One of the memorable moments at SXSW was filmmaker Morgan Spurlock and SnagFilms CEO and widget king Rick Allen sparring on a digital panel over whether filmmakers are making money on digital distribution. Well, they're a lot friendlier now. Spurlock's Super Size Me was the most viewed title shown by SnagFilms in its first year, which it celebrated July 17. Spurlock, who's developing a graphic novel of Super-Size Me along with a Simpsons doc, has executive-produced The Entrepreneur, a documentary by rookie director Jonathan Bricklin about his iconic car inventor father Malcolm, who turned the auto industry on its ear. SnagFilms is releasing the doc online July 24 for one week prior to its TV debut.

Needless to say, premiering online on SnagFilms before a TV run is not your conventional release pattern. Then again, neither is counting up more than 1 billion web page views in one year for free-streaming documentaries. One innovative entrepreneur deserves another.

Heartwarming news: forty years later, the iconic Woodstock couple who posed under a blanket are still together, reports the NYDN.

The special anniversary edition of Michael Wadleigh's doc, which deployed such directors as Martin Scorsese and Richard Pearce in a groundbreaking use of multiple roaming cameras, is available. Amid a lot of Woodstock hooplah, Focus Features is releasing Ang Lee's movie Taking Woodstock, set behind the scenes at the event, on August 28.

Adapting Elliot Tiber's memoir, screenwriter James Schamus (and Focus topper) and Lee explore the cultural moment that Woodstock crystallized—the ways that old and new were clashing and changing. The movie is utterly American, culturally sophisticated, sweet and tender, mood-shifting, and fun. “It was a time when people had t-shirts that didn’t have logos on them,” Lee told me at Cannes.

This behind-the-scenes drama focuses on a family dynamic: two uptight Jewish parents (Henry Goodman and Imelda Staunton) and their vibrant, closeted gay son (Demetri Martin) who, when shoved up against the counterculture, breaks out of their world. Comedy Central star Martin never dreamed of a movie career, but the real discovery is radiant theater actor Jonathan Groff as Michael Lang. Lee and Schamus nail the period. Most of the time they found that hippie lingo didn’t play, and cut much of it out. But when Groff said words like “groovy” and “far out,” he did so with such conviction that they left them in.

Here's the trailer.

Producer Edward Norton considered taking the fall fest route with his By the People: The Election of Barack Obama doc, which has been filming since 2006. But Amy Rice and Alicia Sams' much-anticipated film about Obama's presidential run will quietly bypass the Venice and Toronto fests this year in favor of a short August Oscar-qualifying run in LA and NY and a splashy HBO event launch in September. Norton is repped by the new WME combine run by Ari Emanuel, brother of Obama's chief-of-staff, Ram Emamuel. This should be a big must-see.

Newsweek critic David Ansen pens a lovely tribute to late filmmaker/professor Richard P. Rogers on the occasion of a new documentary about him, The Windmill Movie.

Star Trek colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld is the rising star in a profession, film colorist, that is increasingly in demand.

The LAT lays out the reasons why so many studios chased the online video boom--and went bust.

At last year's Cannes, Paramount Vantage and Overture Films made the announcement that they were backing Michael Moore's follow-up to 2007's Sicko. (Here's my video interview.) Overture execs Chris McGurk and Danny Rosett had worked with Moore when they released Bowling for Columbine at MGM/United Artists. (They're sharing a nice slice of the gross with Moore.) While the doc's still untitled, it now has a release date, October 2, and comes out twenty years after Roger and Me, another doc recounting the perils of capitalism run amuck. The opening will be a year and a day after the Wall Street $700 billion bailout. According to a press release, Moore's film:

...will explore the root causes of the global economic meltdown and take a comical look at the corporate and political shenanigans that culminated in what Moore has described as “the biggest robbery in the history of this country” – the massive transfer of U.S. taxpayer money to private financial institutions.

Here's Moore's statement:

"The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn't have enough wealth. They wanted more -- a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money. Now, why would they do this? That is what I seek to discover in this movie."

Much like Michael Moore, Kirby Dick (Twist of Faith, This Film is Not Yet Rated) has a talent for putting himself front and center in his documentaries, as well as making them controversial and entertaining. Clearly his latest, Outrage, which is debuting at the Tribeca Film Fest, is no exception. Magnolia will release the agitprop doc on May 8.

Here's early reaction from Wilshire and Washington, Movieline and IndieWire.

In the movie business, the mix of art and commerce is always tricky. Some people have taste and talent smarts, but no business acumen. Developing a good script is one thing, but getting it produced is another. The ability to smell a hit is a weapon that only some producers have in their arsenal. Others easily churn out "product" but wouldn't know a good movie if it hit them on the head. When one person combines taste, quality control, and business moxy, then you get the rarest thing of all in Hollywood: a consistent track record.

Jim Stern of Endgame Entertainment is on a roll. While he varies his level of investment and responsibility in three to four projects a year, he had the sense to nail down significant pieces of several upcoming quality movies. At the recent Toronto Film Festival, during a time when self-distribution is the best option available to many indies, Stern went in with one film already sold: The Brothers Bloom, a caper comedy starring Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo, which was pre-bought by Summit Entertainment (now set for release May 29). Two Endgame films also sold to Sony Pictures Classics: BBC Film's Noel Coward period comedy Easy Virtue, starring Jessica Biel, Ben Barnes and Colin Firth, and Every Little Step , a doc about the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line, featuring Broadway's first-ever filmed auditions, which Stern financed and co-directed with frequent collaborator Adam Del Deo. And at Sundance in January, Sony Pictures Classics also acquired Lone Scherfig and Nick Hornby's BBC film An Education, which Stern partly funded.

Not bad, having your own production funding. But the question is, how do you use it? In the case of Every Little Step, which opened April 17 to strong reviews, Stern was in a position to know what to do. The Chicago-born theater major from the University of Michigan had produced sixteen Broadway shows, including Stomp, The Producers, and Hairspray. He had produced such films as Proof and Stage Beauty. Stern had directed three films with Del Deo, on basketball, politics and theater. And he had financed a number of films, plays and TV shows since he founded Endgame in 2003. "It really helps being a director," Stern says, "even when I'm producing. It makes things easier and smoother when it's easy to understand what people are trying to do. All you ask is that the director makes the film they say they're going to make."

All Stern's experience came together with the doc Every Little Step when an old theater acquaintance, attorney John Breglio, gave him the Michael Bennett tapes from the snowy night in 1974 when he first conceived of A Chorus Line at a 12-hour marathon session with 19 dancers. When Stern heard the tapes, he felt chills and thought, "This is a movie."

