“I strongly suggest you make time to see Racing Dreams, which is easily the best film I’ve seen so far at the [Tribeca Film Festival] and probably this year,” wrote Scott Feinberg in a Sunday e-mail. “It’s a documentary by Marshall Curry, the guy who did Street Fighter a few years ago, and like Hoop Dreams it follows kids who aspire to become professionals at race-car driving.

“Without giving anything away I’ll just say (a) Curry found three perfect subjects, (b) the film was tremendously moving, and (c) it received a standing ovation through the entire credits at Saturday’s screening. I have no stake in it, but know you need to catch it at one of the next showings. It’s definitely gonna be nominated for the Best Feature Documentary Oscar, and could well win.

“The three competitors — Annabeth Barnes, Josh Hobson, Brandon Warren — are shown going through a year of ‘NASCAR Little League,'” says a festival blog post. “Their search for the title takes them from Michigan to North Carolina to upstate New York, and Curry delves deep into their worlds, both personal and professional. The kids interact with each other, and we also see the toll their aspirations take on their families. The result is both a multifaceted look at a world most New Yorkers know nothing about and a classic coming-of-age story with three charismatic kids as the centerpiece.”

I’ll be seeing JJ Abrams‘ Star Trek (Paramount, 5.8) very soon so Dave Itzkoff‘s N.Y. Times profile of Abrams and his filmmaking partners — Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Bryan Burk — had my attention right off.

Star Trek director JJ Abrams

“Abrams and his partners are guys with mainstream pop-culture aspirations,” Itzkoff writes. “Their forte is taking on genres with finite but dedicated fan bases — science fiction, fantasy and horror — and making them accessible to wider audiences. And what they had in mind for their Star Trek movie is a film that is consistent with 43 years of series history but not beholden to it.

“Despite their collective reverence for Star Trek — and Star Wars and Indiana Jones and X-Men, and other cultural artifacts of their awkward adolescence — none of them are total Trek completists (not even Orci, who once owned a telephone shaped like the Enterprise). They say that makes them the ideal candidates to upgrade Gene Roddenberry‘s creation for 21st-century audiences.

“There’s just too much stuff out there to be loyal to everything,” Lindelof said. “Someone will find 50 ways to tell us we’re idiots, and it wouldn’t be Trek if they didn’t.” At the same time they appreciate the perils of chiseling away at a cultural touchstone whose influence has remained enormous even as its reputation has varied wildly over the years.

“If Star Trek fails, Kurtzman said, ‘it’ll be the biggest personal failure we’ve ever had, because we will have actually violated something that means a lot to us.'”

Former Fox 411 columnist Roger Friedman hasn’t wasted any time in launching his own site, which he’s calling Showbiz411. Starting out slowly, gradually. The graphics could use enhancement and refinement, but so could Hollywood Elsewhere’s in the early days. He’s running around the Tribeca Film Festival, going to Cannes, etc.

There was a Tribeca Film Festival screening and after-party last night for Barry Ptolemy‘s Transcendent Man, a proflle of futurist and “singularity” proponent Ray Kurzweil. He’s been projecting that singularity — the creation of super-intelligent, long-lived beings via the fusing of humans and computers — will happen within 30 years. Ptolemy profiles Kurzweil as well as followers — including Steve Wonder and William Shatner — of his regimen, which he says will bestow eternal life.

Transcendent Man director Barry Ptolemy, producer Felicia Ptolemy.

Ptolemy “also interviews evangelists who believe that Kurzweil is challenging God, especially by his ongoing endeavor to bring his father back from the dead,” says a Popular Mechancis summary. “Ultimately, Ptolemy asks if singularity is the theory of a genius or a sci-fi idea taken too seriously.”

I missed last night’s screening due to being at IFC’s Fear Me Not dinner near Rivington and Bowery, but I wanted to very much to meet Transcendant Man composer Phillip Glass, whom I’ve admired for decades. I was told when I got to the party, however, that Glass was unable to attend due to a concert he was performing. This “concert,” I later found out, was a private party that Glass was hosting at his home near the intersection of 2nd Avenue and 3rd Street. He did perform there, I’m told.

“In the year 2050, if Ray Kurzweil is right, nanoscopic robots will be zooming throughout our capillaries, transforming us into nonbiological humans,” an article reads. “We will be able to absorb and retain the entirety of the universe’s knowledge, eat as much as we want without gaining weight, shape-shift into just about any physical form imaginable, live free from disease, and die at the time of our choosing.

“All of this will be thrust on us by something that Kurzweil calls the Singularity, a theorized point in time in the not-so-distant future when machines become vastly superior to humans in every way, aka the emergence of true artificial intelligence. Computers will be able to improve their own source codes and hardware in ways we puny humans could never conceive. This will result in a paradigm shift that sees mankind coalescing with its own creations: man and machine, merging into one.

