Somewhat lost in the shuffle of the endless top ten lists that appeared at the end of 2008 was this curiosity:  Stanley Fish's list of the ten best American movies of all time.  Fish, a legal scholar, literary theorist, philosopher, and author, is well known for his irascible opinions, unique antifundamentalist arguments, and ability to make friends -- and, just as easily, enemies -- on both sides of the ideological spectrum.  He's also a somewhat legendary film books, and several of his many books are peppered with analogies from and references to his favorite movies.

Fish is definitely a product of his time and place (as he'd be the first to admit), and his list relies pretty heavily on films that would have made a big impression on an urban male of his particular age.  The few modern movies that make his list range from the predictable (Raging Bull) to the surprising (Groundhog Day), but his commentary on all the films is worth reading, as he excercises his rare gift to cut to the heart of moral poses and contradictions -- as in his review of Sunset Blvd.:  "When the movie begins, Gillis comes across as a nice guy, somewhat down on his luck, and Norma Desmond (Swanson) comes across as an egomaniacal monster who pressures him into becoming her boy-toy. But even before the final incredible scene of Desmond descending a staircase while the camera, empty of film, rolls, she has earned the sympathy we extend to the terribly needy, and he has revealed himself to be the true monster, a betrayer of Desmond, of the young girl (NancyOlson) who sees more in him than there is, and of himself."

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You know, you spend the best years of your life arguing against the conservative notion that academia is full of navel-gazing, pointy-headed nudniks so out of touch with the real world that they suck up millions to pursue theses that anyone with an ounce of common sense could disprove in thirty seconds, and then something like this comes along.

In a story that smacks equally of grant-chasing and pure desperation, the Massachussets Institute of Technology -- providing dynamic proof of what happens when people trained in science attempt to apply objective standards to subjective fields of study -- has collaborated with a number of Hollywood big-shots to create something called the Center for Future Storytelling.  The premise behind this colossal boondoggle is pure crankery:  the movies, they say, are running out of stories.  Despite record profits at the box office, we're apparently running dry of narrative (an argument their spokespeople bolster with such fist-shaking geezer logic as blaming text messaging, <i>Guitar Hero</I> and cell phones). It's basically an updated version of the argument advanced in the 1970s that thanks to the proliferation of rock 'n' roll music, we were rapidly running out of melody, and within thirty years there would be no such thing as a new song.

The whole thing is patently absurd.  Narrative is a rhetorical device, not a natural resource; it can't be depleted like a coal mine.  We'll no more run out of stories than we'll run out of metaphors.  Even the act of defining different types of stories in order to prove that we're running out of them is a form of narrative.  Do we see an increasing number of shitty movies based on old TV shows?  Sure we do.  But it's not because there aren't any original stories; it's because Hollywood keeps financing hackwork.  And why does Hollywood keep financing hackwork?  Because people pay to see it.  Blaming some kind of imaginary depletion of the Narrative Zone on scriptwriters' inability to write decent endings ignores the fact that the whole thing is largely a business transaction, not a creative endeavor.  And even if the ridiculous claim were true -- which it isn't -- it ignores the fact that there are other ways to tell innovative stories on film than narrative, and Hollywood has shown precious little interest in them, either.

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A recent article by Dave Kehr in the New York Times about a new digital restoration of Manhatta is well worth a look, though, even if you aren't particultuar interested in the movie itself.  It sheds a fascinating light on various aspects of film restoration, from the economics of the process to the social politics of why it becomes necessary.  In the case of Manhatta, the main print of the film that was circulated for decades was horridly bleached out, poorly timed, and of awful quality (it can be seen on YouTube here, in a print described by Kehr as looking like "a fifth-generation photocopy that someone's dog had been sleeping on for several years").  Kehr notes that there it's unlikely that a photograph by Paul Strand or a painting by Charles Sheeler, the two men behind Manhatta, would be allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair.  He quotes Josh Siegel, a curator at MoMA, as saying "There is a misconception about film that because it's a mass-produced medium, that all these films are easily accessible and easily reproduced.  And of course, they're not."

