The Screengrab

You want to talk about life experiences? Keira Knightley is twenty-three years old and has already starred in three very long movies based on a Disney theme park ride. "I mean, it was really fucking embarrassing and we all thought it was going to be total shit anyway," she told Matthew Rhys. "But then suddenly I was kissing Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom and bang, there you go, instant bloody stardom. I'd always wanted to be an actress, always dreamt of it, but I don't think you're ever quite prepared for being a movie star." Maybe not, but it's probably a good sign that she recognizes that the two positions are not the same, though they sometimes overlap. "I know that when Bend it like Beckham came out and it was quickly followed by Pirates, suddenly people were looking at me and thinking, 'Well she's not very good, she's just a pretty face, don't know what all the fuss is about'. But I wasn't really ready to be scrutinised. I wasn't any good at my job yet. But with Pride and Prejudice, yes, I was at least trying to say: look, see, I can learn, and I can do this, or at least give me the right director and I'll give it my best shot. So since those first films, I've always been looking to be stretched - it doesn't always mean I'm going to be good, but I'm trying to become a good actress, really I am."

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“I love addicts. I love these guys. That’s the people I want to be around. You know, former users. And I think that’s really crazy.”That's Mike Tyson talking to Tim Arango in The New York Times. Now 41 and, one assumes, or maybe hopes, Tyson still has his own peculiar addictions, and one of them seems to be to the filmmaker James Toback. Tyson supplied Toback with the most memorable scene of his 2000 improvisational jam session Black and White when he turned up as himself in a party scene and gets cruised by Robert Downey, Jr., a scene that ends with the unnerved Tyson ("I'm on parole, brother, please") ringing Downey's bell. (After Downey goes down, Brooke Shields, playing his wife, rushes over to see if he's all right, and then she hits on Tyson. "“They say I raped a woman,” Iron Mike tells her politely. “They put me in the penitentiary. I don’t need no white bitch coming on to me.” At the time, there was some indication that Tyson was unhappy with how he came across onscreen and felt that Toback had set him up--not an unreasonably paranoid reaction to Toback, a self-styled provocateur who likes to surround himself with celebrities and stir up some shit. But Tyson came back for an appearance in Toback's little-seen When a Man Loves a Woman, and now he's the star of Toback's new film, a documentary simply called Tyson, "which interposes interviews of Mr. Tyson conducted last year while he was in rehab, with fight clips," and which premieres at the Cannes Film Festival.

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Some movies experience the theatrical-release equivalent of a still birth yet never seem to stay dead. Such is Night Tide, written and directed by Curtis Harrington and completed for release in 1961, though it didn't get full distribution until 1963. It quickly slipped into obscurity but began to be revived in the 1990s after its star, Dennis Hopper, enjoyed a comeback after wrecking the career he only started to build years after this, his first leading role in a movie. (It's since been issued on DVD with a commentary track featuring both Harrington, who died last year, and Hopper. Last week, a restored 35-mm. print was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.) Hopper, wearing an Eminem hairdo and a sailor suit that makes him look like part of the male chorus singing behind Fred Astaire and Randolph Scott in Follow the Fleet, plays a sea-farin' man who wanders into a boardwalk carnival reminiscent of the one where Ray Dennis Steckler stopped living and became a mixed-up zombie. There he meets Mora (Linda Lawson), dark-haired beauty whose blank gaze stops the camera cold in the middle of a dolly shot. She's sitting in a beachfront hangout listening to a jazz combo, and Hopper introduces himself by asking if he can join her at her table because, from where he was sitting, he couldn't see the band. She nods yes, and in response, he sits down facing her, with his back to the musicians. It's little things like this that explain why Dennis Hopper's Smooth Moves Guide to Meeting Girls sold so poorly.

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Scott Bowles reports that the opening of the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer may herald an exciting new wave in rehashed entertainment: already, Hollywood is snatching up the rights to anime properties, just in case that Iron Man opening weekend was a fluke and the bottom is about to fall out of the superhero market. On the horizon: Hollywoodized versions of Akira and Ghost in the Shell (that last one to be directed by Steven Spielberg) and M. Night Shyamalan's movie adaptation of the anime-style Nickelodeon series The Last Airbender. Anime itself has been a cult object in the U.S. going back some fifteen to twenty years (back when we used to call it "Japanimation" around the college dorm, on the occasions when we'd been away from out bongs long enough to approach words of more than three syllables), but unless you count the Pokemon films, it's never really crossed into the major markets. As Zac Bertschy of Anime News Network puts it, "Generation X is very familiar with anime. But if you're not in that age group, there may be a learning curve."