Stern and Del Deo shot some 500 hours of video, and waded through tons of archived footage. With first-time ever permission from Actors' Equity to shoot auditions for the new show, the filmmakers began following 50 to 60 singer/dancers, often using four cameras to capture key moments. "Fortunately in this world, people were used to cameras," says Stern, who knew he had "doc gold" when director Bob Avian wept as Jason Tam nailed his audition as Paul. "We were like flies on the wall. You shoot first and ask questions later."

YouTube has gone live with long-form feature content. One of the charter partners on the new deal is SnagFilms, which now has a YouTube channel featuring full-length feature documentary films selected from SnagFilms' online library. Their long-form feature collaboration launches April 17.

Now, YouTube users can view free ad-supported, full-length feature documentary films via YouTube's search feature as well as library listings on the SnagFilms channel. The initial film slate will come from the 650 docs available on SnagFilms, and will grow over time. SnagFilms splits the revenue it receives from the accompanying commercials with its filmmakers.

Exposure for docs from this co-venture "will help grow the reach and impact of non-fiction films," says SnagFilms CEO Rick Allen.

After more than 30 years of not making it as Anvil, aging heavy metal rockers Robb Reiner and Steve Kudlow finally scored the career boost they needed from an unlikely source: a Brit who was once their roadie in 1983. In 2005, Hollywood screenwriter Sacha Gervasi (The Terminal) checked out the band online and realized they were still plugging away, trying to break through. He contacted lead singer and guitarist Lips and “within five minutes it was like I was 15 again,” he recalled during a Q & A after Anvil! The Story of Anvil at the Nuart Tuesday night. “He was exactly the same, so fully crazy, I started to believe him again. He believed so hard. They weren’t bitter. They truly believe that if they just hold on long enough that some kind of miracle is going to happen. In the end I realized it was an incredible story.”

So Gervasi pitched the doc to producer Rebecca Yeldham (The Kite Runner), who didn't care for heavy metal but loved the story. At Tuesday night’s Q & A after Anvil!, which finally opened Easter weekend after debuting at Sundance a year ago, Gervasi apologized for the absence of his stars. "They're playing in Seattle tonight," he said. "They'd love to see every screening of this film."

The band is on a seven-city tour backed by VH1, which will air the movie this summer, after a long struggle to find a distributor. Abramorama is handling the theatrical release of Anvil! which opened this past weekend at number one among specialty films, and performed best at LA’s Nuart Theatre with a per screen of $16,472. Landmark CEO Ted Mundorff believes so strongly in Anvil! that’s he’s moving it to the Westside Pavilion and adding screens around the country. Additionally, the Landmark chain is promoting the film via a sneaks program and plan to expand the tour dates for “The Anvil Experience,” which adds a performance by the band to the movie. They aim to peak in June.

Anvil! was all over my Facebook feed Easter weekend, fueled by good reviews (here are the NYT and New Yorker reviews), a Facebook page and Twitter-- John Mayer posted a twitpic of himself with Anvil. The domestic trailer went up on YouTube March 12 and hovered at about 300 views until two weeks ago when it shot up: it’s now at 21,658, while the U.K. trailer is at 86,470 views.

The movie has been good for the band. Their self-released 13th album has been selling well, and EMI Canada even approached Gervasi to help them sign the band—after turning them down in the movie. “They’re funny and human,” says Gervasi, who clearly loves these guys. “It’s about perseverance, friendship and family. It never stops. Last week Anvil recorded songs for Rock Band. They recorded ‘Thumb Hang.’ For guys like Lars Ullrich, who we interviewed for an hour, ‘it could have been me.’ These guys did get overlooked and they shouldn’t have. I had an opportunity to give them the support they needed.”

As for the inevitable comparisons to This is Spinal Tap, Gervasi responds: “Spinal Tap is the fake Anvil.”

Jazz fans should check out Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense, a contemporary jazz doc featuring interviews and performances with Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard, Ravi Coltrane, Medeski Martin & Wood and the Bad Plus. Seven years in the making, the four-part doc will debut at Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 15 and air on the Documentary Channel on April 20. Backed by old friend Roberto Serralles, an exec at Don Q Rum, exec producer John Comerford interviewed 75 jazz artists with hi-def cameras, shot 25 hours of concerts on super 16, and also adds archive footage.

[Photo of Brian Blade and Christopher Thomas by Jean Hangarter]

Here are the film's MySpace and iPhone pages and trailer:

B-movie afficionados rejoice: AMC is streaming programmers online.

Filmmaker Stacy Peralta (Dogtown and Z-Boys) blogs the case for his doc Crips & Bloods, Made in America via the Huff Post.

In case you missed it, check out this edition of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He's on a roll:

Boston Phoenix critic Gerald Peary's long-gestating doc For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism is finally done. Appropriately, for a film hatched nine years ago at the Toronto Film Festival, Peary is taking his self-financed labor of love, produced with wife Amy Geller with foundation grants and funds from friends, on the film fest circuit, first to SXSW, and next, this month's San Francisco International Film Fest.

Peary conducted the first interviews in 2001, strangely enough, at the World Trade Center at a meeting of the New York Film Critics Association, a few months before 9/11. "Now the movie is filled with people without jobs," says Peary, whose primary income comes from running the film department at Boston's Suffolk University. He keeps having to go back into the film and change titles to "ex-critic." His subjects, including a plumper, talking Roger Ebert, will also see themselves captured at a younger age.

Thus the film, which offers an excellent history of American film criticism, also serves as a valentine to a vanishing profession, something Peary could never have foreseen. He interviewed the critics he could catch, at Toronto right after 9/11, in Cannes, and in New York. He asked them to answer the personal question: "Why am I a film critic?" And he got them to talk about their earliest film memories. "The stupidest view is that film critics don't like anything," says Peary. "Most critics are smitten at an early age, you can see the shine in their eyes."

As Peary fashioned his 100-year-narrative of criticism, he leaned on the likes of Richard Schickel to share his fave critics such as obscure early writers Frank Woods and Robert Sherwood, and filmmaker John Waters, who reveres Parker Tyler. Peary goes back to the days when Andrew Sarris first espoused the auteur theory and the merits of Budd Boetticher and Douglas Sirk in the pages of Film Culture, which led to the wars between the auteurists led by Sarris and Pauline Kael and her Paulettes. "A good doc teaches you something," says Peary.

Even the late Kael and Manny Farber made it into the movie, via talk-show appearances and filmed interviews. Ex-critic Jami Bernard offered up her home movie of being unemployed. Peary wanted to find the tape of Farber interviewing James Stewart at the Telluride Film festival, "but nobody knows where that is." Next up: finding a distributor and clearing his film clips, which if they are not deemed fair use, could cost a fortune.

It's hard not to feel sad at the end of this movie, about a world that no longer exists, a profession that seems to be dying in front of our eyes. Spoutblog's Karina Longworth speaks for the younger generation plying the craft online, but the old culture of literate lengthy debates when movies seemed to really mean something are long gone. "It's a stop the bleeding movie," says Peary. "I hope that those who watch the movie value criticism and will read it and demand it in their newspapers. It's tough though. There are so many factors. What's the effect on people who Twitter all day? That's not good for film criticism."