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Bollywood lost one of its most legendary directors today when B.R. Chopra, the commercially successful but often controversial filmmaker who managed to bring a tone of moral seriousness and ethical inquiry to an industry most often given over to frothy, lightweight musical entertainments, passed away at the age of 94.  As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, Chopra's death from natural causes was announced by his son, also a film producer and a member of what has grown to be a prominent family in the Indian film industry.

Originally trained as a journalist and setting out to support a large family with only his determination to succeed as a filmmaker, crag-faced Baldev Raj Chopra initially encountered failure in his film career, helming a few forgettable romantic comedies before scoring mild success with popular thrillers that showed the influence of Hitchcock.  It was in the 1950s that Chopra's career truly blossomed, mirroring the success of the industry itself; and, as time went on, he proved himself capable of scoring popular successes with traditionally-minded audiences while still seeking to push the boundaries of what was allowed in Indian film of the day.

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The studio system is long dead, but for over 30 years, David Geffen has been proving that the old-time movie mogul is still a going concern.  One of the richest men in Hollywood history, Geffen is a true multimedia tycoon who's made money in film and music hand over fist and whose personal worth is estimated at close to $6 billion.  Indisputably one of the biggest power players in the industry, he's had a huge impact on almost every studio you can name:  Universal, Paramount, Disney, and the DreamWorks studio he founded with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.  But, having hit 65 -- the age at which most people look forward to a respectable retirement -- is Geffen ready to walk away from it all?

Just weeks after engineering a break from Paramount -- which had recently purchased DreamWorks for over a billion and a half dollars -- Geffen continued to wheel and deal like a mogul of old.  He formed a new company with Spielberg and Stacey Snider, backed by money from one of the biggest players in the emergent Bollywood system, and then -- shockingly -- seemed to indicate that he was backing off from production, and perhaps leaving the entertainment industry altogether.  According to an article in the New York Times, even Spielberg is stunned at the possibility:  "I cannot imagine not having David in my professional life.  If that's true, I'm going to have to figure out what to do about it." 

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Forty years ago, the idea that Rowdy Yates from TV’s Rawhide would turn out to be a talented director would have seemed ridiculous. Yet it came to pass, with Clint Eastwood proving to be one of Hollywood’s most celebrated filmmakers. In addition, he’s also one of its most prolific, churning out an average of one film almost every year over the past decade. But in spite of making such well-regarded films as Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby, the truth is that when a filmmaker works at such a rate, there are bound to be some clunkers in the bunch. Surely enough, Eastwood had his share of mediocre or even subpar films throughout his career, even in the fertile period of the nineties. In the case of movies like True Crime and Blood Work, the middling quality of the films wasn’t too big a deal, as they were disposable adaptations of forgettable airport novels.

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Where goeth Scarlett Johansson and Zooey Deschanel, so goeth Terrence Howard.  Or so it would appear, as the Oscar-nominated star of Hustle & Flow prepares to release Shine Through It, his debut album on Columbia Records.  And while it would seem unlikely that Johansson would record an album of Tom Waits covers, or that Deschanel would make a record that was actually worth listening to, so too would it seem improbable that the star whose rise to fame is inextricably linked with Three 6 Mafia would make an album of subtle, sensitive singer-songwriter tunes.  And yet here we are.

In a profile in today's New York Times, Howard, whose screen reputation is largely built on playing street-smart hustlers, namechecks an unlikely set of performers as influential in the making of Shine Through It, including Paul Simon, Don McLean, and, yes, Barry Manilow.  While he waxes rhapsodic about these artists, and explains why he didn't perform "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" at the Oscars (problems with the language, says he), Howard makes it clear that he's no fan of rap music, and that while his peers listened to funk, he existed on the deeper level of artists like Harry Chapin and Dan Fogelberg.  "I grew up in the projects, but Rick James wasn't my buddy," he sniffs.  "I was more sensitive than that."   