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The Fall, the second feature from Tarsem Singh, the TV-commercials-and-music-video director still probably best known for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion", finally crawls into theaters this weekend, a couple of years after it was unveiled at the Toronto Film Festival. Signh's first movie was 20000's The Cell, an eye-popping, empty-headed thriller in which he deployed his elaborately detailed visual imagination to depict "the mind of a serial killer." (Turned out the poor guy had a Damien Hirst exhibition going on in there.) Like some other directors who made the leap from music videos to the big screen, Singh showed a faith in his own visual flash that was so intense and single-minded that it bordered on outright contempt for representational details and other essentials of basic storytelling: how else to explain the decision to cast Jennifer Lopez as a visionary scientist and Vince Vaughn as a morally stern FBI agent? Damned if The Fall, which is based on a screenplay credited to Singh, Dan Gilroy, and Nico Soultanakis, doesn't turn out to be a self-conscious tribute to the wonders of "storytelling."

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Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)



Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

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Peter Sobczynski at Hollywood Bitchslap checks in with the towering Mary Woronov as the inimitable cult queen prepares to spend the weekend in Chicago, at retrospective screenings of a couple of her drive-in classics, Rock 'n' Roll High School (at the Music Box Theatre on May 9, with music critics Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot) and, on May 10, Death Race 2000, as part of the annual Sci Fi Spectacular. Woronov entered movies through the side door after working with "the Theatre of the Ridiculous in New York, which was majorly cult--it was hardly Broadway theater or even off-Broadway," and then with Andy Warhol, which led to her getting a show-stopping role in the breakout Warhol factory picture The Chelsea Girls. For much of her movie career, Woronov seemed joined at either hip to the late Paul Bartel, who directed her in Death Race 2000 and co-starred with her in Rock 'n' Roll High School, and Roger Corman, on whose nickel both pictures were made. (She also appeared in the Corman productions Hollywood Boulevard and Cannonball, a follow-up to Death Race 2000, which she describes as "just the worst movie" and which she says inspires this outburst from Bartel, who directed it: "What is happening to me? I don�t like cars--I hate cars!�") and acted for Bartel in such labors of love as Eating Raoul and Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills.) As she explains it now, it was a natural fit in both cases because Bartel "really liked camp acting and that was really who I was, a camp actress," and because Corman "didn't care as long as the movie got made."

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NEW YORK: One of America's finest cinematographers, and an artist notable both for his consistent record of excellence and a range so vast that he seems to have none of the overworked favorite tics that often make it easier for a cameraman to develop a reputation based on his easily identifiable "style", Ed Lachman gets his , running from May 9 through the 20th. The schedule, which includes Lachman's playful vision of downtown New York in the mid-1980s as a punk playground for Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan, his harder-edged view of the city in Paul Schrader's nocturnal Light Sleeper, David Byrne's tour of the malls of middle America True Stories, and the Dylan kaleidoscope I'm Not There, kicks off with a screening of one of Lachman's rare directing jobs (in collaboration with Larry Clark), the controversial 2002 Ken Park, which has never been picked up for distribution.

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Steve Bryant at Reel Pop drew our attention to these beautifully assembled little montages by YouTube user "barringer82", who ought to be working for the Academy Awards people. They're like eating peanuts. "The Films of the 1970s" makes a case for that era as a time when actors who knew what the hell to do with a long, unbroken silent take, in particular Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino, ruled the world, and it feels so perfectly assembled, as if flows from one clip to the next in synch with the music and Peter Finch's big speech from Network, that we couldn't care less that Blow Out was actually released in 1981. (It also made us realize, for the first time ever, that one reason that Finch works so brilliantly in that part is his vocal resemblance to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Before he actually appeared on screen, I thought the clip of him talking was from a fireside chat that FDR must have given after snacking on hash brownies.)

