude, no opinion of any kind, and focusing almost entirely on the horse-race aspect (which will make the most money?) and ignoring the certainty that the only tolerable ones will be The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean’s Thirteen.

A letter has been sent out to Academy members telling them to expect a survey about their media-reading habits by way of the Oscar race. The survey won’t be sent from the Academy but from a publication that the letter doesn’t identify. A publicist friend who told me about this last night knows nothing concrete, but speculated that it’s probably from one of the trades, or possibly from the Los Angeles Times.

She said that the survey will ask where Academy members get their information and to what degree. How often do they read the trades or online sites like this one (or Hollywood Wiretap, The Envelope, Nikki Finke, Movie City News) or Patrick Goldstein‘s column or David Carr or what-have-you? As soon as I get hold of a copy of the survey I’ll scan it and post it here and HE readers can respond on their own.

“‘There has been much, much more demand from producers, distributors, directors — from people in every branch of filmmaking,’ a festvial staffer told Variety‘s Alison James a few days ago. ‘Everyone wants to come to Cannes this year.’ Journos, however, report a bigger struggle to get that all-important press badge this year. “They are being much more finicky about what publication you write for, how big its circulation is and how many articles you are intending to write,” a freelancer told James.

I’m still way behind on the video-editing tutorials, but I feel confident enough to announce that I’m going to start posting short little video reports on Hollywood Elsewhere in a week or so, and certainly by the start of the Cannes Film Festival.

I’ll probably run two versions of each report — one in an MPEG4 format and the other in Flash. No pop-fizz editing, no narration, no music cues…nothing slick. Austere, spartan. Almost no hand-held stuff, 90% tripod-mounted. Visual infuences: Stanley Kubrick (I’ve got a little wide-angle lens that makes everything look Clockwork Orange-y), Sergei Eisenstein, Bruno Dumont‘s Flandres, Jim Jarmusch‘s Stranger Than Paradise.

I’ll probably start posting quickies from Manhattan sometime during my stay there — Friday, 5.4 to Monday, 5.14. Until I get more proficient with the editng software I may forego editing altogether except for opening titles and just “cut” in the camera. I’m just saying this in anticipation of reader complaints about the video stuff being too stark or funky or whatever. I think it’s better to deliberately go in that Dumont/Jarmusch direction and make the shorts as good as I can in this mode, and then gradually slick things up as I shuffle along.