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No one likes a celebrity stalker story, but speaking personally, I am particularly outraged by the unfolding story of 37-year-old Jack Jordan, who is currently on trial for harrassing Uma Thurman by sending her bizarre letter and menacing doodles, breaking into her trailer, and generally acting all creepy around the Kill Bill star.  Hey, pal, not only is stalking Uma Thurman evil and wrong, it's supposed to be my job.  I haven't invested 20 years of my life on this celebrity crush just to have some punk like you steal my thunder.

The Jack Jordan story is filled with icky little details, such as the Henry Darger-esque clippings he left in Thurman's trailer during the filming of My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Uma Thurman stalker tip:  a better thing to leave in her trailer would be a note imploring her to pick better scripts), the stick-figure drawings of himself giggling and leaping off a razor blade into a grave (Uma Thurman stalker tip:  hire a professional illustrator), and the midguidedly tender notes reading "If you think you love me, then how sad that your kids and you and me would have to spend another holiday apart.  Now it's the end of September and I live in my car." (Uma Thurman stalker tip:  it's never a good opening gambit, with any woman, to mention that you live in your car.)

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Disney, as Disney is fond of reminding us, is not just a movie company or an entertainment conglomerate:  it's a kingdom, a lifestyle, almost a religion.  And if that's true, its position on the major issues of the day are more than just fodder for the back pages of their annual stockholder report:  they're front page news, or even the subject of scholarly tomes. 

Such, as the New York Times reports, is the case with Disney's environmental record.  Throughout its history, Disney has played both sides of the ecological fence:  it recently announced the formation of a new film unit exclusively dedicated to creating nature documentaries, while its theme parks are denounced by environmentalists as resource-draining, pollution-spewing nightmares; its previous science films have sparked the interest of children in wildlife and conservation, while attracting charges of exaggeration or outright fakery; and its beloved animated children's classics have cemented a protective attitude towards nature in the minds of entire generations, while both hunters and animal rights activists claim that they present a distorted and dangerous view of animal life. 

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Two years from now, America will mark the anniversary of the shooting of students at Kent State by National Guardsmen.  It was a pivotal moment in the anti-war movement, and it marked, for many, the exact point at which it was no longer possible to pretend what kind of country they lived in.  There will be a lot of nostalgia, a lot of hand-wringing, and if we're lucky, a certain degree of self-examination.  What probably won't be discussed quite as much, if at all, is the fact that it wasn't the first killing of students on campus by members of the armed forces. 

That dubious distinction belongs to the so-called "Orangeburg Massacre", where, in 1968, National Guard soldiers opened fire on a crowd of 100 students at South Carolina State College.  Three of the students were killed, and dozens were wounded;  today, two separate films -- one, Orangeburg, by a pair of independent documentarians, set to debut on PBS this fall, and the other, Black Magic, by a more mainstream filmmaker, airing on ESPN of all places -- ask why America's memory of this outrage doesn't echo the way Kent State did.  There are plenty of good reasons, of course:  the SC State shooting wasn't as well documented (only a few photographs were taken at the time, and most were destroyed in a fire); it fell during an off news cycle and wasn't picked up by the major newspapers until it had largely died down; initial reports of the massacre falsely described it as an exchange of gunfire, rather than the shooting of unarmed students by soldiers; and it happened at night, when no television crews were available to cover the event.

But the biggest reason of all is that the victims were all black.  The shooting was triggered by protests in reaction to white citizens who objected to the desegregation of a local bowling alley, and instead of being a response to the Vietnam War, the Orangeburg Massacre was part of the ongoing struggle for civil rights.