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The sixth annual Tribeca Film Festival wraps up tonight with the premiere of the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer, which will soon be joining the festival's earlier glossy Hollywood premieres, Baby Mama with Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler and David Mamet's Redbelt, in general theatrical release. Most of the major festivals awards were handed out last Thursday. These included Tomas Alfredson's young-vampire story Let the Right One In, winner of the Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature; Hüseyin Karabey, winner of the Best New Narrative Filmmaker prize for his acted-documentary love story My Marlon and Brando; young Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello, who share the Best Actor honors for their teamwork in Shane Meadows's Somers Town; Eileen Walsh, winner of the Best Actress award for her work in Declan Recks's Eden; Gini Reticker's Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which won as the Best Documentary Feature; and Old Man Bebo, which earned its director, Carlos Carcas, a citation as Best New Documentary Filmmaker.

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Welcome to yet another new weekly feature here at the Screengrab. Hard as it is to believe, our research shows that there is actually some miniscule percentage of our reading public that misses the occasional post during the week. We can’t stand the thought of any of you being deprived of our wit and wisdom, so every Friday the Highlight Reel will round up the best of the week in Screengrab.

You like film festivals? We’ve got your film festivals covered! Phil “Tolstoy” Nugent has seen and written about seemingly every movie at the Tribeca Film Festival, while Andrew “Dropkick” Osborne has the Independent Film Festival of Boston covered.

While those guys are out loading up on art, I’ve been sitting home with the 100 worst movies of all time. You might say they’re Unwatchable.

Art schmart. What you really want to know is which movies will be the Top 5 Hits of Summer 2008 and which will be the Top 5 Bombs.

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The animator Bill Plympton doesn't make cartoons for kids; kids wouldn't stand for this stuff. Plympton's hand-drawn, independently produced features depend on the kind of tolerance that adult audiences, especially those who love animation, can be counted on to extend to something when they know how much tedious hard work when into its making. Plympton is basically a gagman with a drawing board. He started making noise in animation festivals more than twenty years ago with a string of punchy short films (Your Face; 25 Ways to Quit Smoking; How to Kiss) that were boiled down to nothing but their visual jokes. The best of them were combustibly funny, especially if you saw them slotted in between a few "poetic" animated shorts, and their handmade roughness was part of their charm. But then Plympton started turning out feature films (beginning with the 1992 The Tune, which cannibalized a number of his early shorts), and they've been padded-out, deflated non-events, with vast acreage of undecorated blank space on the screen; Plympton has so little compositional sense that his bare backgrounds make you feel as if you're not getting a lot of movie for your money. He doesn't even give you much to look at while you're killing time during the long wait for the next joke to show up and bomb.

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The Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho's Playing is an experimental documentary that sounds like a dumb stunt but plays as a fascinating study in the nature of acting and storytelling. The movie opens with the text of an ad Coutinho placed in the newspaper that amounted to an open call for any women in Rio de Janeiro over eighteen "with stories to tell." He filmed them talking about their lives and then brought in a succession of actresses, who studied these monologues and then, using their own words, delivered their own versions of the stories. The trick is that in the finished film, Coutinho cut together the best of both material-- the original speakers and the actresses doing their "interpretations" of them-- without clearly identifying for the audience which is which. Sometimes a scene will end with a woman revealing herself to be an actress by commenting on what she's just done; sometimes, as in the case of a woman who talks about how she sees her relationship with her grown daughter reflected in Finding Nemo, we get to see the original speaker's words alongside those of the actress who "plays" them; sometimes we never find out. At its simplest, the movie reveals a lot about "real life" and theater and how they complement and comment on each other. (A number of the women who seem to be describing their own experiences tear up very easily. However, an actress shows the director the tool she would have used if he'd insisted that she cry during her performance and explains that though she was prepared to use it, she preferred not to because it's her observation that when people really feel like crying, that's when they hold back their tears.) It also shows how thin the line between the two can be. Coutinho has taken a device that could have been used to cook up one more dopey illusion vs. reality game and made something substantial with it.

