'Playlist' star is Hollywood's hottest awkward teen

Michael Cera always seems to be pining for something: booze and a popular classmate in "Superbad"; the sly soul mate he impregnated in "Juno"; a lovely but forbidden cousin in TV's "Arrested Development."

One thing the modest, soft-spoken Cera does not pine for is celebrity, but he's got it anyway. As Hollywood's favorite awkward teen, Cera has just turned 20 with an enviable list of hits and critical favorites behind him.

He's back in full heartache mode in "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist," starring as a high school senior whose obsession over a shallow ex-girlfriend vanishes during an all-night romp through New York with a new dreamgirl (Kat Dennings).

With back-to-back $100 million hits in "Superbad" and "Juno," Cera has quietly jumped to the forefront of young Hollywood actors. He has two movies due out next year and another starting production soon in Toronto, near his hometown of Brampton, Ontario.

Steady, enjoyable work, not stardom and commercial success, is what he aims for, however.

"I never really had expectations either way. It doesn't matter to me. I just like the work," Cera said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where "Nick and Norah" premiered. "I like being on the set and that's what's important to me about being an actor. Things change and come and go, and whatever happens happens. As long as I like it and I'm working with people I like, I'll be happy."

"Nick and Norah" is a boy-meets-girl story that plays out over one wild night. The film opened Friday and had a successful weekend at the box office.

Cera's Nick is so smitten with his ex-girlfriend he devotes endless hours to making and packaging music compilations for her, CDs she thoughtlessly discards. But they have magically found their way to Dennings' Norah, who adores the song selections.

After Nick and Norah share a memorable introduction at a club, they wind up on a quest to find a missing drunken friend while dodging their past romantic partners, at the same time tracking the next guerrilla gig of their elusive favorite band.

It's the second all-nighter Cera has pulled on the big-screen, following last year's "Superbad," which followed the adventures of three underage pals on a hunt for alcohol.

"The one-night idea, I think it's something that people like. Whenever people go to a party or something, they're kind of hoping it will be a memorable night," Cera said. "It's a cool idea. Those nights are great when things just keep happening and leading to other things. It just feels like you're living."

Cera got into acting as a child after he and a friend enrolled in a class that taught improvisational games. One of the teachers told Cera's mother that the family should get an agent for the boy.

After doing some commercials, Cera began landing TV roles in Canada and then Hollywood, eventually winning the part of hemming-and-hawing teen George-Michael Bluth on the critically adored comedy "Arrested Development," the story of a dysfunctional rich family trying to make do after their assets are frozen.

Oliver Stone: Bush's life 'bigger than fiction'

George W. Bush's ascent to the presidency was "bigger than fiction," director Oliver Stone told "Larry King Live" Monday night, describing his soon-to-be released biopic, "W."

Stone, whose film opens October 17 -- less than three weeks before the November 4 presidential election -- said he was fascinated by Bush, "a bum at the age of 40 years old."

"He turned his whole life around and through evangelism and through his faith and his family and he became president," Stone said.

"It's a great fantasy and it happened. It's bigger than fiction," said Stone.

Stone said while he supports Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee in the presidential race, his personal politics didn't influence the film.

"I couldn't make a movie with hate or malice. There is none in this movie. I see the guy as more like John Wayne, which is to say I don't like his politics but he's endearing in a strange, goofy, awkward way, and he did capture the imagination of the country," he said.

Stone, a Vietnam veteran, is known for his critically acclaimed, yet politically charged films. He's received Best Director Oscars for "Platoon," which also won an Oscar for Best Picture (1986), and "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989). He also won an Academy Award for his screenplay adaptation of "Midnight Express" (1978).

From "JFK" to "Natural Born Killers," Stone's films have made him a lightning rod for controversy -- and "W" is unlikely to change that. In the film, he draws a contrast between President Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, whom Stone says was a "far more diplomatic" commander in chief.

"We went to war in Iraq and he did not go all the way," referring to the elder Bush. "So that becomes a big issue in the movie. He didn't get rid of Saddam then and the son has to be -- feels that he has to act stronger than the father because of emotional reasons and there's a lot of father-son subcurrent in the movie. He is challenged by his father and he wants to outdo him, he wants to be stronger than him."