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When film critic Nathan Lee signed on at The Village Voice in October 2006, he said, in reaction to the staff cuts and other problems then plaguing the paper (even as it was patting itself on the back on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary): "I came into this at a point where the Voice had been bought," he said. "The change was done; it had happened. I'm coming into it afterwards and my sense is, 'What is still valuable here; what can we still do? How can the Voice continue to have a strong, lively, influential and really smart sense of film coverage?' That's what I'm really invested in at this point." The paper turned out to be invested in other things, and now, eighteen months after claiming his first-ever regular staff position ("I've never had health benefits in my entire adult life"), Lee has been let go, from the Voice. Lee's own announcement of the unhappy news reads as follows: "In great Village Voice tradition, I was abruptly laid off today for 'economic reasons.' My employment at the paper ends immediately: someone else, alas, will be tasked with specifying the precise shade of periwinkle frosting atop the cupcakes in My Blueberry Nights. And so I am, as they say, 'looking for work,' though presumably not as a staff film critic as such jobs no longer appear to exist."

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It's not often that the subjective, opinionated world of cultural criticism and the objective, fact-based world of hard science come together, let alone form a common consensus.  But in January of 2008, one of those rare moments occurred:  a special screening of the Hayden Christensen vehicle Jumper, about a young man who discovers he has the power to teleport through space, was arranged for physics professors and their students at the Massachussets Institute of Technology.  These brilliant men and women, heirs to the tradition of Newton, Bohr and Einstein, agreed with movie critics the world over:  Jumper has got a lot of problems. 

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At least, that's what the New York Times says about his latest, Cassandra's Dream — and, more to the point, the MPAA isn't doing anything about it.

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An ongoing investigation into the traffic in steroids and HGH (human growth hormone) has yielded some unexpected names, according to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere.  Rather than the usual litany of fair-to-middling baseball players, the most frequently cited figures in the latest probe are entertainers -- specifically, rappers like 50 Cent, Timbaland, and (inexplicably) Mary J. Blige.  We're not the only ones to be a bit stymied at why a musician would need to take 'roids; while, admittedly, they're cheaper than a personal trainer if you want to hulk out the way Timbo has of late, a personal trainer can only symbolically shrivel your generative organs while shouting motivational slogans at you, rather than literally causing them to curl up and wither on the vine the way steroids can.

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In the Village Voice film section, Michelle Orange reviews the inelegantly titled Chuck Close:  An Elegant Portrait of the Art World's Leading Portraitist.  Set for limited release the year after Manufactured Landscapes signalled a great leap forward for documentaries about visual artists, its director (and friend of the subject) Marion Cajori won't be around to enjoy any success her film might encounter; having worked on the film for over fifteen years, died in 2006 after completing work on the film.   Cajori's previous work as a documentarian also focused on the art world; her best-known films were Joan Mitchell:  Portrait of an Abstract Painter and Louise Bourgeois:  Art is Sanity, and a previous iteration of the Chuck Close documentary, in a shortened form broadcast on PBS and entitled Chuck Close:  A Portrait in Progress, was nominated for an Emmy in 1998.  The completed film focuses on Close, best known for his gargantuan, photorealistic self-portraits, as well as other artists and creators such as Robert Rauschenberg and Philip Glass who received the same treatment (Gerhard Richter is a curious omission).  The focus of the film, however, is Close's artistic process, and not his often-irascable personality -- Close was partially paralyzed in the 1980s and since then, has used a self-designed system of leverl, pulleys, ladders and other Rube Goldberg devices to allow him to finish his massive paintings.  Cajori's film, Orange says, alleviates the usual arts-doc talking head boredom as she "regularly slows the gorgeously crisp, high-def film down to the brush-stroke" and notes that "Close's piecemeal, coherent style is wonderfully, almost winkingly well suited to Cajori's".  Matt Zoller-Seitz, reviewing the film for the Times, likewise calls the film "splendid" and notes that it "truly excels is in its depiction of the physical process of making art."  Close is a major figure in the world of art, and has deep ties to the Pacific Northwest and Chicago as well as claims to international fame as a painter; we're hoping that Cajori's documentary gets wider release than just the New York arts scene of which she was a part.