Here's a transcript of Peary's SXSW critics panel, a Q & A with Peary in Filmmaker, and the trailer:

Trumpeter/singer Chet Baker sings the Umberto Bindi song Arrivederci in the 1960 Italian movie Urlatori alla sbarra. I first discovered Baker via Bruce Weber's superb 1988 Oscar-nominated documentary Let's Get Lost, which showcased his looks and talent as well as his decline due to heroin addiction. In 1988, at age 58, he fell out of an Amsterdam hotel window to his death.

[Hat Tip: Amos Poe]

Back from SXSW, I've been playing catch-up. For much of the news media, Natasha Richardson was the sad, sad story of the week.

Dade Hayes details some of the comings, goings and speculation behind the scenes in the turbulent New York film fest scene, from Tribeca under ex-Sundance chief Geoff Gilmore to Film Society of Lincoln Center honcho Mara Manus, who is giving the musty old place a thorough overhaul.

Kim Masters unveils DreamWorks’ Animation czar Jeffrey Katzenberg’s bad dream.

Business Insider reports Cisco’s acquisition of Flip Cam maker Pure Digital for $590 million. That’s my flip cam! And Business Insider also uses the flip cam in its reporting, grabbing Time EVP John Squires to talk about experimenting with mixing paid and free content. Meanwhile outgoing Time editor Jim Kelly has another POV.

Movie lovers unite! Not only is David Chase bringing a new mini-series to HBO about the early days of Hollywood, A Ribbon of Dreams, but TCM documentaries has greenlit an exhaustive history of Hollywood from the point of the view of the big personalities who built it: Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood, produced by John Wilkman with backing from CAA agent-turned-Broadway-impresario Bill Haber.

Driving home Monday night, I heard KCRW's Garth Trinidad interview Pigeon John and other participants in the hip hop scene at L.A.'s Good Life Cafe, now the subject of the documentary This is the Life. It made me want to see the movie. (I loved Marc Levin's Slam.) Here's Variety's upbeat review:

Picking up where the flawed 2000 doc "Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme" left off, "This Is the Life" is a sharp, thoroughly enjoyable exploration of seminal South Los Angeles hip-hop hotspot the Good Life Cafe. Written and directed by former cafe habitue Ava DuVernay, the docu is clearly the product of real love, bubbling over with enthusiastic performances and an indelible sense of place. The film's appeal is decidedly niche, as it makes few concessions to those not already well versed in hip-hop history, but those who are will delight in discovering it. Limited L.A run begins today.

One of the most unlikely people walking the red carpet to the Oscar show Sunday was Kimberly Rivers Roberts, the 9th Ward New Orleans ex-drug dealing heroine of the Oscar-nominated doc Trouble the Water. There she was, resplendent in a silver gown, accompanied by her husband Scott Roberts and executive producer Danny Glover, who agreed to back Tia Lessen and Carl Deal's New Orleans doc featuring Roberts' homevideo footage of her struggle to help her neighbors survive Hurricane Katrina. The pic was a sleeper hit at Sundance 2008, where Roberts gave birth to her first child.

Since Hurricane Katrina, Roberts and her husband have turned their lives around; Kimberly's first hip-hop CD will come out in April at the same time the movie debuts on HBO. Before flying into L.A., she participated in the New Orleans Mardi Gras in the Muse Parade as the muse of tragedy, Melpomene. A celebratory week indeed.

Here's some red carpet Flipcam footage of Glover and Roberts (with some Dominic Cooper wedged in):
Find more videos like this on AnneCam

Shortlisted for the documentary Oscar, Trouble the Water was one of last year's Sundance breakouts. It was a good year all around for its scrappy real-life heroine, Kim Rivers, who surprised herself and many people around her as she videotaped Hurricane Katrina and helped to save lives. At the fest, she gave birth to her first child, and then watched the film go on to many kudos, including Time Magazine’s Top Ten Performances of 2008.

Rivers debuted her music in Trouble the Water, and is releasing an album in April to coincide with its HBO release.

Here's the movie's trailer:

The American Cinema Editors nominations mirror the PGA and DGA noms; I maintain that the five dramas will be named the best picture Oscar nominees on January 22. The Editors will announce winners at their awards show on February 15.

BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (DRAMATIC):
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Angus Wall & Kirk Baxter
The Dark Knight
Lee Smith, A.C.E.
Frost/Nixon
Mike Hill, A.C.E. & Dan Hanley, A.C.E.
Mil
Elliot Graham
Slumdog Millionaire
Chris Dickens
BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (COMEDY OR MUSICAL):
In Bruges
Jon Gregory, A.C.E.
Mama Mia
Leslie Walker
Tropic Thunder
Greg Hayden
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Alisa Lepselter
WALL-E
Stephen Schaffer
BEST EDITED DOCUMENTARY:
Bush’s War
Steve Audette
Chicago 10
Stuart Levy, A.C.E.
Man on Wire
Jinx Godfrey

Sony Pictures Classics has acquired two movies in advance of the Sundance fest--James Toback's well-received Cannes doc Tyson, and the Mexican director troica Cha Cha Cha's first outing,Rudo y Cursi,a soccer flick reuniting Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna, directed by Carlos Cuaron. This practice of selling movies before film fests is something SPC co-prexys Tom Bernard and Michael Barker wish more filmmakers would emulate, but suspect they won't. "We prefer to set up a film with press there," says Barker. "It's an advantage to have a company attached, to be able to answer questions, knowing what you're going to do with it."

SPC and Toback started talking about the Tyson acquisition at Cannes, but rights issues blocked the sale of North American rights until recently. They told Toback they would be happy to wait and make the deal when rights were cleared, and so they did. NBA star Carmelo Anthony, who recently founded Krossover Prods, is also joining the movie as exec producer.

I saw Tyson at Cannes; it is a strong, moving document of a riveting character, former world heavyweight Mike Tyson, as he reexamines his life and choices with moving honesty. Here's my Cannes interview with Toback and Todd McCarthy's review.

SPC was already planning a Sundance press launch for the guitar doc It Might Get Loud, directed by Davis Guggenheim, which debuted at Toronto. Guggenheim's last entry at Sundance went pretty well: An Inconvenient Truth.

While Gus Van Sant's biopic Milk, starring Sean Penn as the murdered San Francisco gay activist, is enjoying a strong award-season run, many are also discovering Rob Epstein's classic 1984 doc, the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk. And they're finding it online, thanks to the unremitting efforts of Cinetic Digital Rights Management.