Stone and Bush started their freshman years at Yale University together, but Stone said he didn't graduate with Bush because he went to Vietnam. "I met him years later," Stone said.

During the interview, Stone drew parallels between Bush and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, now Sen. John McCain's Republican running mate.

"I think she's -- she's along the lines of 'Dubya' [George W. Bush] a bit. That same kind of folksy, common man approach," he said. "And she -- it got Dubya elected. He did very well with that."

And, even though he and McCain are both Vietnam veterans, he opposes McCain's views on war and disagrees with the candidate's positions on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Still, Stone said, "Whoever wins this, Obama or McCain, it's going to be living in the shadow of Dubya. I think he changed the world. I think we're going to be with him for a generation."

Stone noted that Bush has earned a historically low approval rating -- only 24 percent, according to the most recent CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll. "He's a young man, Mr. Bush. He's not -- he's not leaving the scene. He may have low polls, but he's going to be around."

Esquire names 'Sexiest Woman Alive'

Alongside a photo spread that shows her in little more than a T-shirt, Halle Berry talks about being the sexiest woman alive, a title Esquire magazine gives her in its November issue.

"I don't know exactly what it means, but being 42 and having just had a baby, I think I'll take it," says Berry, who gave birth to her daughter, Nahla, in March.

"Sexiness is a state of mind -- a comfortable state of being," she says. "It's about loving yourself in your most unlovable moments."

But Berry, who won an Oscar for her role in "Monster's Ball," can't claim the sexiest-woman honor all to herself.

"I share this title with every woman, because every woman is a nominee for it at any moment," she says.

Struggling With Faith and Gentrification

THE Feast of San Gennaro, the celebration of the Neapolitan saint that transforms Little Italy in Manhattan into a tourist-thronged street fair every September, has made a few memorable movie appearances over the years. It was the bustling backdrop to Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” and the scene of a couple of violent crimes in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Godfather” trilogy. This year another Italian-American filmmaker took his turn: Abel Ferrara, chronicler of the downtown underbelly and lately a resident of the neighborhood.

On the final night of the feast last month — also the final night of shooting for his documentary about the event and the personalities in its orbit — Mr. Ferrara was racing up and down Mulberry Street, weaving through the bemused crowds and past the sausage and zeppole stands, looking for things to shoot and people to talk to, and finding material everywhere he turned.

“I didn’t want to shoot during the feast,” Mr. Ferrara said. “But it’s when the talent comes out.” Sure enough, the actor Danny Aiello was signing head shots in the back of one restaurant. In front of another the former Hell’s Angel and “Oz” star Chuck Zito was having dinner. In the restaurant La Mela the owner, Frankie Cee, who has appeared in a few of Mr. Ferrara’s films, was hosting the doo-wop singer Dion and his wife, Susan.

Watching Mr. Ferrara at work — a blur of continuous motion but a lot more in control than he lets on — you can almost see what gives his films their hallucinatory ambience. His movies thrive on a kind of hypnotic chaos, and Mr. Ferrara seemed to be feeding off the din and disarray of San Gennaro, actively looking for digressions. He tried to get a deli owner to reveal who he was voting for in the presidential elections (while a policeman watched warily), stopped for a snack at a falafel restaurant and struck up a conversation with the waiter (“Anyone ever tell you you look like Christopher Walken?”), and bantered with a neighborhood old-timer who goes by Skinny Vinnie. (For reasons unknown the encounter left Mr. Ferrara in possession, briefly, of a pineapple.)

Mr. Ferrara and Shanyn Leigh, an actress who has appeared in his films, have been living for the past few months in an apartment above La Mela. For Mr. Ferrara, 57, the San Gennaro project is a matter of some urgency, a way to reconnect with a neighborhood and a cultural heritage. “If I didn’t do this I would have to come back as a ghost,” he said.