“These grand-scale premonitions are largely based on Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns, which states that the development of technology has been increasing exponentially since the beginning of time. That concept isn’t really compelling to anyone but science nerds until you focus on the ‘knee’ of this exponential curve — the point where the perpetual doubling of technological growth skyrockets and negates the linear models of progress that people like economists have relied on for so long.

“Kurzweil says we’re just about to start rounding this bend and that the rate of progress will be so great it will ‘appear to rupture the fabric of human history.’ In other words, we will trump nature and take control of our own evolution.”

Has anyone mentioned an obvious analogy about Kristian Levering‘s Fear Me Not, a current Tribeca Film Festival attraction? Levring and Anders Thomas Jensen‘s script is about a mild-mannered family man who undergoes big changes and wreaks havoc after taking an experimental mood-altering drug. This is the basic premise of Nicholas Ray‘s Bigger Than Life. IFC On Demand is opening the film on 6.10.

This comic short has been playing before every feature shown over the last three or four days at the Tribeca Film Festival. Directed by David Gray for Ogilvy New York, it’s about a nebbishy flasher (Doug Moe) who hits it off with one of the women he’s tried to shock. Moe and the women playing the would-be victims (Jennifer Morris, Jennifer Bowen) are appealing and amusing, but the piece doesn’t work after the friendly-flirty stuff begins. I’ll explain why in a second.

Ogilvy creative directors Dustin Duke and Jon Wagner have been quoted as saying that the short’s “basic premise is that New Yorkers have seen everything — flashers, drug dealers, prostitutes, muggers, mobsters — and have become immune to it all. [So the short is] honoring New Yorkers’ resilience and optimism and ability to turn an unpleasant and negative situation into something that is positive and opportunistic.”

That’s true regarding the smiling 40ish brunette who’s open to having coffee (i.e., Morris). New Yorkers aren’t easily shocked and are open to spontaneous feeling, etc. Except the short only half-expresses this because Moe’s flasher doesn’t adapt.

Humor isn’t humor unless it connects to reality, and flashers, make no mistake, are about aggression and rage. Like rapists, they’re expressing contempt and loathing for their victims. So what should’ve happened (i.e., if Gray had been a better director) is that Moe would have stopped flashing after he hits it off with whatsername. He’d drop the hostility and fully surrender to her smile and spirit instead of what he does, which is laugh and grin and flirt and continue to show the monster.

By the end of the piece Moe’s character is saying (a) “hey, I’d love to go out with you!” and (b) “I still despise you so much that the possibility that I might continue to inspire revulsion despite our repartee gives me a wonderful sense of sociopathic satisfaction.”

This is what mediocre directing is all about — i.e., failing to take the reality of the human condition into account. If Alfonso Cuaron or Luis Bunuel or Wes Anderson or Mike Nichols had directed this short, it would have ended — trust me — with Moe buttoning his coat.

A reminder that Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Three Monkeys will stream freely this Sunday, 4,26, on www.theauteurs.com. Ceylan’s Climates will also be viewable on the site from 4.23 to 5.3.

Why is a forthcoming DVD of Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Il Grido (’58) only available in England? Why isn’t it coming out here through Criterion? This is Antonioni’s first landmark film — his first world-class depiction of characters trapped and semi-narcotized by a sense of their alienation and rootlessness.

“When sugar refinery worker Aldo (Steve Cochran) is jilted by his mistress, Irma (Alida Valli), he takes to the road. With daughter in tow, Aldo wanders the Po River delta, seeking temporary but always illusory respite with a series of lovers, who only serve to remind him of Irma. Unable to find a new life, Aldo’s haunted past gives way to a fateful finale.

“With a script conceived by Antonioni, exquisite cinematography (including a signature concern with desolate vistas), and a plaintive score by renowned composer Giovanni Fusco, the award-winning Il Grido — it took the Golden Leopard at Locarno — is an early key work in the director’s much-celebrated oeuvre.

“The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Il Grido for home viewing in the UK for the very first time. New high-definition transfer of the film in its original aspect ratio. Newly translated optional English subtitles. Original 1957 Italian theatrical trailer. Previously unseen deleted footage. A 56-page booklet featuring a color reproduction of the original Italian poster. Archival publicity stills. An essay by William Arrowsmith called ‘Antonioni: The Poet of Images.’ Writing and interviews from Michelangelo Antonioni.”

Eight months before its scheduled release on 12.18.09, James Cameron‘s Avatar, a science-fiction thriller filmed with his own specially devised 3-D technology, “is stirring up a kind of anticipation that until now had been reserved for, say, the Rapture,” writes N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply in tomorrow’s edition.

But before we go any further, let’s cut to the chase with a few Avatar Wikipedia page quotes.

One, in Cameron’s original Avatar script treatment, “a man tries to make his way as a miner by combining with an alien during an interplanetary war in which aliens can make themselves manifest by possessing human bodies — avatars.” Or is it vice versa?