Cinetic's Matt Dentler helped to forge a deal with New Yorker Film's Dan Talbot to release some of their library titles in the video space online. With the combination of Milk's opening and the controversy over the passing of the gay marriage ban Proposition 8, "it was a perfect storm," Dentler says, to release The Times of Harvey Milk, a history of gay rights in California. Cinetic rushed to make the film available on iTunes, and VOD on Amazon.com. To promote the doc, Dentler did a number of Facebook blasts, posted a 90 second excerpt of the film on YouTube channel, and Epstein did interviews on blogs and gay social networking sites.

The movie swiftly moved to Amazon's number one doc rental, and iTunes' number two indie rental (after Ed Burns' Purple Violets). As soon as the pic hit Hulu Monday, it soared to the top of their charts as well. "It's a way for a lot of people to consume a movie that they otherwise wouldn't have," says Dentler.

Naturally, all this exposure leads people to links so that they can watch the trailer, and buy or rent the movie. Another classic, Richard Linklater's Slacker, is Cinetic's other digital space hit on YouTube, Hulu, iTunes and Amazon VOD. "This proves that different portals attract different audiences," says Dentler.

I'm not a big fan of live-blogging, but it does work occasionally, as NY Post critic-blogger Lou Lumenick demonstrates with his play-by-play reporting of the New York Film Critics's divisive voting this morning.

Thus, Rachel Getting Married led the first two ballots and Milk pulled ahead on the third, followed by Happy-Go-Lucky and Slumdog Millionaire; Milk star Sean Penn handily beat The Wrestler's Mickey Rourke; Milk's Josh Brolin beat out The Dark Knight's Heath Ledger; and documentary Oscar front-runner Man on Wire beat out Waltz with Bashir and Trouble the Water. Vicky Cristina Barcelona's Penelope Cruz easily defeated Viola Davis of Doubt; third place was a tie between Rachel Getting Married's Rosemary DeWitt and Debra Winger. Happy-Go-Lucky writer-director Mike Leigh narrowly edged out Slumdog Millionaire's Danny Boyle. Wall-E took best animated feature over Waltz with Bashir.

Here's Lumenick on how the best actress vote went down, which helps explain the ballot process:

Sally Hawkins of "Happy-Go-Lucky'' won the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actress as voting got under way this morning at the Time-Life Building. Hawkins won on the second weighted ballot, receiving 39 points to 32 points for Melissa Leo of "Frozen River,'' with Kate Winslet ("Revolutionary Road'') and Anne Hathaway ("Rachel Getting Married'') with 22 apiece. In the NYFCC's convoluted voting system, the critics make one choice apiece n the first round. If nothing captures a majority, there follows one or more weighted ballots, each critic ranks choices with 3, 2, and 1 points; the winner also has to appear on the majority of ballots until the fouth ballot (if there is one) -- in Hawkins' case, 18 ballots.

OSCAR ANALYSIS
Finally, the critics voting solidifies my thinking re: the Oscar race. The Golden Globes may add some fuel tomorrow, but for now I see Milk as the front-runner for best picture, followed by Slumdog Millionaire and The Dark Knight, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Doubt and Revolutionary Road fighting it out for last two slots. Penn may be the front-runner now, but the man he has to beat is Clint Eastwood, who gives a devastating performance in Gran Torino. The Academy will be moved to tears by him. Mickey Rourke looks solid for a nom. The Visitor's Richard Jenkins could have used more help here.

Thanks to critics, Sally Hawkins and Melissa Leo are moving into best actress contention, while I've Loved You So Long's Kristin Scott Thomas may not. Changeling's Angelina Jolie is fading fast. Milk's Josh Brolin and James Franco could both win supporting slots.

Revolutionary Road will be in the hunt for picture, director, adapted screenplay, actress, actor and supporting actor. But the grim, serious drama needs some love at this point, especially from critics. And may get it.

The Reader, which may have a shot for Kate Winslet in supporting and David Hare for adapted screenplay, has a long way to go. It got slammed by critics today, earning an initial 54 % on Metacritic. That is not good enough. It needs all the help it can get.

Doubt has the support of the dominant actors branch and likely the writers (if not directors); it will be vying for actress, supporting actress, supporting actor and adapted screenplay.

Much as I admire Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, it strikes me as oddly perverse for the NYFCC to throw their foreign vote away on a movie that is only available on DVD at this point, rather than trying to boost the theatrical and Oscar fortunes of a new upcoming release. But it's a free country.

The full list of winners is on the jump:

One of my fave Sundance movies never got seen by many people--for whatever reason. It's Dan Klores' wildly improbable true romance documentary Crazy Love, which The Sundance Channel will debut on the internet at 1 PM on January 5 via YouTube Sneak Peak, five days before it airs on January 10 as part of the Channel's Sundance Film Fest special programming.

As Sundance explores new distribution models, the network will make the film available on YouTube’s long-form video player beginning January 5, said Laura Michalchyshyn, Sundance Channel's exec vp and general manager. Crazy Love will stay up on YouTube through the end of the month.

Winner of last year's Indie Spirit best doc award, Crazy Love tells the story of the disturbed, obsessive relationship of Burt Pugach and Linda Riss Pugach. They earned headlines in 1959 when the married 32-year-old Burt was charged with arranging an attack on his mistress that left Linda blind. While serving 14 years in prison, he stayed in touch with Linda; they got married after his release and remain together to this day.

The winners of this year's International Documentary Awards were announced Friday night at a ceremony at the DGA. (Waltz with Bashir and Man on Wire tied for best feature doc.) But the highlight of the night was director Werner Herzog's tribute. After showing stellar clips from Little Dieter Learns to Fly, Grizzly Man and his most recent doc, Encounters at the End of the World (which is short-listed for Oscar consideration), Herzog got a standing ovation and gave a speech.

"There are deeper strata of truth in cinema and there's such a thing as poetic ecstatic truth," said the director, who thanked his editor on his last fourteen docs and features, Joe Bini. "In being a filmmaker I really tried to find an answer about what constitutes reality...we have to individually find our own ways. I have tried to find something much deeper, something that constitutes truth, which is hard to grasp. In my filmmaking I have tried to find some sort of ecstasy where you are deeply moved and illuminated. If you leave pure facts behind...truth can create illumination."

At dinner afterwards, the classically educated Herzog cited Virgil's joyful The Georgiad as a source of inspiration for Encounters at the End of the World, yet another of his celebrations of the wonders to be found on this earth. The filmmaker arrived in Antarctica without knowing what his movie would be; he looked for interesting people and chose his subjects as he went. He was not permitted to dive under the ice, much as the fearless documentarian would have liked to. He denies that he is in any way a "journalist" or "reporter." He's seeking truth, which is something else entirely.

A complete list of winners is on the jump:

The Academy has announced the 15-film documentary short list. Now the doc branch will select the final five nominations. UPDATE: Here's Justin Chang's story. And Andrew O'Hehir's reaction.

Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure is on the list, even though Abu Ghraib was also covered in Alex Gibney's Oscar winning doc Taxi to the Dark Side. Surprise omissions include Gibney's Hunter Thompson doc Gonzo; the Mardi Gras movie The Order of Myths; and Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. The well-reviewed doc Dear Zachary was clearly an emotionally-charged film with a strong personal POV.

On the other hand, so was Scott Hicks' gorgeous Philip Glass doc, which went pretty easy on the famous composer as he went through a tough patch in his marriage. The Academy made up this time for overlooking Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man by including his must-see Antarctica doc Encounters at the End of the World. I suspect the Philippe Petit tightrope thrill-ride Man on Wire is going to be a strong contender, as well as the New Orleans doc Trouble the Water and Pray the Devil Back to Hell, an inspiring story of the women who fought against war in Liberia and won.

Here's the list:

At the Death House Door
The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)
Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh
Encounters at the End of the World
Fuel
The Garden
Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
I.O.U.S.A.
In a Dream
Made in America
Man on Wire
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
Standard Operating Procedure
They Killed Sister Dorothy
Trouble the Water

In the ramp-up to the election and the release of Oliver Stone's George W. Bush biopic, Hulu is streaming the Bush doc Crawford.

It's not like Errol Morris's Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure, for all its merits, is going to go flying off the shelves when Sony releases the DVD on October 14th, even if the doc did win the Silver Bear Grand Jury Audience Award at Berlin. So how do you promote a serious doc about relative truth, photography and torture?

Well, I've never seen this one before: Physicians for Human Rights and Participant Media, which backed the film, are setting up a simultaneous digital screening at 27 medical schools around the country on October 6 (7 PM EST). The medical schools range from Albert Einstein U, Boston U to Brown Medical School and the U of Utah. The screening will be followed by a Q & A with the filmmaker and Farnoosh Hashemian, MPH, author of PHR’s Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of US Torture and Its Impact.

James D. Stern's L.A.-based Endgame Entertainment is on a roll.

As expected, Stern sold North American and Australian rights to his showbiz documentary Every Little Step to Sony Pictures Classics. The deal was in final stages Monday after the film won raves from auds and critics at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Endgame funded and produced Every Little Step, a behind-the-scenes look at auditions for a revival of the Broadway classic. Filming started back in 2005 as the show auditioned some 1,700 actors/singer/dancers hoping to land a slot on the 2006 Chorus Line. The pic blends audition footage with vintage material from the original 1975 production. The moving doc plays like a reality-TV show crammed with winners and losers as talented hoofers put themselves on the line. It’s a likely awards contender for best doc.

Stern and Adam Del Deo both produced and directed. The team also made docs So Goes the Nation and The Year of the Yao. Stern also produced shobiz productions The Producers, Hairspray, Stomp and Legally Blonde.

Endgame's other Toronto pics were Brothers Bloom, starrng Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz, which Summit acquired in December 2007, and Stephen Elliot's romantic comedy Easy Virtue, based on the Noel Coward play, starring Jessica Biel, Colin Firth, Ben Barnes and Kristin Scott Thomas, which is also expected to sell. Endgame has also co-financed past releases I'm Not There, Hotel Rwanda and White Noise.

William Morris Independent repped Every Little Step in the sale. The agency's New York Theatre department was involved in early discussions on the project because they repped the attorney and the estate of A Chorus Line creator Michael Bennett, who died in 1987. William Morris Independent's Rena Ronson sold the Japanese rights to the film to Shochiku early on, and took the project to Endgame, which put up the lion's share of the budget.

[Sharon Swart contributed to this report]

Finally my fave film in Sundance is opening. I know you've seen a lot of Hurricane Katrina docs. Trouble the Water, which won the documentary grand jury prize, is rough around the edges. It's not a question of how well it was executed technically, or the quality of the writing and direction. What distinguishes this is the unexpected, lightning in a bottle aspect of this seemingly unremarkable 9th Ward marginal woman, Kimberly Roberts, who had no idea she was capable of being a hero until Katrina revealed to her and the folks around her who she really was. I get choked up thinking about it.

Here's the story I did in Sundance, and a video interview with filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin:

Here's the NYT review and Richard Corliss in Time.

And the trailer:

Shooting started Monday in Denver on Mayor, George Hickenlooper's documentary feature and pilot. "It's a real-life Spin City focusing on the day-to-day life of a mayor running a major American city under the incredible pressure of having a star-studded political convention descend upon his domain," Hixkenlooper states. "In this case the Mayor is Denver's John Hickenlooper (yes, a close relative) who Time Magazine named in 2006 as one of the five most important and progressive mayors in the nation. We just came from an inside meeting with the Governor, Senator, Congressmen. A lot of interesting information about how Colorado, which is hosting the convention, may ironically turn out to be this year's big swing state, like Florida was in 2000 and Ohio in 2004."

Thus Hickenlooper (Hearts of Darkness, Factory Girl), who is returning to his doc roots, is getting unusual access to the mayor as he deals with the challenge of keeping Denver in order as it hosts the Democratic National Convention. How will John Hickenlooper hold it all together under the spotlight? Monday night the director is filming Barack Obama at the Colorado Governor's mansion, where he will first meet Mayor Hickenlooper.

R.J. Cutler (The War Room) produces with Donald Zuckerman (Mayor of the Sunset Strip).

Other doc filmmakers are descending on Denver.

Hickenlooper is also prepping Bagman, a feature about Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, the two infamous Washington lobbyist scallywags who brought down Majority Leader Tom DeLay in the biggest scandal to hit the Capital since Watergate. Hickenlooper is hoping for a January start date. Matt Dillon is attached as Abramoff. "It's about American democracy for sale," Hickenlooper says. "Plays like 'GoodFellas' in Washington. The script also explores an aspect of Abramoff that no one really knows about -- that he was connected to (not responsible for) a murder. And this is a man who had no problems getting into the Oval Office to see George W. Bush or Karl Rove! Incredible!"

Prolific filmmaker Alex Gibney, who won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, is also working on a doc about imprisoned lobbyist Abramoff.

The IDA will showcase 19 features and four shorts for Oscar consideration during DocuWeek at the Arclight in LA August 22-28, and in NYC as well.

Films directed by Terence Davies, Scott Hicks, Ellen Kuras and Stacy Peralta are in the lineup. 25 films featured in DocuWeek have been nominated for an Academy Award; six films have won Oscars, including the 2008 feature Docu winner Taxi to the Dark Side. A complete schedule is available at the IDA website.

[posted by Josh Marks]

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth (Freeheld) and Pulitzer Prize finalist author Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) are teaming up to take on teachers salaries in an upcoming feature-length documentary that promises to do for wage inequality in the educational system what Michael Moore did for our broken health care system in Sicko.

