As a dinosaur, I don’t really understand these newfangled magazines the kids are putting out. With titles like Plasm or Egg they appear to be a combination of fashion, movies, and rock and roll, which I presume is all that the young think about, though if they do it is obviously with an arch, distanced, wry, hipster, easily bored coffee house stance. Often these magazines are just an excuse for an art director to play around with a bunch of new fonts, with the actual subject matter or content mattering little. But now, the third issue of a new pop art magazine annual called Lemon is out and I really want to understand this genre of magazine because the theme of the issue is all things Kubrick.

Said theme begins with a cover portrait of Leelee Sobieski (who was in Kubrick’s last film, Eyes Wide Shut) “as” Jack Torrance from The Shining. Inside the mag proper is a multi-media event, even down to the inclusion of a record in flexi-disc form of Gavin Friday doing a new version of A Clockwork Orange’s signature tune, “Singin’ In The Rain.” At only $8.95 it seems like a pretty good bargain, though you won’t come away learning much new about Kubrick. Malcolm McDowell, who was in Orange, gives an entertaining interview in which he also talks about Heroes and the new Halloween remake, in which he takes the Donald Pleasance role. Leelee Sobieski is also inside the pages in one of those maddening Maxim-style interviews in which the writer keeps pursuing the topic of Miss Sobieski and Milla Jovovich (who stared in competing editions of the Joan of Arc story) in a mud wrestling match. Tangential to Kubrick but presented in the style of his movies are profiles of book cover designer Chip Kidd and an interview in comic book form with Goldfrapp. Also honored are the artists Gregory Crewdson (who actually tells stories in his photographs), Allen Jones (whose art figures briefly in Orange), and Marvel comics hero Jack Kirby, who did a brief series based on 2001.

Kubrick is all the rage all of a sudden. There is a festival of his feature films touring the nation’s museums (one in Portland is just ending). The run of the films at the Seattle museum inspired a “let’s cut to the chase” piece by Charles Mudede (whose three-word lead sentence contains a grammatical error) for The Stranger. It matches a similar piece by the otherwise brilliant Thomas Doherty in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which is ostensibly a review of several new Kubrick books, including the new one by James Naremore.

Undaunted, Warner Bros. Home Video is releasing another new box set of Kubrick films this fall, this time including the uncensored version of Eyes Wide Shut that everyone else in the world got to see on the big screen except Americans, and all the movies in the 16×9 format for high definition TV screens.

Over at QuickStopEntertainment, they’ve published my review of the second issue of Close-Up, a film journal in book form.

The thrust of the issue is to explore the implications, strengths, and weaknesses of what could be called Tonal Studies in film. Under the editorship of Douglas Pye and John Gibbs, the issue makes a dramatic statement about the utility of this approach to film. What is Tonal Studies? Click the link and find out! In addition to the book review itself, I’ve appended two interviews with the high priests of Tonal Studies, one with editor Pye himself, and the second with George Wilson, the author of Narratives in Light, one of the key texts in the movement.

When I was a youth, the Mallory Hotel in Southwest Portland downtown was the short term residence of choice for rock stars, traveling salesmen, and local hipsters looking for a good spot for a wedding reception. Its odd-shaped Driftwood Room was the darkest bar outside of Hung Far Low (an actual name of a Chinese restaurant; its sign once turned up in the National Lampoon), and the establishment had a louche reputation in general.

But the Mallory was bought by a small chain called Hotel deLuxe, which runs hotels in five cities so far, each with its own overriding “theme.” Portlanders are lucky in that the theme for the venue is movies, and one of the innovations Hotel deLuxe has established is frequent screenings in a special screening room just off the main lobby. There, on the third Sunday of the month, the hotel plays host to films by regional filmmakers, who are encouraged to stop by and field questions from the public after the showing.