Throwing Incaution to the Wind, Stone Paints Bush

IMAGINE these fantastical sequences from “W.,” the Oliver Stone portrayal of President George W. Bush that opens on Friday: The president is not alone with his dogs when he chokes on a pretzel and tumbles from the sofa; Saddam Hussein is in the White House family quarters with him. Later Mr. Bush flies over Baghdad on a magic carpet as the bombs rain down. And finally Mr. Hussein returns for another cameo, this time to shout insults at the president and his father.

These depictions would hardly be a reach for a director who is fond of monkeying with history. In “JFK” Mr. Stone suggested that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a cabal of gay anti-Communists. In “Nixon” he made that president so epically loathsome that even his Irish setter turned on him.

But “W.” contains no airborne Bush; Mr. Stone cut the scene. And the pretzel incident has no Iraqi dictator, only the two first dogs, Barney and Spot.

“It was wacky stuff that at the end of the day took us out of the movie,” Mr. Stone said in a recent interview in a back corner of the restaurant at the Royalton Hotel in Manhattan. “We wanted to focus on the mind-set of this man. We don’t change anything in his true story. Don’t have to, because it’s a great story. Dickens would do it. Mark Twain would write a great book. This guy who is basically a bum becomes president of the United States.”

The surprise about “W.” is that its left-wing creator made a movie that is not so much operatic or hysterical as utterly plausible.

Revolutionary Hero, Relentless Heroine

Hollywood meets Havana as the 46th New York Film Festival glides and sometimes stumbles into its second week. In “Che,” Benicio Del Toro, wearing a jaunty beret and wispy tufts of beard, wages war against Yankee-supported states in Steven Soderbergh’s 257-minute (with a 30-minute bladder break) historical epic. Meanwhile in “Changeling,” Clint Eastwood’s 141-minute period drama, Angelina Jolie, wearing a jaunty cloche and bloody slash of lipstick, does battle against the patriarchs of 1920s Los Angeles. “Che” and “Changeling” were first shown in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where they were swaddled in hype and hysteria and anointed with tears of critical joy and fury. Other similarities: both were directed by men who have always maintained a distance from the studios for which they profitably work. Both also hinge on bankable Hollywood stars — Mr. Del Toro as Che, Ms. Jolie as Christine Collins — and feature recognizable faces in supporting roles. Lou Diamond Phillips plays a sissy Communist leader in “Che,” in which a distracting Matt Damon pops up as a man of peace. I didn’t notice any pinkos in “Changeling,” but John Malkovich goes all righteous and solemn as a man of the cloth.
Divided into two sections — once called “The Argentine” and “Guerrilla” — the now monosyllabically titled “Che” tracks the guerrilla leader over mountains and through his tactical successes in Cuba before moving on to his catastrophic bid to bring revolutionary socialism to Bolivia. The movie has been described as dialectical, but two parts do not a dialectic make: something meaningful has to happen between those parts. Throughout the movie Mr. Soderbergh mixes the wild beauty of his landscapes with images of Che heroically engaged in battle, thoughtfully scribbling and reading, and tending to ailing peasants and soldiers. Che wins, Che loses, but Che remains the same in what plays like a procedural about a charismatic leader, impossible missions and the pleasures of work and camaraderie — “Ocean’s Eleven” with better cigars.

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

The problem in “Rachel Getting Married” — not the problem with the film, mind you — is that even though Rachel is the one getting married, it’s all about Kym, her younger sister. Kym, played by a decidedly un-princessy Anne Hathaway, is furloughed from rehab for the happy event, arriving at her father’s rambling Connecticut clapboard house on a toxic cloud of snark, cigarette smoke and wounded narcissism. With her pale, slack features and dark-rimmed eyes framed by severe bangs, Ms. Hathaway resembles the silent film star Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box,” except that Kym is less like the curious maiden of Greek mythology than like the box itself: a bottomless repository of guilt, destructiveness and general bad feeling.And yet she is also an undeniably magnetic figure, drawing the attention of her father (Bill Irwin) away from Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and pulling both the film’s and her family’s center of gravity toward the self-loathing, self-pitying core of her damaged personality. And like the family the film, directed by Jonathan Demme from a screenplay by Jenny Lumet, both accommodates Kym’s need for recognition and struggles against it.
The themes of dependency and recovery that Kym brings home in her overnight bag are familiar, even banal. Every unhappy family may be unique, but every addict is fundamentally the same, and if “Rachel Getting Married” had surrendered its story completely to Kym, it would have risked becoming as drab and familiar as a made-for-television 12-step homily.
But Mr. Demme protects the film against such an unsatisfying fate. He is certainly sympathetic to Kym, even as he and Ms. Hathaway conspire to show her at her appalling worst. But he has never been one to restrict his sympathies, and the wonderful thing about “Rachel Getting Married” is how expansive it seems, in spite of the limits of its scope and the modesty of its ambitions. It’s a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)