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My Winnipeg, the latest from Canadian filmmaker and friend of the Screengrab Guy Maddin, was commissioned by the Documentary Channel, but as noted here recently, it's hardly the straight history-travelogue that the title might suggest. It's an impressionistic, semi-satitic tribute to the hometown of his fantasy life that Maddin's feelings about the city as a taking-off point, the way his recent "autobiographical" films Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! take off from his feelings about his memories from his early life. Those feelings, as they come through here, might best be described as affectionate but haunted. In Maddin's telling, the entire city is a folksy snowscape where people might yearn to get away but aren't awake enough to formulate an escape plan. "Guy", our hero and narrator (played by Darcy Fehr) recalls that for a hundred years, there was a yearly, day-long, city-wide treasure hunt, and the prize was a train ticket out of town, but nobody ever used their winnings because, after spending a day exploring the city, no winner could bear to leave. At the same time, Guy says, Winnipeg has ten times the number of sleepwalkers of any other city; at night, the sidewalks are clogged with folks who've gone to bed only to stagger outside and wander zombie-like through the cutting winds.

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Baghead bills itself as being presented by "the Duplass Brothers." That's Jay Duplass, who a few years ago directed The Puffy Chair, from a script he co-wrote with brother Mark, who starred in it and produced it. Along though The Puffy Chair was no major world-changing feat, it had a story and actual jokes and was decently lit, all of which easily set it apart from the work of most of the filmmakers who've been lumped together under the heading "mumblecore"--such as Joe Swanberg, whose Hannah Takes the Stairs featured Mark Duplass as the first, and funniest, of the serial boyfriends of the confused heroine (Greta Gerwig). The Dupplass boys may be having second thoughts about that, because Baghead, on which they share writing and directing credits and in which they both co-star, opens with a fairly vicious parody of a half-assed "mumblecore"-style independent film that looks as if the print had been delivered to the projection room in a cinnamon roll box with the icing still stuck to the insides. After the in-jokes are out of the way, the two boys, accompanied by the women in their lives (played by Gerwig and Elise Muller), repair to a family house in the woods to work on their fantasy of writing a script for a movie that will launch the four of them out of film-extra work and to see what they can come up with in the way of comedy and drama with the tangle of misfiring sexual and romantic attractions between them.

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I may have dosed off for a few minutes while watching the hammerhead Brazilian police drama Elite Squad. Listening to all that screaming and cursing and the sound of gunshots--it was just so much like being at home in my bed in the Bronx. A scandalous success in its native Brazil, Elite Squad is the latest post-City of God potboiler that depicts Rio de Janeiro as being just like Miami Vice except with fewer washed-up rock stars. Based on a book about Rio's special forces outfit known as BOPE, the movie is narrated by squad Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), the hardest of hard men, who is looking for someone tough enough to replace him so that he retire and stop placing his life on the line and raise a proper family with his pregnant wife. Moura thinks there may be potential in a couple of young recruits, who also happen to be bestest buddies: Neto (Caio Junqueira), who seems tough and trigger-happy enough but is maybe just a teensy bit too Cro-Magnon to be trusted with large arsenals of weapons at his disposal, and Matias (Andre' Ramiro), who wears glasses and is smart and stuff, but may be too evolved to keep the savages in line. How to choose!? Faced with this head-scratcher, Moura addresses it the only way a real man can: he yells at everybody who comes within a mile of his office until you expect his throat to hemorrage. Then he takes to the training field to figure out which recruits have what it takes, by the time-tested method of yelling at them. Then, having used his famous leather lungs to keep Rio from cracking apart, he goes home to enjoy a relaxed evening of yelling at his wife. We must remain ever vigilant.

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In her comic book work from some fifteen years ago, Nina Paley spoofed the trend towards "confessional" autobiographical comics such as those done by people like Julie Doucet and Joe Matt. Drawing in a goofy, bigfoot-cartoonist style, Paley complained that she hadn't enjoyed enough unhealthy, grotesquely unstable life experiences to compete with the real trailblazers in that field. Sita Sings the Blues, Paley's first animated feature, shows that time has helped her catch up a little in the miserable-experience department, and it also shows an artist who's blossomed a bit in the face of the possibilities offered by moviemaking. It also shows that Paley has found a way to be confessional without being exhibitionist or soppy.