I went to the Screening Room, as it is called, just this last Sunday night at the urging of my friend Kathi. There is no admission, but interested parties can make reservations in advance to secure a seat, as there are only 40 available in the room (503-219-8627). The Hotel is no longer shabby and the lobby is filled with the work of hip artists such as Lori-Ann Latremuille. The Screening Room itself is a square box, with a bar-concession stand to the right. The seats are large and cushy, as you would imagine them to be in Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino’s private screening rooms. The films themselves are shown by DVD projection, but the image is sharp and the sound is clear.

I purposely didn’t look up the title of the film being shown that night, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was The Cockettes, the documentary about the trippy San Francisco theater troupe, which I’d seen but which I was happy to re-see as part of some research on San Francisco I have to do for a project. As Kathi scarfed down the whole bucket of popcorn (which is free; concessions, food, and drinks cost money), I watched the movie, monitored the audience response (there were about 20 people there), and listened attentively when co-director David Weissman (I think; I didn’t catch the name because I never do when people are introduced) stood up to answer queries and tell us what happened to several of the film’s subjects, about eight of whom have died since the 2002 film was released. The director charmingly explained that he hadn’t done a follow up film yet because “making movies is exhausting.”

Since it was an August night, the sky was still light when we emerged, always a good feeling to the movie buff who doesn’t want his nights always taken over solely by movies. The next film in the series is Film Geek (which has the distinction of featuring me in a key role), on September 30th, at 6:30 pm. The film’s director, James Westby, will be in attendance.

Many readers may be familiar with Portlander James Westby’s tragi-comedy Film Geek (in which this writer has a small role). It tells the story of Scotty, a lowly asocial video store clerk who has his own movie review website. In his fantasy, the site becomes world famous, and critics far and abroad praise the clerk for his vast film knowledge.

There’s a real life Scotty, and his story may end as unhappily as Scotty’s.

Damian Arlyn is a 31-year-old video store manager in Corvallis, Oregon. In what appears to be his abundant free time, Mr. Arlyn maintains a film blog. Titled Windmills of My Mind (from the theme song to The Thomas Crown Affair), it offers the usual fare, lists, quizzes, obits, links to like-minded bloggers, and celebrations of personal favorite films, filmmakers, and moments (such as the elements of the opening credits for The Simpsons). Though it is more or less like every other blog in the world, Mr. Arlyn’s blog has developed a following, and was championed by New York Times writer Matt Zoller Seitz at his site, The House Next Door. Pretty heady stuff for what is a fairly conventional and often rather awkwardly written blog. But in the blogosphere (as in the print world), true talent scares people, and they cringe from it back toward mediocrity. And Monsieur Homais has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.

For August, Mr. Arlyn came up with the gimmick of dedicating a blog entry each day to his favorite filmmaker, Steven Spielberg. Entitled “31 Days of Spielberg,” Mr. Arlyn proposed to “analyze” every film by Spielberg in chronological order, beginning with the episode he did for Night Gallery. In prose that was alternately clumsy and pretentious, Mr. Arlyn proceeded to do just that. The gimmick worked, and the Spielberg project created a lot of buzz, despite the fact that Mr. Arlyn’s entries were little more than a combination of set gossip and visual transcriptions. The talkbacks for each entry were ecstatic, and Mr. Arlyn was careful to reply to almost every poster.

Though running a little behind schedule, by the 19th entry, Mr. Arlyn was covering Hook. And that’s when disaster struck. Amid the blaze of praise for Mr. Arlyn’s endeavor in the talkbacks to the entry, an anonymous made a devastating comment.

“Damian are you aware that you are being accused of plagiarism, on the spielbergfilms.com website? The post discusses Duel, Columbo, and Eyes.” The link took the reader to a website devoted to Spielberg, where a debate had arisen over the value of various books on the director. Steven Awalt, who maintains the site, basically put down most Spielberg books as dry and overly intellectual, especially the latest book, Directed by Steven Spielberg, written by Warren Buckland, an academic who favors the use of cognitive psychology in film analysis. As an alternative, Awalt pointed to Mr. Arlyn’s website, where good solid criticism was being practiced. To this, a poster using the handle justanotherfan pointed out that it was paradoxical of Awalt to praise Mr. Arlyn at the expense of Professor Buckland, since it was the same text. Mr. Arlyn, justanotherfan charged, had plagiarized Buckland.