As thin as an iPod Nano, as full of adolescent self-display as a Facebook page, “Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist” strives to capture, in meticulous detail, what it’s like to be young right now. Working from a popular novel by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan (and an idiomatically spot-on screenplay by Lorene Scafaria) the director, Peter Sollett, spins a shy, sweet romance around a carefully chosen soundtrack with music (and cameo appearances) by such emblems of up-to-the-minute hipster credibility as the singer-songwriter Devendra Banhart and the band Bishop Allen, among others.Nick and Norah, New Jersey high school students bouncing through the rock clubs of New York, are drawn together by their shared musical passions (in particular for an enigmatic band called Where’s Fluffy). The tunes that play alongside their nocturnal adventure express longing, sadness, anxiety and joy with more intensity than they can muster themselves. Nick, played by the wet-noodle heartthrob Michael Cera (“Juno,” “Superbad”) and Norah (Kat Dennings, who has a hint of Kate Winslet’s soft, smart loveliness in her face) are, like so many kids these days, most comfortable with diffidence, understatement and a deadpan style of address that collapses the distinction between irony and sincerity.
Norah’s wary, pouty manner and Nick’s odd mix of timidity and sarcasm are both strategies of self-protection. He has recently been dumped by Tris (Alex Dziena), a schoolmate of Norah’s and one of her social oppressors. She has a sometime boyfriend (Jay Baruchel) and, behind her mask of indifference, a lot of self-doubt. The daughter of a recording industry big shot, Norah is never sure if anyone likes her for herself. Nick, for his part, seems unsure about whether he likes himself at all.

Catching the Heartbeat and Fragmented Poetry of the Delta

There isn’t much talk and not a drop of cynicism in “Ballast,” Lance Hammer’s austerely elegant, emotionally unadorned riff on life and death in the Mississippi Delta. Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn’t so much tell a story as develop a tone and root around a place that, despite the intimate camerawork, remains shrouded in ambiguity. Mr. Hammer puts in the time, but never asserts that he knows this world and his black characters from the inside out, a wise choice for a white boy playing the blues.

Taken on its own, “Ballast,” which has been making the international festival rounds with great success since its premiere at Sundance in January, offers plenty to chew on. Shot on 35-millimeter film by the British cinematographer Lol Crawley, it opens with a hand-held camera trailing after a boy of around 12, James (JimMyron Ross), looking and then walking toward — and soon running at — hundreds, thousands, of geese noisily taking flight into the blue winter sky. The boy doesn’t say a word as he watches this screeching mass, yet a feeling of loneliness, thick as a winter coat and every bit as palpable as those darkly swirling birds (surging like storm clouds, like waves), settles around him.

More moody skies follow, interspersed with words that, with few exceptions, sound as unrehearsed as life. Through a series of short, elliptical scenes, fragments of beauty caught as if on the fly, you learn that James lives in a cramped trailer with his single, hard-working mother, Marlee (Tarra Riggs), though mostly what he does is drift. Visibly bored, seemingly friendless, he putt-putts across his unnamed township on a small motorbike and sniffs around the local bad element, adolescent thugs offering perilous companionship and crack cocaine. Despite all this drifting, the film remains grounded, tethered to a great mass of humanity named Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.), who increasingly fills the screen and gives this exceptionally fine feature debut both its title and heart.