Film -- based on the New York Times bestselling book, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers – will tell the stories of struggling teachers, backed by commentary from policy experts and sobering statistics. For instance, according to the website the duo have set up, theteachersalaryproject.org, half of all teachers must hold down second jobs as they try to make ends meet on an average starting salary of $31,753.

With a presidential election on the horizon and the perception among some that American education is lagging behind the rest of the world, this documentary seems as timely as ever.

[Posted by Peter Debruge]

Anyone out there in the habit of watching movies or TV shows online? I've been slow to embrace the process, mainly because the titles provided through iTunes and elsewhere have been ones that would be better served by the largest possible screen. But my man Matt Dentler, who recently left his SXSW film festival gig to work for Cinetic Media, has engineered a deal that gives me hope: Watch Hoop Dreams for free on Hulu.

Now, here's a movie everyone should see, the same landmark documentary Roger Ebert named best film of the '90s. I remember being a bit disappointed when Criterion polished it up for DVD a few years back, since the film was originally shot on video and couldn't possibly meet the company's usual standard of visual quality -- the advantage here is that unlike other blockbusters you might attempt to watch online, Hoop Dreams doesn't suffer tremendously from the streaming video downgrade. But if those other more popular pics are more your style, check out Hulu's library -- they're adding a new film that can be viewed for free online every day this summer.

Is American Teen a brilliantly accurate doc that catches you up in the intense hormonal drama of five high school students on the verge of leaving small town Warsaw, Indiana for college? Or is it a manipulatively fake reality-TV-style doc that alters fact to preserve dramatic narrative drive? Nanette Burstein, who just had a baby in New York City, wasn't at the Arclight Wednesday night to defend her position. (Paramount Vantage opens the film July 25.)

It was up to four of the five kids who dominate the film--who have all completed their sophomore years in college--to take up the slack. As far as The Princess, The Jock, The Heartthrob and The Geek were concerned, Burstein got them right, even if she left thousands of feet of film on the cutting room floor. She started filming some 15 kids and didn't know what the main stories would be until she had been filming for several months. Burstein spent a full ten months prowling the halls, covering the teens like a blanket--full crews for big ball games, just herself and a small camera for parties and intimate scenes at home. The kids clearly trusted and liked her. And revealed themselves, warts and all.

The camera catches hunky football star Mitch watching admiringly as the director's favorite, pretty oddball would-be filmmaker Hannah--performs with a band. He then asks her out, and eventually breaks up with her via text message when she doesn't fit in with all his jock friends. Hannah comes out a lot better than Megan, who reveals a nasty streak that even her mother identifies as suppressed anger. And Burstein picks out many selfish, embarrassing moments for the parents as well.

The kids didn't see the film until the night before its Sundance premiere last January. And they were taken aback at first. But the movie has opened up their lives to such a degree that there's no looking back. They're on the road for a promo tour, and all agreed that there was no way they'd rather be having a dull summer in Warsaw than ordering creme brulee and capuccino at the Arclight Cafe. At the Q & A after the movie, they all admitted they'd be open to acting careers, and definitely do not want to go home again after college.

Documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and blogger A.J. Schnack strikes back at John Horn's recent death to docs piece in the LAT.

The dispute over the HBO doc, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, continues as director Marina Zenovich, who was asked by HB0 to rewrite the film's final "card" on the eve of its first broadcast June 9, tweaked the card again for its Saturday, June 14 airing. The question remains what the final card will read for its theatrical release by ThinkFilm on July 11th.

Finally, after all these years, it's still a case of he said, she said, as Zenovich makes tweaks and tries to keep her film's dramatic punch. And Polanski himself stays in limbo. (He finally saw the film in Paris just before he arrived in Cannes, where he lunched with Zenovich before the fest's closing night ceremony.)

The problem Monday was that the person talking was a Los Angeles Superior Court judge. HBO decided to back off the film's assertion that Judge Larry Paul Flider in 1997 demanded that any court hearing with Polanski be televised, should the exiled director return to the U.S. That's because right before the doc was due to air, L.A. court officials called the assertion "a complete fabrication." So Zenovich reworded the ending to say that the judge demanded an open court hearing.

Now the card refers to a dispute over what happened, stating: "the judge insisted the hearing be held on the record in superior court."

On Wednesday, in response to Monday's L.A. Superior Court statement and an L.A. Times story, former deputy district attorney Roger Gunson and Polanski's attorney Douglas Dalton, who are interviewed in Wanted and Desired, made a statement in support of the film's version of events--and talked to each other for the first time in a decade. "It is our shared view that Monday's false and reprehensible statement by the Los Angeles Superior Court continues their inappropriate handling of the Polanski case," they said.

(The full statement is on the jump; here's my prior story, Polanski Doc Wanted and Desired Changed for HBO. )

Doc filmmaker Marina Zenovich was struck when she read a 2002 article in the LA Times about whether director Roman Polanski would be able to return to the US if he were nominated for an Oscar for The Pianist. Of course he won--and watched the show from his bedroom in Paris. After Zenovich learned more about why Polanski was forced to flee the country rather than turn up for his trial for seducing a minor, she embarked on the long journey to get Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired made.

Patrick Goldstein writes about Zenovich's doc, which has earned rave reviews since its January debut in Sundance, where HBO acquired the film; it also fared well at Cannes. The movie aired on HBO Monday night after a brief run in NY and LA for Oscar consideration. Financially beleaguered distrib ThinkFilm is scheduled to release the film theatrically in July.

A sidebar explores why Zenovich was forced to amend the ending of her movie, an issue also addressed by Slate's Kim Masters. (See UPDATE below.)

Last year at Cannes, Shootout's Peter Bart and Peter Guber conducted a rare Polanski video interview-- Zenovich did not do fresh on-camera interviews with him for the doc, and he did not participate in its promotion. (He turned up in Cannes this May just for the closing night ceremony.) When Bart and Guber asked him last year how he felt about returning to L.A., he responded, "I have black memories of that time. People forget that when I was in my 30s I suffered a tremendous loss and tragedy."

More recently, Bart and Guber interviewed director Marina Zenovich on Shootout: "What mattered to me was what happened to him after he committed the crime," she told them. "So many people think they know what happened that night, why he fled the country. I was interested in getting the facts straight."