The examples were devastating. Here’s just one:

Buckland: “Jim is unimpressed, indicating that Ken is not wearing gloves, does not have his finger on the trigger, and that the gun barrel does not contain any bullets. Ken concedes he is a lousy practical joker, and offers Jim champagne.”

Mr. Arlyn: “Jim is unimpressed, indicating that Ken is not wearing gloves, does not have his finger on the trigger and he can clearly see there aren’t even any bullets in the barrel. Ken smiles charmingly, concedes he is a lousy practical joker, offers Jim some champagne.”

To his credit, Mr. Arlyn owned up to the charge, both at the Spielberg films site and at his own. In Mr. Arlyn’s lengthy mea culpa he casts himself, when it was convenient, as a seasoned writer, one who “can offer no excuse except to say (and this is not really an excuse, just an explanation) that it was very early on in the project and I hadn’t yet found the ‘rhythm’ by which I was operating,” and then, when it is convenient, pleads for pity from the court of public opinion as a poor boy of little means: “I am not doing — nor have I ever done — this for praise, for esteem, for glory, for fame and certainly not for money. One thing I have never lost sight of is that in the big scheme of things, I am a nobody. I am a thirty-one-year-old video store clerk who lives in Corvallis, Oregon. I make little more than minumim wage a year and I happen to love movies. I never intended for this blog to be anything more than an expression of one little guy’s passion and affection for cinema.”

Mr. Arlyn’s friends and supporters, seemingly unaware of the gravity of the case and how it was giving blogs in general a black eye, rallied around him in the talkbacks, praising his newfound forthrightness. There was one lone voice of dissent. A user named penman wrote, “Sorry, but I feel like that senator in Quiz Show who, after all the other senators kiss Ralph Fiennes’ ass for being ‘brave’ for finally copping to his cheating, reminds everyone present that Van Doren broke faith and shouldn’t be praised for merely coming clean about his wrongdoing. That’s how I feel. I have a Ph.D in English and teach college composition and literature, and what Damian did is exactly what savvier student plagiarists do: They copy outright and then ‘cover tracks’ by changing a word here and there. For all the different kinds of plagiarism I’ve seen — and I’ve seen a lot of ‘em — Damian’s kind is the one that most clearly demonstrates intent to deceive and consciousness of wrongdoing. So I can’t join in with the other commenters here with the ‘atta boys’ and ‘chin up, kid.’ I’ve been reading every day since Matt [Zoller Seitz] linked here, and I was looking forward to more. But it stinks here, now. I won’t be coming back.”

Though there are slight differences between the explanations for his actions at the two locations, it’s clear that the backstory is that Mr. Arlyn embarked on his project and soon found himself in over his head, and in the race to complete his entries relied a tad too heavily on already-printed material. In this regard, Mr. Arlyn resembles the main character in the new documentary Deep Water, Donald Crowhurst, the amateur sailor who attempted to win a world circumnavigation contest in 1968 with a cunning cheat.

I don’t know how many others are going to pick up on this story and pontificate on it, but one thing that needs to be said is that plagiarism of the gross kind that Mr. Arlyn engaged in is not the real problem in contemporary film criticism. There is another kind, that is more pervasive and insidious and nearly invisible. That’s the group-think that sweeps across the nation as certain reviews and reviewers set the tone and limit the terms of response to a film. What these writers are doing is plagiarizing a tone, the way the Paulettes from long ago, and even to this day, took their cues from Pauline Kael’s New Yorker reviews and her private exhortations. Plagiarists such as Mr. Arlyn are always eventually caught out. Plagiarists of the second kind never are, yet can unduly influence the fortunes of a film. In this light, perhaps it’s a good thing that no one pays attention to movie reviewers any more.

Why was Nicole Kidman so hot to make The Invasion?