Mr. Hammer developed “Ballast” with his mostly untrained actors over several months of rehearsal. Although the results generally look and sound more authentic, more real (whatever that means!) than even most American independent fare, the film nevertheless ebbs and flows like fiction. It builds on a series of incidents — a suicide, an attempted suicide, some bloody hooliganism and a misfired gun — any one of which would have given most of us enough excitement (and barroom anecdotes) to last a lifetime. It’s the kind of dramatic pileup that bodes ill in many films, but here feels natural as air largely because Mr. Hammer’s visual style — at once spare and detailed, restless and anchored by a classic sense of film space — tempers the story and keeps it from boiling over.

Believers, Skeptics and a Pool of Sitting Ducks

There is no arguing with faith. As the comedian and outspoken nonbeliever Bill Maher travels the world, interviewing Christians, Jews and Muslims in the facetiously funny documentary “Religulous,” you begin to wonder if there might be two subspecies of humans.

The skeptical minority to which Mr. Maher belongs constitutes 16 percent of the American population, he says, citing a survey. For many of them, including Mr. Maher, the tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam (Eastern and African religions are ignored) are dangerous fairy tales and myths that have incited barbarous purges and holy wars that are still being fought. A talking snake? A man who lived inside a fish? These are two of Mr. Maher’s favorite biblical images offered up for ridicule.

The majority of Americans, however, embrace some form of blind faith. But because that faith by its very nature requires a leap into irrationality, it is almost impossible to explain or to defend in rational terms.

Mr. Maher has already established his position as an agnostic in his HBO comedy series, “Real Time With Bill Maher.” A recent clash on the program with his frequent guest the blogger and author Andrew Sullivan, who is a Roman Catholic, illustrated how believers and those who doubt might as well be from different planets. They can argue with each other in fairly reasonable voices about politics, but not about faith.

“Religulous” is directed by Larry Charles, whose credits include “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” and many episodes of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” And the movie has the same loose, on-the-road structure as “Borat.” Much of Mr. Maher’s film is extremely funny in a similarly irreverent, offhanded way. Some true believers — at least those who have a sense of humor about their faith — may even be amused. But most will not.

Shamita dances to kids tune

You did a song for Hari Puttar... It is a fun song?
Yes, but let me clarify that it was a promotional video and not part of the movie. The producers came to me after the film was shot. I liked the concept and took it on.

How was the experience shooting with little kids?
I enjoyed every moment. The idea was very cute. And I had to dance with kids. I found it interesting and so took it up. I think it is a fun song.

The media has been terming it an item number.
It is a masti number where I play myself. The song is peppy and Punjabi -- a fun song. To term it an item number is not fine. It is a kids film.

What motivated you to do a kids film?
I have never done a kids film. I wanted to do the song as like I said, the cuteness appealed to me.

How was it working with Zain?
Zain is a good actor. It was fun working with him.

We don't see you much on the silver screen. What is reason for being selective?
I am running my production house now. And it takes up a lot of my time. I do not get much time to do films and besides, I need something that I enjoy to take it up.

It is said that Shilpa Shetty is making a film with you and AkshayKumar in the lead roles?
I wish I get these newsbreaks before you do. No, Shilpa was never making a film with me and Akshay Kumar. These stories are made up by media.

Television. No, I haven't thought about it. I live one day a time. I don't know what the future holds for me. I would like to do a great job at what I have taken on right now. And if in the future, I get
interested then well, it is a matter of that moment.

What do you feel is the USP of Hari Puttar – A Comedy of Terrors?
Why does anyone go to the theatre after buying a ticket? To be entertained. Hari Puttar – A Comedy of Terrors has that entertainment value. It is a fun film and I am sure that is one reason why everyone must see it.

Talking of kids films, one parting question. How does it feel to see
Taare Zameen Par being chosen for the Oscars?
Taare Zameen Par is a film that everybody loved. It is a brilliantly made film. I am very happy it has been chosen for the Oscars. And I am sure it will win.