UPDATE: Here's a response to Monday's L.A. Superior Court statement and the L.A. Times story from former deputy district attorney Roger Gunson and Polanski's attorney Douglas Dalton, who are interviewed in Wanted and Desired:

June 11, 2008 In 1997, Douglas Dalton, attorney for Roman Polanski, and Roger Gunson, prosecutor on the Polanski case, met with Judge Larry Paul Fidler in his chambers to discuss the Polanski case. Mr. Gunson and Mr. Dalton advised Judge Fidler of Judge Rittenband's conduct in handling the case that is accurately captured in the documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. At the meeting, Judge Fidler advised Mr. Dalton that if Mr. Polanski returned to Los Angeles, that he, Judge Fidler, would allow Mr. Polanski to be booked and immediately released on bail, require Mr. Polanski to meet with the probation department, order a probation report, conduct a hearing, and terminate probation without Mr. Polanski having to serve any additional time in custody. That there was a deal worked out between Judge Fidler and Mr. Dalton was reported in the New York Daily News as early as October 1, 1997. One of the issues raised by Mr. Dalton during the meeting was the question of media coverage. All understood that any proceedings would be open to the public as required by law. During the meeting, Mr. Dalton pressed Judge Fidler for a resolution of the case that would allow for minimal news media. Mr. Dalton recalled that Judge Fidler would require television coverage at the proposed hearing due to the controversy. Mr. Gunson recalls television coverage discussed at the meeting. Mr. Dalton told documentary director Marina Zenovich of this requirement. It is our shared view that Monday's false and reprehensible statement by the Los Angeles Superior Court continues their inappropriate handling of the Polanski case. Roger Gunson Douglas Dalton

Religulous has always seemed potentially hilarious to me: Bill Maher takes a doc crew around the world to talk about religion. He starts out promisingly by entering a church and saying, "Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been 40 years since my last confession."

Here's the trailer:

Peter Bart reports that Bryan Singer and Tom Cruise have begun the long-planned reshoots on Valkyrie. Here's the trailer:

Director Roman Polanski is a frequent visitor to Cannes: he famously walked out of the Chacun Son Cinema press conference last year in a huff when a journalist asked a question that he didn't like. But he's staying in Paris this year, even though he has a doc about him here, partly because he hasn't seen Marina Zenovich's doc on the justice that he did or did not receive in the U.S. before his exile, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

The director has given Polanski, who lives in Paris, many opportunities to see the film about his 1977 rape trial. But he told her that he'd rather that Zenovich do the talking in Cannes and be the spokesperson for the film. He just may not be ready to deal with revisiting his painful ordeal.

Here's my ABC.com review of Standard Operating Procedure, about the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the photos that were taken there and what they do and do not reveal. And here's the HD trailer.

ThinkFilm has nabbed Marina Zenovich's doc, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a hit at Sundance, for theatrical release after its June 9 HBO launch. The doc-friendly distrib acquired theatrical and homevideo rights. The movie will play at Cannes.

One of the surprises in the Cannes program line-up was a special presidential jury screening of Alison Thompson's The Third Wave. Of course the jury prexy this year is Sean Penn, who asked the Cannes fest to unspool the film.

I called up Penn's reps and got the following comment from him: "The Third Wave is truly a must-see for ourselves, our children and everyone we know, for anyone who has two good legs and a dollar in their pocket. It inspires the very best in us, just when we need that most. It comes as close to answering our purpose in life as any film in recent memory."

The film was shot after the 2004 Asian tsunami disaster by four indie volunteers who flew to Sri Lanka to see if they could help. They rented a van, filled it with supplies, and drove along the coast, stumbling onto Peraliya, a tribal village that was totally devastated by a 40-foot tsunami wave, leaving more than 2500 people dead.

The movie documents the strange year-long odyssey of these four volunteers as they set up a first aid station and took charge of a refugee camp of over three thousand people. The villagers slowly turned against them when the world's donated tsunami money never showed up. But they persevered, and helped to rebuild the village.

The Third Wave is being sold at the fest by Cinetic Media's John Sloss.

The director's statement is on the jump:

Keep a Child Alive, a charity organization that sends food and medicine to AIDS patients in Africa, is debuting South African filmmaker Earle Sabastian's documentary Alicia in Africa:Journey to the Motherland, chronicling a month-long trip by Alicia Keys to South Africa, Kenya and Uganda to visit communities affected by HIV and AIDs. The film is available online for free, streaming at the official site and myspace and downloading at SpiralFrog.

Keys will also screen the Alicia in Africa trailer before each concert on her American tour, which kicked off April 19 in Virginia. Here is Keys' mission statement:

“Everyone who visits Africa is changed by the experience, but not everyone can afford to go to Africa. Come with me on my journey and learn as I learn. Let’s start a virus to stop a virus– send the film to everyone you know. Let’s change this nightmare into our generation’s greatest success story.”

Here's the trailer:

Friday night I interviewed Errol Morris at the Apple Store in Santa Monica. The guy is nothing if not charming, even when talking about such a dead-serious, ugly topic as Abu Ghraib.

Even so, Morris's 9th documentary, his first in cinemascope, Standard Operating Procedure (April 25), which took him the usual three or so years to make, is quite beautiful. When Morris interrogates his subjects in the Interrotron--a gizmo that projects the interviewer and subject to each other and creates a remarkable intimacy--he picks up certain key images that he then films as cinematic reenactments. But they're more like slo-mo poetry.

When letter-writer and Abu Ghraib "specialist" Sabrina Harmon (profiled in this New Yorker article) penned hand-written letters home in 2003 to her wife about a 16-year-old kid who was crawling with giant-size Iraqi ants in his cell, of course Morris had to shoot that.

The shot of an exploding helicopter --an image from a bad dream of Harman's--came from outttakes Sony gave him from Charlie's Angels. And Morris couldn't resist filling a shot of the prison with shredded paper, to illustrate the vast cover-up that went on after the scandal broke. Morris gets reverent when he talks about the high-tech digital camera that shoots so fast that he could shoot the water drops pouring down from a shower.

Mostly though, he shows the photos--the ones that got these "bad apples"-turned-scapegoats into so much trouble. Lynndie England, the diminutive 20-year-old private who held a crawling detainee by a tie-down strap, is surprisingly articulate, now, about what happened. (She has a baby, too.) "People said I dragged him, but I never did," she says in the film. "I'm a 95-pound woman, I'm dominating him. He [she's referring to her then 34-year-old boyfriend and photographer, private Charles Graner] wouldn't have had me standing there if the camera wasn't there." She was the last person Morris interviewed. He had to wait for her to get out of prison. "I liked her," he says.

"When you join the military it's a man's world," she tells him in the film. "You have to be equal to a man or be controlled by a man. You're going to have to be strong to step up to them. I was blinded by being in love with a man."

The person who knocked me out (who Morris interviewed for seventeen hours) is ex-Brigadier Army General Janis Karpinski. She was given the daunting assignment to run Iraq's prisons, including Abu Ghraib. Her competence and anger are palpable. And she was demoted--informed by a reporter ten days before she was relieved of her command in the mail--- in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. "We discipline ourselves," she said. "We're Americans. We know right from wrong. The fear of the truth silenced people."