David M. Halbfinger reports that the uncertain state of the political thriller State of Play may offer some insight into how the game is being played this minute in a movie industry driven half-nuts by labor difficulties. Brad Pitt, who was locked in to star in the movie, pulled his Hamlet act and waltzed away from the project last week, just as it was about to go into production. Like many high-level productions, State of Play was all set to go so as to complete shooting by next June, when Hollywood may face an actors' strike. Now Universal, if it decides to proceed on schedule, will have to re-cast the lead quickly before other fully-booked-up actors in the cast start dropping out to make their other pre-June committments. On the plus side, they can consider any number of leading men, such as Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp, who are suddenly available because the projects they were about to start work on have been put on hold until after the writers' strike ends, because it's been decided that the scripts still need work.

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At the peak of his fame, Otto Preminger was one of the few directors of his day whose name was familiar to American moviegoers. Though he had made a couple of decent pictures in his day and even one enduring classic (the 1944 Laura), this had a lot less to do with the quality of his big, expensive, titillating epics (Exodus, Advise and Consent, The Cardinal, In Harm's Way) than it did his gift for self-publicity. Preminger, who played the commandant of a German P.O.W. camp in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17, wasn't above using his Austrian accent, bald head, and commanding personality to remind people of Erich von Stroheim, and he kept the public reminded of his existence by such stunts as getting himself cast as Mr. Freeze for a special guest villain gig on Batman.

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Two of the major film comedians of recent decades have started launching multiple assaults onto bookstore shelves. Woody Allen, of course, stop being a "mere" comedian a long time ago; he also started hemorrhaging audience shares a long time ago, and Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Movie-making, a redundantly subtitled collection of interviews conducted with his biographer Eric Lax, is designed to serve as a reminder that he is a major filmmaker, in case any of the people who've stopped seeing his movies have forgotten it. Much of what he has to say about the path he's taken as a director and his on-again, off-again relationship with his fans will be very familiar to anyone who's had moments of being interested lo these many years. Allen likes to affect a mandarin pose; the official story is that he stopped reading his reviews after Annie Hall, a film whose "classic" status apparently strikes him as inexplicable. But the 1980 Stardust Memories, a self-victimization orgy (and a work that Allen regards as among his very favorites) that includes a fantasy scene of extraterrestrials telling Allen that they prefer his "earlier, funnier" films, sure does look like it was made by someone who'd made a close study of the reviews of Interiors. Lax may be too deferential for the job; the book would be a livelier read if some of it had been done with an interlocutor who might have reacted to Allen's wondering aloud why Hollywood Ending "was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy" by explaining, "Because it sucked donkeys, my liege."

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After largely triumphant tour of the festival circuit — it premiered at Cannes last spring and recently played at the New York Film Festival — the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men has now started trickling into commercial theaters. With a cast headed by Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem, adapted from a Cormac McCarthy novel, and widely hailed as a "return to form" for the Coens after a couple of poorly received comedies (the doomed remake of The Ladykillers and the sharp, cruelly underappreciated Intolerable Cruelty) the picture does not lack for talent, cultural cachet, and the news hook. Yet from the very first reports from Cannes, one detail has tended to dominate the coverage: the hair helmet that Bardem sports in his role as the borderlands Terminator, Anton Chigurh. The first notices the movie received simply described it as a "pageboy haircut", which is accurate enough but fails the convey the full, shocking impact of the sight of the thing.

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David Carr's story in the New York Times — posted yesterday — is a typical trend piece. Entertainment journalism (and, hence, people like me, admittedly) couldn't survive without the occasional story that identifies three or more roughly similar things happening at roughly the same time and concludes that it means something important; still, Carr's piece struck me as particularly off the mark. He concludes that we're in for a renaissance of movies about rock music: he cites documentaries on Tom Petty, plus features like Across The Universe (The Beatles), I'm Not There (Bob Dylan) and break-out hit Once.

What Carr seems to be getting out, without being really aware of it, is how the rock biopic has displaced any other kind of biopic, with VH1's Behind The Music cited as the prototype for every rise-and-fall arc peddled. "We all know these stories from VH1’s Behind the Music, and even though we know what to expect, we still love watching them," weighs in Judd Apatow, apropos of his upcoming spoof Walk Hard. (We do?) The real question is, why are biopics nowadays seemingly all about musicians just old enough to be canonized — where are the artists (it's been years since Pollock), politicians and writers? When Richard Attenborough stopped churning out stuff like Gandhi and Shadowlands, did the genre die? If so, why?

