FILM Some mainstream filmmakers grow so encumbered by the industry-within an-industry they've become that they profess yearning for those "small, personal" projects they started out with — often vowing they'll get right back there just as soon as they've finished the obligatory Behemoth IV: The Next Generation in 3-D. (Coppola actually did it; Lucas needs to stop saying he will until he actually quits finding new ways to commercially reanimate the charred remains of Star Wars. Meaning never.)Read more »

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FILM You had to forgive most of the gay press for getting a little too excited over Brokeback Mountain (2005). Oh, no doubt it's a great movie, or that the Oscar going to the fraudulent Crash (2004) said less about that film's virtues than a skittishness that other movie stirred. But its excellence and commercial success induced widespread bouts of wishful thinking in the form of announcing new trends that never came to pass.Read more »

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FILM There is probably nowhere in the Christian-majority world where it's as OK to wax hum-buggy about Christmas and all it entails as San Francisco. Allergies to carols (admit it, they're horrible), frantically enabled shopaholicism, and forced contact with those people you moved here to get away from are all tolerated, even encouraged here.Read more »

Every nation had its distinct cinematic response to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s. Germany's was characteristic in offering the pretense of order, "scientific" educational value, and encouraging a healthy collective morality — even if all this was usually mere gloss over the usual, more marketable qualities of copious T&A.Read more »

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FILM In recent years, on the film festival circuit at least, it seems like everything Romania puts out is gold — not that it puts out more than a handful of features per year. This vogue has overshadowed trends elsewhere in the region, notably neighbor Hungary, whose more richly historied, prolific film industry has produced some very interesting work of late. (On a less personalized level, its relatively pristine period architecture and low overhead draw a lot of foreign film shoots — Budapest subbing for Victorian Read more »

MOVIES WITH MOHAWKS Punk and the movies met when the former was very young. When punk eventually grew up, the movies still insisted on viewing it as a child. Their union, nowadays perverted by mutual materialistic bloat, has been rather like an arranged marriage: long-lasting, with moments of real understanding, but fundamentally fraudulent.Read more »

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FILM Danny Boyle is a director whose projects seem chosen largely to have nothing in common with anything he's done before. Mid-career at 54, he's been good at a lot of things. But what, exactly, is his ideal fit?Read more »

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