It’s a curious matter because it is a remake (the fourth) of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so the material is not exactly fresh. Second, according to Entertainment Weekly, Kidman was already signed up to do The Brave One, and then dropped out for The Invasion. The Brave One subsequently went to Jodie Foster (which is the second time Foster has inherited a Kidman role: Foster also replaced Kidman on Panic Room). The project immediately became one of those “troubled” productions, with the original and still-credited director Oliver Hirschbiegel (Downfall, the film about the final days of Hitler) replaced by the Warchowski Brothers through their disciple James McTeigue, through the aegis of the producer Joel Silver. McTeigue and the Brothers apparently added a few more suspense scenes and chase sequences, perhaps the one in the subway, underground trains being a favorite locale of the team. In addition, Kidman was injured during some reshoots, a habit with the evidently frail Kidman, who’s apparently as illness prone as Elizabeth Taylor.

But what drew Kidman in the first place? EW says that the original screenplay was the talk of the town, and seemed to get actors excited. But there might be more to it, and seeing the film suggests that there was a personal reason for her interest in the material. After all, the plot concerns aliens taking over the world at virus speed. They seize people and drain them so they become soulless, emotionless automatons dressed in business suits. Once converted, they set about to convert those around them as fast as possible. Since Kidman was married to prominent Scientologist Tom Cruise for a while, perhaps the plot appealed to her as a dig against her former husband and his religion. Much of the center of the film concerns Kidman’s efforts to wrest her son, Oliver (Jackson Bond) from the clutches of her ex-husband (Jeremy Northam). It’s notable how often Kidman’s roles concern a woman fighting to rescue children. In an even more recent issue of EW, we learn that Kidman is a devout Catholic, which makes her flirtation with the world of Scientology even more curious.

It’s interesting to watch the former Cruises play out their psychological states on the big screen. Kidman’s Oscar-winning performance was in The Hours, a film about a prominent writer trapped in a suffocating marriage with suicide as her only escape. Her former mate Cruise had a phase where he appeared to be wrestling publicly with his private persona, and from Mission Impossible to Eyes Wide Shut to Vanilla Sky he wore masks and visibly wrestled with his identity on the screen. The absolutely personal nature of these films contradicts the pervasive notion that modern Hollywood movies are impersonal machines. Maybe they are too personal: corporate financed multi-million dollar therapy sessions for neurotic actors.

One wishes that The Invasion were a better film. It could have created more tension by pulling a Battlestar Galactica and making the “villains” a bit more interesting than the flawed humans. Wouldn’t the terror of the aliens be more intense if they actually had a well-argued case, that life without emotion was indeed better and made for a better world. An amusing subtext in the film is the running CNN news spots revealing that peace is breaking out all over the world. The Invasion could have used more of this and fewer pointless car chases. In the end, The Invasion is no more exciting nor engaging than Kidman’s last thriller, the equally confused and divided The Interpreter.

Update, Tuesday 21 August: Outsiders have finally caught on that The Invasion is a knock against Scientology. The First Post quotes a “Hollywood insider” who says that the “whole thing is clearly a calculated swipe at Scientology.” The First Post goes on to say that, “Moreover, [Kidman] plays a drug-dispensing psychiatrist, the ultimate bugbear for Scientologists as evinced by Cruise’s hugely controversial attack on Brooke Shields’ use of medication for post natal depression.”

Superbad is the funniest movie since The 40-year-old Virgin, which is the last movie to evoke honest, well-earned laughter, not the willed laughter of an obvious Steve Martin/Queen Latifah slapstick marathon. It also makes the film’s producer, Judd Apatow, who wrote and directed Virgin and the recent Knocked Up, the Steven Spielberg of comedy, or maybe even the new Billy Wilder.

Superbad is an American Graffiti for right now, rather than a decade earlier. In the tradition of the great teen sex comedies of the ’70s and ’80s, the film takes place in a 24-hour period wherein a couple of nerdy guys tried to get laid as a farewell to high school. Their adventures along the way should evoke memories in everyone no matter how tangential their relationship with high school. For a brilliant account of the genre as a whole, consult this great essay by Andy Selsberg from The Believer.