The cynical, probably correct answer, is "because these movies suck." Still, it's a question worth thinking about; boomers are getting older and more secure about canonizing previously disreputable idols. Notice how Carr doesn't cite Musician (a recent documentary about jazz avant-gardist Ken Vandermark), Dig! (the indie-music bible featuring The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols), or Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. It's not a rock renaissance, it's another smug round of cultural gentrification. I smell another think piece coming on; hire me, New York Times! — Vadim Rizov

In the New York Times Book Review, Charles Taylor celebrates Anupama Chopra's new biography of Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, both for its own virtues and for what its existence may say about the spread of interest in popular Indian cinema to the English-speaking audience. "The larger significance of the book," he writes, "is that a major American publishing house is bringing out a biography of a major foreign star, largely unknown in the United States. And that is remarkable at a time when newspaper and magazine editors and film distributors are increasingly reluctant to offer readers and viewers what they haven’t already heard about." With more and more movies fighter for fewer and fewer screens in America, and with the international distribution system an erratic mess, it may seem a stretch to suggest that Bollywood is about to take the country by storm. "But in a global economy in which India stands poised to play a bigger part, when the Internet and DVD’s are creating film audiences not bound by borders or by the caprices of film distribution, when some American multiplexes are giving over screens to Bollywood releases in order to lure America’s growing Indian population and when the stagnation of Hollywood sometimes makes the survival of movies as a popular art form seem an iffy proposition, Americans can’t afford to ignore Bollywood much longer." At forty-one, Shah Rukh Khan could well be an important tool in breaking into the Western market; two of his recent movies, Veer-Zaara and Chak! de India (which comes out on DVD next month) are among the rare Bollywood movies that have actually played theaters in the States. Taylor describes him as "part leading man, larger part buoyant goofball" who "represents the confident, successful Indian yuppie, the citizen of the world who is nonetheless recognizably Indian." He definitely has crossover potential. But can he do it in pictures as exotically strange to American tastes as his Bollywood hits? The obvious alternative would be Hollywood-style versions of Bollywood movies, similar to the imitation-Hong Kong action knockoffs that Chow Yun Fat got shoved into when he came to America. The very idea may give migraines to Bollywood-lovers and -haters alike. — Phil Nugent

Asylum is a small Hollywood production company with a niche. Its recent titles include The Da Vinci Treasure, Snakes on a Train, and Transmorphers. As Rolf Potts explains, that last one might be mistaken, ideally by someone on a late-night raid at Blockbusters, for Transformers, except that the Asylum product "has no recognizable actors, no merchandising tie-ins and a garbled sound mix. Also unlike Transformers, it has cheap special effects and a subplot involving lesbians." Potts calls films like these, which are designed to be viewed by people with another, better-known movie on their minds, as "mockbusters." David Michael Latt, the company's co-founder, calls them "tie-ins", though that term has traditionally been used by people who were actually working together on a mass-marketed product and not by people who were, in effect, letting the big studios unknowingly do their marketing for them. Latt explains that Anchor, which has been around since 1997, just kind of tripped into this; they had made their own cheapo adaptation of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds, starring C. Thomas Howell, and they noticed that, when Steven Spielberg's own big-time movie of that same name and provenance hit DVD racks, it didn't hurt their sales. Soon, Asylum was making King of the Lost World, starring Bruce Boxleitner and Steve Railsback and featuring a DVD cover with a picture of a big-ass gorilla, which was timed to appear at the same time as Peter Jackson's King Kong. "I’m not trying to dupe anybody," Latt tells Potts. "I’m just trying to get my films watched." And the only way he can do that is by duping people. But at least he's keeping Steve Railsback off the streets. — Phil Nugent