Tahaan is going global

Since its grand debut at Cannes, ‘Tahaan’ has been invited to participate in a number of esteemed film festivals across the globe. Tahaan has been selected in competition at the prestigious Rome International Film Festival (Oct 22, 2008) in Italy, CineKid International Film Festival (Oct 23,2008) in Amsterdam, Amazonas Film Festival (Nov 11-15, 2008) in Brazil, Dubai International Film Festival (Dec, 2008) in U.A.E, and Stockholm International Film Festival (Mar 2009) in Stockholm.

Tahaan has been invited for official selections at the Pusan International Film Festival (Oct 8, 2008) in South Korea, BFI London International Film Festival (Oct 15-30,2008) in the U.K, and Palm Springs International Film Festival (2009) in the US.

IDream Production’s ‘Tahaan’ directed by internationally acclaimed, award winning director and ace cinematographer Santosh Sivan made it’s global debut at the Cannes Film Market in 2008 to packed houses. Tahaan started its journey at Pusan in 2007 when the script was awarded a coveted place in the prestigious Pusan Promotional Plan, a dynamic project market focused in Asian cinema that provides financers and producers an opportunity to discover top quality projects.

Starring the enthralling, talented and versatile child actor Purav Bhandare, ‘Tahaan’ is a fable-like journey which revolves around an 8 year-old boy’s pursuit of purpose in his little world. Besides a truly spell-binding performance by Purav, the film also boasts of a strong ensemble cast consisting of some of the greatest veterans of Indian cinema such as Anupam Kher, Sarika, Rahul Bose, Victor Banerjee and Rahul Khanna.

Rafoo Chakkar (Comedy)

This one's a comedy that never takes off. Unless you find fine actors like Mita Vashisht and Archana Puran Singh playing 45-year-old brides to twenty-something chokras in order to hang on to their father's fortune. The chopsucky girls are simply in a marriage of convenience and try their best to hold onto their truant dulhas by using their fists, chops and kicks.

Doesn't work, because the aunties deserve better. Maybe, if they had a few funny lines, it might have helped. Or maybe, if the boys did not look as if they had lost their way and landed on the sets, the film would have had a story. But right now, it's time for a Rafoo Chakkar on the part of the viewer.

Welcome to Sajjanpur (comedy)

SHYAM Benegal's been to the Indian village, long years ago. Then, at the helm of the parallel film movement, he had given us films like Ankur , Nishant , showcasing the seamier side of rural India. The films still remain milestones in celluloid history. Benegal goes back to the village once again, this time with a breezy outlook and a buoyant tone. Of course, you do miss the stark realism and the social concerns of his earlier films. But hey, hasn't the national mood changed too? Isn't India several notches higher on the global happiness index. So smile. Sajjanpur's sweet, simple, sylvan bliss, where widows still aren't allowed to be remarried...but that's just a fleeting reference; where superstition, ritualism still rule...but that's funny, not sad; where politics and governance is a messy business...but that's comic business. So what if India's foremost filmmaker who pioneered hard-hitting realism in films is now somewhat soft and flossy; at least he's still around, unlike most of his contemporaries.

Hence, the importance of Welcome to Sajjanpur , a light-hearted sojourn into an archetypal gaon that's on the fringe of modernity. The leader of this pastoral pack is Shreyas Talpade, the educated postman who dreams of being a writer and writes letters instead. And as he pens postcards for the bunch of illiterate villagers, he gives us a peep into their lives. Like a master craftsmen, Benegal not only introduces you to the sundry characters -- the child widow, the abandoned wife, the harried mother, the corrupt neta, the romantic compounder -- he also helps you connect with them. You almost wish the postmaster's love story reaches a happy end, even as you hope the seductive widow finds her soulmate.

It's simple, uncomplicated storytelling that leaves a smile on your face.

Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors (Comedy)

In an industry starved of children's films, any attempt to create a full blown entertainer aimed at the tween audience needs to be lauded. Unlike Hollywood, which treats its young audience very seriously, Bollywood really doesn't have much to boast about in this department. Hence the importance of a film like Hari Puttar which doesn't try to talk to adults through a tween protagonist. It talks to all. The film focuses on the heroics of a ten-year-old hero and is sure to have everyone -- under 10s and over 10s -- chuckling with glee with its generous splattering of slapstick masala and message. For behind all the bluster and pranks, there is the sweet little homily on the great Indian family. A happy family is the antidote to all evils. Amen!

Hari Puttar is a cute Punjabi munda who, like all pre-pubescent kids, feels awkward, out of place and almost neglected in his kingsize family. In a fretful moment, he just wishes they would disappear. And they do. The puttar is left alone with his young cousin, Tuk Tuk (Swini Khara) and hopes to do everything he's not allowed to do. Like, rummaging through his elder brother's possessions, exploring his dad's study, shaving like a man....Until, the intruders arrive. Then, it's a full blown war to save a microchip, that has national importance, from the goons (Saurabh Shukla, Vijay Raaz).

It's here, in the second half, that the film really picks up and evokes peals of laughter, as the bumbling baddies end up bruised, battered and Hari weary. The fulcrum of the zany show is young Zain Khan who manages to create a winsome picture of a strong, yet vulnerable kid, longing for his mom in the midst of the mayhem. Cute.

Name Game: A Tale of Acknowledgment for ‘Despereaux’

As Universal readies “The Tale of Despereaux” for release in December, Sylvain Chomet, the acclaimed director of the Oscar-nominated animated feature “The Triplets of Belleville,” is raising a plaint about its handling of the last issue, if not all four.

In both an e-mail message and a telephone interview this week, Mr. Chomet — who was fired as the director of “Despereaux” more than two years ago — accused both the studio and the film’s producers, Gary Ross and his wife, Allison Thomas, of using his designs and concepts in the movie without acknowledging his contribution. It is a claim the filmmakers strenuously dispute.

Mr. Chomet’s unusually open challenge may simply point to a gulf between European practices, which grant artists enduring “moral rights” in their work, and an American approach that says, in effect, a deal is a deal.

That hard-nosed attitude is especially so in Hollywood, where battles over authorship can be particularly ferocious. Still, it is an unwanted embarrassment for Universal, which is ramping up its efforts in animated features, a genre it has recently left to others. And it offers a glimpse at the tensions that sometimes afflict the business of creating family fun.

The French-born Mr. Chomet, who is working at his studio in Scotland, stopped short of contending that anyone had violated his contractual rights; he acknowledges having been fully paid for his work.

But he expressed outrage at seeing promotional materials for the movie, based on a hugely popular children’s book by Kate DiCamillo, that omitted any mention of him. “I feel utterly disgusted that someone else is going to take credit for all my visuals and concepts on this film,” he said in an e-mail message.

“We’re making a film for kids, a film that has a moral,” Mr. Chomet added in a telephone interview on Friday, “and behind it is such aggressive action about lawyers and legal things — there are no human relationships. I felt like a lemon; they got the juice out of me and threw me away.”

Shakira's 'Barefoot' to focus on poverty worldwide

Shakira said Barefoot, known as Pies Descalzos in her native Colombia, will start focusing on children worldwide later this year.

"We have a model that works. Under less than $2 a day, we can provide a kid with top quality education and the nutrition that they need to be able to function and be able to learn because a kid with an empty stomach cannot learn," said the singer, a multiplatinum superstar known for hits like "Hips Don't Lie."

"So this model that has been so successful in my country, now I want to bring it to other countries in my small way."

Shakira made the comments Wednesday after appearing at Columbia University with Spanish singing sensation Alejandro Sanz and the presidents of Mexico, Argentina, Paraguay, El Salvador and Panama. The event focused on the importance of education, nutrition and health intervention for Latin American children. The singers asked the presidents to adopt an agreement on combating child poverty during the upcoming Iberoamerican Summit in late October.

"The presidents seem very committed and that's what we need. We need all the leaders of Latin America to have a definite commitment toward our children (because) the children of Latin America are waiting for opportunities," said Shakira in an interview after conference.