What Superbad gets right is that though nerds may be meek around bullies and uncomfortable around girls, they are just like other guys when around each other: creatively and aggressively foul-mouthed, competitive, horny, and just as full of adrenaline and testosterone as their more “masculine” tormentors. And it’s also about the solace of male friendship in a world that makes it hard for non-classic males to find intimacy with the opposite sex (in fact, the last minute of the film carries one of the saddest “farewells” in all of film history).

Another thing the film gets right is the kind of music that would be in these kids’ heads, which isn’t the doleful singer-songwriter stuff of the day or the latest preening sex champion band, but soul music, which tends to be happy, celebratory, and encouraging, thus mirroring the ever-hopeful psychology of the ever-grasping nerds.

Superbad is a must see because it is an accurate account of the American experience. And it has a clever subplot concerning two cops (Bill Hader and script writer Seth Rogen) who are like adult versions of what Evan (Arrested Development’s Michael Cera) and Seth (Jonah Hill) might become if it weren’t for the adventures of this special night.

Hi. My name is Matt. I watch a lot of television. Like, a lot a lot. I just wanted to introduce myself, which is about all I have time for, given that I’m writing this on my lunch break during a particularly hellish night here at the video store. If you decide to frequent this corner of the blog (and you should), you’ll find the semi-regular rantings of someone who believes that television is a vastly misunderstood and, to put it mildly, criminally misused medium. Here you will not find Salon.com-style hissyfits about the latest reality show, nor will you find Tom Shales-like, curmudgeony cranks arguing for the classy stuff.

A quick rundown: I have never watched an entire episode of House. I despise reality shows (except for The Simple Life, but that’s neither here nor there). I only watched CSI: Miami because David Caruso cracks me so consistently up. The ending of The Sopranos was really fitting and good. Also, just to start us all off on the right wavelength, you will hear repeatedly from me that The Wire is the finest piece of art the medium has ever produced. And I am always right.

Coming up next: John from Cincinnati, Forgotten Masterpiece — Concerning the predominant stupidity of Deadwood fans and the great disservice they have done themselves.

In Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece from 1967, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (Two or Three Things I Know about Her), the film’s heroine, Marina Vlady, is in a cafe, drinking coffee. As “life” goes on around her, she gazes into the coffee cup, where galaxy-shaped pools of cream curl. Godard’s reflective voice comes onto the soundtrack, with a commentary over the images:

“Maybe an object is what permits us to relink, to pass from one subject to the other, therefore to live in society, to be together. But then, since social relationships are always ambiguous, since my thought divides as much as it unites, since my speech brings nearer through that which it expresses and isolates through that about which it is silent, since an immense gulf separates the subjective certitude that I have of myself from the objective truth that I am for others, since I do not cease to find myself guilty although I feel innocent, since each event transforms my daily life, since I ceaselessly fail to communicate … I mean, to understand, to love, to be loved … and each failure makes me experience my solitude, since I cannot tear myself from the objectivity that crushes me nor from the subjectivity that exiles me, since I am permitted neither to lift myself to being nor to fall into nothingness, I must listen, I must look around me more than ever a the world, my likeness, my brother.”

Martin Scorsese quotes this image, but not the words, nine years later in Taxi Driver, his masterpiece about urban anomie. The true film of the bicentennial of America’s birth, Taxi Driver captured an youthful anger and urban terror that exists to this day. Scorsese didn’t bother to quote the words, however. Instead, he shows the film’s main character, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), dropping two Alka-Seltzers into a dirty glass of New York water and watching it fizz. Scorsese, who once taught film at NYU, leaves it to the viewer to look up the accompanying words and see their relevance, their virtual summary of Bickle’s emotional dilemma. In fact, on the new 30th anniversary 2-disc edition of Taxi Driver, Scorsese hints that he was simply responding to the imagery as he ransacked film history for analogs for what he wanted to do. Scorsese borrowed from everything, from Citizen Kane to Fassbinder’s Merchant of Four Seasons. What the film student discovers upon looking up the words that accompany Godard’s images is a precise summary of Bickle’s consciousness.

