As it’s Mother’s Day, it seems fitting to kick things off with a Mother Goose children’s song that goes like this: “Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn, Apple seed and apple thorn, Wire, briar, limber lock Three geese in a flock One flew East One flew West And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”

Today, I did something rare; I met a deadline. Okay, technically, it was a day late – but I was still the first, of six, to submit my nominations for titles that I’d like to see included in an upcoming collection of short films from the last Sundance Film Festival. These films will then be [...]

I’d like to call your attention to a rather insidious thing that Hollywood has done in regards to romantic comedies. You know what they all have in common? They usually end with a wedding ceremony. And I think this is insidious precisely because most romantic comedies are aimed squarely at younger people who thus grow [...]

Criterion Pictures is circulating a new 35mm for Elia Kazan’s Wild River (1960). It’s not available domestically on DVD, we just screened it last night, and now it’s headed for the Wisconsin Film Festival where one of Kazan’s daughters will be watching it. We had two show-times, and halfway through the first screening my projectionist [...]

In a few hours we will screen a 35mm English print of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God. I imported it from Europe with the help of Lucki Stipetić, the younger half-brother of Herzog (and head of Werner Herzog Filmproduktion), who emailed me a week ago to say: “The print we have is the [...]

Young New York filmmaker Zachary Levy’s debut feature, Strongman, won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Slamdance Film Festival and is now finally hopping around to select cities. The documentary follows a modern-day hulk by the name of Stanley “Stanless Steel” Pleskun. For his day job, Stanley hauls around scrap metal. But his every [...]

In 1994 Austin’s SXSW Film Festival (along with the multi-media Interactive Festival) were joined to the musical behemoth that was launched in 1987. About 15,000 participants come for the music, 12,000 for the interactive part, and another 8,000 for the films. Those being official counts, they don’t factor in the influx of stragglers that come [...]

Whether it’s John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson talking about hamburgers in Pulp Fiction (1994) or Anthony Hopkins scaring the heck out of Jodie Foster as he goes on about fava beans and chianti in Silence of the Lambs (1991), food brings out a primal passion that sometimes goes to an extreme. And while the [...]

The Oscars are tonight but surely the recent blog-a-thon covering that topic has quenched your thirst on that subject. Let’s move on to food, which comes to my mind thanks to my friends Chris and Huong, who are opening a new restaurant. They invited various acquaintances and family in for free meals and drinks to [...]