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Located on the far side of the edge of the French Quarter in New Orleans, Faubourg Treme may be the oldest African-American neighborhood in the country. In the years leading up the Civil War, free people of color, drawn to New Orleans by the city's relatively laid-back attitude towards slavery and those trying to escape from it, turned the area into a haven for black poets, artists, and political activists. But long before Katrina washed through the neighborhood, driving off long-time residents and destroying the homes they left behind, Faubourg Treme had slipped into a mire of poverty, crime, and neglect. Among locals, the area was becoming best identified as one of the centers of the city's crack epidemic when, in the late 1990s, New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie decided to buy a house in the neighborhood. Elie is onscreen for much of this documentary, which credits him as writer and "co-director" and Dawn Logsdon, who worked as an editor on such superior recent documentaries as Paragraph 175 and The Weather Underground, is credited as "director." They began work on it around the time that Elie acquired his house, five years before Katrina hit.

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The title character of James Westby's The Auteur, Arturo Domingo (played by Melik Malkasian), is the most artistically creative filmmaker working in hardcore pronography. Westby's movie is mostly set over the course of one busy weekend in its hero's life, during which he's in Portland to attend a tribute being held in his honor at Cinema 21. The festivities include a documentary about his life and work and a career retrospective, which provide a handy way to brief the audience on his back story: how he was set on his path to glory after reaching under his parents' bed and pulling out a copy of Hustler with one hand and a copy of Cahiers du Cinema with the other; how he met the actor who would become his regular leading man and muse, Frank E. Norma (John Breen), and how they would work together on his first masterpiece, Five Easy Nieces ("I can set you up with a room for the night, but you'll have to put up with those nieces of mine."); and how their string of hits, and Arturo's marriage as well, ended with the ambitious Vietnam war film Full Metal Jackoff, which was intended to be "a journey through Hell, with a nice hand release at the end." After the producer reshot and re-edited it, Arturo and Frank parted ways, and the director's career has been in a tailspin ever since. The reaction to his latest is summed up in a cameo by Screengrab contributor D. K. Holm, who appears onscreen just long enough to declare in wonder, "Even I didn't feel like masturbating to this."

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The horror movie The Objective, which follows a group of American forces soldiers led by a poker-faced CIA man on a mysterious mission into the mountains of Afghanistan, has been greeted as a comeback for its director, Daniel Myrick, who hit paydirt nine years ago as the one of the directors of The Blair Eitch Project. So it's a little surprising and more than a little dispiriting when you begin to notice that the new movie is really very much like Blair Witch minus its found-footage gimmick, which is sorely missed. Once again, we're out in a remote, ominously creepy location that seems all the creepier when the landscape seems to begin to change. And once again, we're stuck out there with a small group of characters who start out overconfident and become more and more unglued as something starts picking them off. Although this movie had a written script (by Myrick, Mark A. Patton, and Wesley Clark, Jr., it even has the same kind of numbingly uninspired and repetitive dialogue, which is made to seem all the flatter by the uninflected non-acting of the principles.

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Somers Town reunites the talented writer-director Shane Meadows with Thomas Turgoose, the amazing, fifteen-year-old star of Meadows's previous film, the scalding This Is England. In that movie, Turgoose, playing an emotionally bewildered young skinhead, looked like an eleven-year-old boy with a fifty-year-old face. In Somers Town, which begins with Turgoose's character, Tommo, running away from his home in the midlands, arriving in the title location, and promptly getting stomped and picked clean by three sneering little thugs, turns out to be a kind of buddy comedy, and Turgoose proves himself a surprisingly deft comedian. Tommo strikes up a friendship with Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a sixteen-year-old polish immigrant who has a crush on a French waitress named Maria (Elisa Lasowski). After getting a look at her, Tommo very reasonably decides that he has a crush on her too, and, looking up at her face as it towers over him somewhere in the clouds, he immediately puts her verbal moves on her. He may look a little like a potato with sleep apnea, but having come all the way to the big city (it's big to him) in search of something better, and having discovered that something better is standing in a cafe holding a tray and asking if he wants another glass of water, he isn't about to just let the opportunity pass by. The little bastard is so convinced that he's smooth that he half-convinces you.