Like the words of the Kris Kristofferson song that the shiksa Betsy likens to Bickle, Taxi Driver is “a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” The sympathetic viewer accepts them as intentional. One of the film’s many contradictions is that while Bickle is driving his cab through the urban wasteland of pimps, pushers, and prostitutes that he decries, Bernard Herrmann’s music is exquisitely beautiful, alternating between a building drum roll that is punctuated by police siren-like horn blares plus creeping strings, and a lush romantic theme out of a ’40s noir. If this world is so terrible, why is the music making us feel so elevated about it? It’s as if the film is sustaining two points of view at the same time: Bickle’s and the filmmaker’s.

The signage even comments on Bickle’s state of mind. He passes neon signs for businesses such as Fascination, and Hollywood — both of which reflect his real sense of voyeurism and his view of himself as enacting a rescue mission at the end.

Another contradiction is that Bickle, a Vietnam vet, feels put upon, but aside from a bunch of kids throwing rocks at his cab, no one is outright hostile to him. Why is he so angry? He feels excluded; what he sees all around him in Manhattan is intimacy, couples leaning against cars and whispering sweet nothings to each other. Nor is Bickle as isolated as he seems to feel. He develops friendships with his fellow cabbies and with the shopkeepers whose businesses he frequents (among them is the late Peter Boyle, who looks like he could have been a real life model for Homer Simpson).

The film traffics in reversals. The Secret Service agent chat scene is followed by the “you talking to me” scene, showing the two sides of Bickle, his meekness with authority in contrast with his fantasy of power. This is just as the conflict with Betsy is followed by the scene in which the man in the back seat of Bickle’s cab fantasizes about killing his wife with a .44 Magnum. For much of the movie, others act while Bickle simply watches, or they escape having to act by vocalizing their revenge fantasies.

Seeing Taxi Driver again after so many years is to be reminded of how exciting film was at the time, and of not only how different it is from most contemporary films, but how different it was at the time, which is why it became almost an instant classic, and was the signature film of so-called ’70s cinema. This 30th anniversary disc (Sony, $27.95, Tuesday, August 14, 2007) supersedes the previous DVD release, which was a collector’s edition from way back in 1999. Much of the supplementary material from that disc is carried over to the new edition, and much more is added.

The 2-disc set comes with a terrific new transfer. I don’t know for sure, but it appears as if the bloody climax is as Scorsese originally intended it, not the muted, browned out one that Columbia released to keep an R rating. The sound options are DD 5.1 in both English and French, with English, French, and Spanish subtitles. The film itself is divided into 28 chapters. Supplements on disc one include two audio commentaries, one from screenwriter Paul Schrader and the other by scholar Robert Kolker, a specialist in the films of Scorsese, Kubrick, and others of like mind. In addition, the original screenplay is on offer (a feature carried over from the previous disc). There is also a feature in which one can watch the movie while excerpts from the script pop up. Finally there are trailers for 10 movies: Ghost Rider, Vacancy, Perfect Stranger, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Revenge, Donnie Brasco, The Contractor, Bobby Z, The Last Time, and Yellow.

Kolker’s commentary is detailed and extensive. I don’t buy his main premise, that Bickle is so mad that a lot of his moments are imaginary, such as his call to Betsy or the anniversary card to his parents. He also says that Bernard Herrmann died when the film opened, when in fact he died the morning after recording the film’s music score. Kolker does point out something that seems obvious once he reveals it but which I’d never noticed, that the second half of the movie is a subtle remake of Ford’s The Searchers, with Bickle the “cowboy” rescuing the maiden from the “Indian.”

Schrader’s yak track is sporadic but still interesting, even though he must be bored out of his mind with talking about this movie over the years at the expense of his other work. There are long gaps between his chat, as if an interviewer’s question was excised. Nevertheless, Schrader is the only person on the disc to address the idea that the film supposedly inspired John Hinckley to shoot Ronald Reagan as a way to impress Jodie Foster. His response is just right. Among the other points Schrader makes are that the film is circular, i.e., that Bickle’s rage will rise again.