Two, when Avatar was titled “Project 880”, a casting call was put out in June 2006 with this plot description: “In the future, Jake, a paraplegic war veteran is brought to another planet, Pandora, which is inhabited by the Navi, a humanoid race with their own language and culture. Those from Earth find themselves at odds with each other and the local culture.”

Three, Cameron having described Avatar in December 2006 as “a futuristic tale set on a planet 200 years hence…an old-fashioned jungle adventure with an environmental conscience [that] aspires to a mythic level of storytelling.”

And four, a January 2007 press release having described the film as “an emotional journey of redemption and revolution…the story of a wounded ex-marine, thrust unwillingly into an effort to settle and exploit an exotic planet rich in biodiversity, who eventually crosses over to lead the indigenous race in a battle for survival.”

Ceiply speculates that Avatar might become a hit on the order of Cameron’s Titanic with $1.8 billion in worldwide ticket sales. Or it might just be a giant headache for 20th Century Fox, which is backing Avatar and will have to spend much of the year managing expectations for a film whose technological wizardry is presumed by more than a few to promise an experiential leap for audiences comparable to that of The Jazz Singer, the arrival of Technicolor or an Obama campaign rally.

“To date, neither a trailer nor even a still photo from the film, which tells the story of a disabled soldier who uses technology to inhabit an alien body on a distant planet, has been made public by Cameron or Fox.

“Only a few weeks ago, Joshua Quittner, a technology writer for Time magazine, fed the frenzy when he reported feeling a strange yearning to return to the movie’s mythical planet, Pandora, the morning after he was shown just 15 minutes of the film. Cameron, Quittner wrote, theorized that the movie’s 3-D action had set off actual ‘memory creation.’

“Questioned by telephone recently at his home in Mill Valley, Calif., Quittner said he was still reeling from the experience.

“‘It was like doing some kind of drug,” he said, describing a scene in which the movie’s hero, played by Sam Worthington, ran around ‘with this kind of hot alien chick,’ was attacked by jaguarlike creatures and was sprinkled with sprites that floated down, like snowflakes.

“‘You feel like the little feathery things are landing on your arm,’ said Quittner, who remained eager for another dose.”

Two days ago I ran a two-point riff on the themes of Kirby Dick‘s Outrage. One, closeted gay politicians who support anti-gay legislation are tragic and despicable figures. And two, while I understand and sympathize with those who’ve sought to “out” these hypocrites, I would never out anyone on my own. But I feel differently after seeing Outrage at a Tribeca Film Festival screening last night. Not about my own hesitations, but about how there’s a certain logic and a rightness to outing Washington, D.C. power brokers.

Running only 90 minutes, Outrage seems to me like an exceptionally tight and disciplined and truthful testament. It’s ballsy and straight and coming from a healthy place. It’s certainly one of the best-made films I’ve seen this year, and without question one of the toughest and bravest.

Dick’s aim is to expose a bizarre psychology on the part of closeted politicians who’ve voted against gay civil rights as a way of suppressing their own issues. Bluntly and unambiguously and without any dicking around, Outrage names names. Dick seems to have done his homework; you can sense discipline and exactitude and what seems like solid sourcing all through it. I came away convinced that it’s better to look at this tendency frankly and plainly than to just let it fester.

I still feel opposed to personally outing anyone, but Dick’s motive is clearly to let air and sunlight into a series of Washington, D.C. situations that have been about shadows for too long. That’s what kept hitting me over and over as I watched — i.e., that Outrage is doing a fine job of persuading me that it’s all about telling the truth. I believed it, I believed it, I believed it.

Most of the politicians profiled in Dick’s film are Republicans, which of course fits the spin and deny psychology. Florida Governor Charlie Crist is the headliner. California Representative David Dreier, former George Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman, Idaho Senator Larry Craig, Rep. Jim McCrery (R-La.), and Rep. Ed Schrock (R-Va.). Private aspects of the history of Democrat Ed Koch, the former New York City mayor, are also reviewed.

Fox News anchor Shepard Smith also comes under scrutiny but not a certain CNN news anchor, mainly because CNN isn’t perpetrating a right-wing agenda and because the anchor is known for his humanistic, right-guy reporting so why go there?

The doc, Dick has said, examines “the issues surrounding closeted politicians and their hypocrisy in voting anti-gay — and how these people have harmed millions of Americans for many years…if someone is passing laws against the LGBT community, and they’re closeted, that is a form of hypocrisy, and the public deserves to know. These people are victims of homophobia too. You can never go into too much detail about anything you do because there will always be the next question, and the next question. That keeps you distanced.”

Openly gay politicans and LGBT advocates-activists Barney Frank, Larry Kramer, Michelangelo Signorile, < Tammy Baldwin, and former New Jersey governor JIm McGreevey all make their views known.