When asked at the Apple Store Q & A how he makes up his mind which of his many projects to make, Morris replied, I do what someone will pay me to do. (In the case of Standard Operating Procedure, Participant and Sony Pictures Classics.) Next up: a comedy. Morris has had enough of two war movies in a row. (He won the Oscar for Fog of War.) He wants to lighten up a bit and be funny with the fiction film The End of Everything, which includes his ramblings on a volcano, Laura Bush, a wingless bird, and Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell. Participant may back him again.

UPDATE: The NYT's Frank Rich thinks no one will go to see SOP, no matter how upbeat the reviews, while the Village Voice's Anthony Kaufman says that comedy is the new way to approach Iraq..

[Photo of Sabrina Harmon by Nubar Alexanian, whose set photos from Errol Morris's movies are included in the handsome coffee table book Nonfiction]

Martin Scorsese has always used Rolling Stones songs in his films, so it made sense he would jump with both feet into the Stones concert documentary Shine A Light. This story goes back through Scorsese's oeuvre, Stones chapter and verse. UPDATE: Time's Richard Corliss explores Scorsese's love affair with docs and rock docs.

I particularly like this David Edelstein Shine a Light review. Edelstein also reviews Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, a movie I liked with reservations. She's a gifted, sensitive and compelling director; the movie is impeccably cast with some of the most riveting young actors working today. I cried at the tragedy of the trap these characters are in. UPDATE: Norman Lear reviews Stop-Loss.

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, who jumps for joy that the movie tanked, must not have seen it. Stop-Loss is 100 % on the side of the soldiers, even if it is critical of the government's "Stop-Loss" policies. (Mark Cuban and O'Reilly are having an ongoing battle over Iraq movies.)

But on one level O'Reilly has a point. As producer Jim Jacks (The Mummy) keeps saying, many of these Iraq movies are about victims, when audiences want active heroes, a competent military they can root for and believe in, even if our Iraq policy is a disaster. Peter Berg's The Kingdom was heading in that direction, but it was a complex FBI mystery thriller set in an unfocused past and it failed to resonate with people.

One of these Middle East movies will eventually hit the zeitgeist right. Most of them are victims of bad timing, really. While an ugly movie like Redacted was never going to find a following, most of these filmmakers were telling stories audiences just weren't ready to hear. It will be interesting to see what happens to Berg's upcoming Marcus Luttrell Navy Seal Afghanistan survivor story (if it ever gets made). For the moment Berg is going with a remake of the sc-fi fantasy Dune.

At the weekend boxoffice, George Clooney's period screwball comedy Leatherleads (54% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes) dukes it out with family film Nim's Island, starring Jodie Foster (46 %). Here's Variety's boxoffice forecast.

The one to see, especially if you appreciate Martin Scorsese's mise-en-scene and the Rolling Stones in performance, is Shine a Light, which earned 86% fresh on the Tomatometer. (Here's Stephen Schaefer's report of the Stones' NYC press conference.) I will be catching up with Stop-Loss (62%) while it is still in theaters.

Fandango Five – Ticket Sales (as of 4/4/08 10:00 a.m. PT)

Movie Fandango User Rating % Fandango Sales

Nim’s Island “Go” 15%

Leatherheads “Go” 12%

Shine a Light “Go” 12%

21 “Go” 7%

Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! “Go” 7%

Fandango Weekly Poll (as of 4/4/08 10:00 a.m. PT)

George Clooney's Leatherheads opens this week. Of the movies below, which one is your favorite Clooney flick?

Ocean's Eleven 43%

O Brother, Where Art Thou? 31%

Michael Clayton 10%

Three Kings 7%

Out of Sight 6%

Syriana 3%

It's the HBO way. The fuss is all about the HBO launch--and getting an Oscar nom, natch--not building a successful theatrical release. Marina Zenovich knew this when she made her rich HBO deal for Polanski: Wanted and Desired. The movie quietly slipped into New York for an Oscar-qualifying run, reports Spout and Defamer.

UPDATE: Manohla Dargis' review is in Monday's NYT, for a movie that opened without press screenings--although it was launched to great fanfare at January's Sundance-- last Friday in one theater each in Manhattan and Pasadena. Here are the review's opening graphs.

The Judge, the Director and the Vagaries of Justice By MANOHLA DARGIS

The sharply argued documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" isn't about the innocence or guilt of its title subject, who after pleading guilty in 1977 to having "unlawful sexual intercourse" with a minor flew from Los Angeles to London, never again to return to America. Neither is it about Mr. Polanski's likability, his tragic past, morals, short stature, brilliant and bad films, the sleaze factor or your personal feelings on whether there's anything wrong with a 43-year-old man's having sex with a 13-year-old girl. All these elements come teasingly into view here, but really this is a movie about a very different kind of perversion.

"Wanted and Desired," which opened on Friday without advance press screenings, was bought by HBO at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Its one-week theatrical run will make it eligible for Academy Award consideration, though given that organization's often pitiful record when it comes to nonfiction film, it seems unlikely that a movie this subtly intelligent would make its short list. That's especially true because the director, Marina Zenovich, refuses to wag her finger at Mr. Polanski, even when presenting the sordid and grimly pathetic details of his crime, like the Champagne and partial Quaalude he furnished the 13-year-old girl and her repeated nos.

In his latest email, Michael Moore calls on the Democrats to do something about the war in Iraq, please.

So? ... A Note from Michael Moore

Monday, March 24th, 2008

Friends,

It would have to happen on Easter Sunday, wouldn't it, that the 4,000th American soldier would die in Iraq. Play me that crazy preacher again, will you, about how maybe God, in all his infinite wisdom, may not exactly be blessing America these days. Is anyone surprised?

4,000 dead. Unofficial estimates are that there may be up to 100,000 wounded, injured, or mentally ruined by this war. And there could be up to a million Iraqi dead. We will pay the consequences of this for a long, long time. God will keep blessing America.

And where is Darth Vader in all this? A reporter from ABC News this week told Dick Cheney, in regards to Iraq, "two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting." Cheney cut her off with a one word answer: "So?"

"So?" As in, "So what?" As in, "F*** you. I could care less."

I would like every American to see Cheney flip the virtual bird at the them, the American people. Click here and pass it around. Then ask yourself why we haven't risen up and thrown him and his puppet out of the White House.

[Photo courtesy LA Times]

I talked to Martin Scorsese's editor David Tedeschi (The Blues, Bob Dylan: No Man Home) about the upcoming Rolling Stones doc Shine a Light. (Here's the story.) It's a must-see for any cinephile, aside from the concert itself, for the sheer quality of the 35 mm photography shot by some of the greatest cinematographers in the world, including Robert Richardson, Robert Elswit, John Toll, Declan Quinn, Ellen Kuras, Stuart Dryburgh and more. Each shooter had a back-up for when the film roll had to be replaced, so they wouldn't miss anything. For Tedeschi, it was a cutter's fantasy.

[Jack White and Mick Jagger in Shine a Light]