Schrader also reveals such tidbits as that George Memmoli, the “Mook” guy from Mean Streets, was originally going to be the angry businessman in the back of Bickle’s cab, but was injured on the set of another movie, and so Scorsese took his place. He tells a funny story about a real life hooker who served as a model for Foster’s Iris (called thus because of her opening up and closing down), and reveals that in the original ending the massacred pimps were all black, but their races were changed at the behest of Columbia, which feared riots. Finally, Schrader says that “interesting characters lie, they lie to themselves.”

Disc two begins with a gallery of photos and advertising, carried over from the first DVD, as was a storyboard-to-film comparison with an introduction by Scorsese, who is also interviewed in the new feature called “Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver.” In these he reveals that Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons, Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1962), and Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man were the main influences on the film’s staging and visuals. In fact, Scorsese says that The Wrong Man has probably influenced all his films. Scorsese also notes that he first came upon the script when Brian DePalma gave it to him. Producer Michael Phillips elsewhere says that he had to guilt trip Scorsese into making the film. Has Scorsese ever initiated a project other than the autobiographical Mean Streets, or Gangs of New York? Everything else appears to have been pushed on, forced on, or pleaded from him. Can it be that our “greatest living director” doesn’t really want to make movies, or doesn’t really have anything left to say?

The rest of the supplements on disc two are “Producing Taxi Driver,” a video interview with producer Phillips, “God’s Lonely Man,” in which Kolker and Schrader discuss Bickle’s psychology; “Influence and Appreciation,” in which various colleagues such as Roger Corman, who produced Scorsese’s first Hollywood movie, and Oliver Stone, who was a student of Scorsese’s at NYU, wax eloquent about the man; “Taxi Driver Stories,” interviews with various guys who were cabbies in the 1970s (Stone should have been in this segment, too, since he was a cabbie in Manhattan for a while); “Making Taxi Driver,” a feature length making-of that is carried over from the previous disc; “Travis’s New York,” a visual essay with DP Michael Chapman; and “Travis’s New York Locations,” an interactive map that contrasts scenes from the movie with how the location looks today, with some comments by Mayor Ed Koch and others. These features are playable with optional subtitles. All are interesting and enhance our appreciation of this classic and its makers.

Word of the lineup for the 45th New York Film Festival, perhaps the most most prestigious film festival in the world, came out today. The festival only shows a handful of carefully selected films (28 this year) and gives no award, but being selected for the festival is some kind of award in itself. The festival runs from September 28 through October 14.

Known entities among the announcements include Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (filmed in Portland), Brian DePalma’s Redacted, Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There (Haynes is now a Portlander), Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, which opens the festival, and the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men.

Surprises entries include John Landis’s Mr. Warmth, The Don Rickles Project, and Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales.

Unknown entities include the Spanish-language thriller The Orphanage, Claude Chabrol’s A Girl Cut in Two, Ira Sachs’s Married Life, Cannes winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu, and Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine. The closing night film is the animated movie, based on the graphic novel, Persepolis (see graphic at right). Count on these films to make it to the Northwest by at least 2009.

The Bergman debate still rages. Now, one of the greatest of contemporary film’s critical minds gets in the act. David Bordwell (seen at left), author of several standard textbooks on film history and style, as well as books on filmmakers such as Carl Dreyer and the book Making Meaning, posts his views on Jonathan Rosenbaum’s column at his own website. Professor Bordwell’s take is interesting because he brings a certain common sense to the proceedings, and then goes on to be specific about what aspects of Bergman’s films might have brought Rosenbaum to his conclusions.

“Jonathan’s case is news in the good, grey ** Times,” Professor Bordwell writes, “but it’s an old story among his (my) generation.”

After that, Professor Bordwell develops a highly technical argument concerning the extended amount of time Bergman spent shooting his films conventionally while all the great European directors around him, including Antonioni, were adopting wide screens and color.

Meanwhile, Mr. Rosenbaum himself comes to his own defense with a response to Roger Ebert’s column. He should just remain quiet until this whole thing blows over.