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Julie Checkoway's remarkable, tightly focused documentary Waiting for Hockney stars Billy Pappas, a Maryland art school graduate who was making ends meet tending bar when, prodded and in part funded by a makeshift support group of family, friends, and boosters, he decided to concentrate on trying to perfect his skill and create a masterpiece that he hoped would enable him to launch a self-supporting career as an artist. After discussing it with Larry Link, an architect who took it upon himself to help him focus his energies (in part by loaning him thousands of dollars over the years), Pappas decided to gamble everything on a pencil drawing--a portrait of Marilyn Monroe. Determined to capture the face in as much naturalistic detail as possible, down to the last pore and follicle, Pappas re-taught himself how to draw, and then spent more than eight years on the portrait until he was satisfied that he'd created the most precisely detailed, "realistic" depiction of the iconic face that a human hand could produce. Then, after giving some thought to how best to capitalize on this achievement, he set about trying to attract the attention of David Hockney. He convinced himself that if he could show Hockney his work, and the established artist embraced it as he hoped he would, that would be that: his career would flow from that moment.

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John Cusack gets his smug on in War, Inc., a satiricial action comedy with a touch every bit as light and precise as its sledgehammer title. Cusack, who co-produced the movie with Grace Loh for his New Crime Productions, and splits the screenplay credit between himself, novelist Mark Leyner, and Bulworth scripter and Huffington Post blogger Jeremy Pikser, plays a hit man who is hired by Tamerlane, a Halliburton-like corporaton that is staffing America's first war that has been fully outsourced to the private sector. The movie intends an attack on how big business profits from, and may even influence, American foreign policy, but its ideas about how that's reshaping the world seem to have only gotten as far as slapping company logos on the sides of tanks and in smoking urban war zones, a device that mainly results in some really questionable product placement deals.

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Lou Reed's 1973 album Berlin, a song cycle about the abusive love affair between an American junkie and his "German queen" Caroline, has always been regarded as one of the legendary moments from the first ten or twelve uneven, often confused years of Reed's post-Velvets solo career. For a long time, the common consensus was that the record was legendary in the same way as the final flight of the Hindenburg; reviews from the time it was first released tended to rate it as something between an embarrassment and a war crime. But Berlin, whose reputation has improved markedly in recent years, has always spoken to a few of us lost souls, and Reed's great fan and baiter, Lester Bangs, was delighted when his hero told him, in the mid-1970s, that of all his solo releases, the only ones of which he was proud were Berlin and the famously unlistenable Metal Machine Music. What with one thing and another, the busy Reed never got around to performing the whole of Berlin live in concert until December 2006, when the first of several performances of the material was staged in New York City at St. Ann's Warehouse, with Reed's mother in attendance. (Maybe Reed put off doing it so long because he was waiting for his mother to become too deaf to hear what he was singing.)

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The relatively unheralded Russian film Simple Things is one of the happiest surprises of this year's Tribeca lineup. Written and directed by Alexi Popogresbsky, the film is a wry character study of an anesthetist--Sergei, played by Sergei Puskepalis--whose teenaged daughter has moved in with her boyfriend, giving Sergei and his beautiful wife a few extra inches of breathing space in their tiny apartment. Sergei is already struggling with the question of whether this is cause for celebration or a reason to despair when his wife informs him that she's pregnant again. Bewildered about where his life is going but pretty sure that he'd have trouble affording it no matter what, Sergei takes a job moonlighting for a shady company that supplies in-home painkilling services to the terminally ill. In turn, their clients agree to sign their apartments over to them after they die. He winds up making regular housecalls to an ancient actor (Leonid Bronevoy, who looks like a Slavic Jean Renoir), who offers him a bribe of a valuable painting in exchange for a lethal injection.

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We've reported on this before, so this is just a timely reminder: this Sunday, April 27, Cinema 21 in Portland (616 NW 21st Avenue, phone 503-223-4515) is holding a fundraiser for critic, author, and Screengrab contributor D. K. Holm. The website says that Holm, who has written books on Robert Crumb and Quentin Tarantino, "is suffering from a very treatable case of esophageal cancer. However, he is also, as he puts it, 'the American nightmare' -- uninsured and facing thousands of dollars in medical bills for chemotherapy and surgery." The event will include a silent auction and entertainment including a "compilation of D.K. Holm's many appearances in the films of James Westby" and "Portland luminaries reading some of D.K.’s most deliciously vitriolic reviews and hate mail." Those who may be able to unable--if say, you, like some of us, have the misfortune to not live in Portland--but would like to make your presence felt on the dance floor can send contributions directly to D. K. Holm at P.O. Box 4146, Portland, OR, 97208-4146.

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