"Where I come from every child who is born poor will die poor and we have to change this, and this is the moment to do it. We are at the threshold of a new wave of awareness and sensibility toward our children's issues. But early childhood development should be at the top of our priorities and at the top of every president's agenda."

In attendance were Mexican President Felipe Calderon; Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez; the president of Paraguay, Fernado Lugo; El Salvador's president, Tony Saca; and Panamanian President Martin Torrijos. Also on hand was Dominican-born baseball star Sammy Sosa, Panamanian musician Ruben Blades and English rocker Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame, along with Nobel Prize-winning economist James J. Heckman and Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter-American Development Bank.

The event was sponsored by the Earth Institute at Columbia, led by economist Jeffrey Sachs.

Shakira and Sanz are members of Latin America in Solidarity Action (the Spanish acronym is ALAS, or "wings"), a nonprofit coalition founded by Latin American artists, intellectuals and business leaders to promote social communities and early childhood development programs in Latin America.

Earlier this year, ALAS held all-star fundraising concerts in Mexico and Argentina that helped secure $200 million in donations.

"I belong to a generation that is learning new ways to get involved in these issues. We are not a passive generation, we're very proactive," Shakira said. "We want to see all those brutal contrasts in our world disappear, we want to see poverty eliminated because we believe it is possible."

She also talked about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, and urged Latino voters to use their voice and vote.

"I'd like to invite the Latino community to come out and make themselves present during this election because they can really make a difference," she said. "I care deeply about this country and I think everyone does because America's economy is so crucial for the rest of the world. The rest of the world's economy depends on the economy of this country and world peace depends on the policies of this country."

Viggo Mortensen and his shotgun in 'Appaloosa'

As an Old West lawman, Mortensen packs a booming eight-gauge shotgun in "Appaloosa," which reteams him with "A History of Violence" co-star Ed Harris, who also directed and co-wrote the Western.

Fifty inches long and weighing 11 pounds, the eight-gauge initially was a turnoff for Mortensen when shooting began on "Appaloosa."

"When I first had it, I said, `Do you really need it to be an eight-gauge, Ed?"' Mortensen, 49, said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where "Appaloosa" premiered in advance of its theatrical release Friday.

"It's not that manageable, it's not going to be accurate at much distance. I said, `I'm not going to shoot that thing off a horse, because I'd get blown off the horse, realistically."'

After a day or two, Mortensen started looking at the eight-gauge as an ally, a handy reminder to bad guys that the law can always outgun them.

At that point, Mortensen started lobbying for a bigger role for the gun, which sent dogs and horses running the first time he shot it outdoors and which rattled the windows and floorboards when he test-fired inside a saloon.

"I said, `Ed, you know, I think I should even have it indoors. Even if I'm being friendly or if I were buying some fruit or getting a haircut, I always have it with me,"' Mortensen said. "It's just an intimidation thing, just like our larger-than-the-other-horses horses are. So once you've seen it fired, you don't need to see it being shot again."

"Viggo handles props great, and he loves detail, so that thing was his baby," said Harris, who compared the eight-gauge to an elephant gun.

Co-star Renee Zellweger said Mortensen and his eight-gauge became inseparable.

"He had it everywhere, all day, every day," Zellweger said. "There's a scene that's not in the film where he carries my luggage out of the diner, the cafe, and he had to figure out a way to open the door, grab the suitcases, close the door, and all the while hold that gun."

Adapted from Robert B. Parker's novel, the film is the story of two old trail buddies, Virgil Cole (Harris) and Everett Hitch (Mortensen), itinerant lawmen who sign on to clean up the town of Appaloosa, where a murderous rancher (Jeremy Irons) runs the show.

Cole and Hitch's efforts are complicated by the arrival of widow Allie French (Zellweger), who begins a capricious romance with Cole.

Harris pitched the story to Mortensen while they were at the Toronto festival in 2005 to promote "A History of Violence," the first of a number of smaller projects Mortensen took on after completing "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and the epic "Hidalgo."

They had been on opposite sides of the law in "A History of Violence," Mortensen a diner owner trying to protect his family and Harris a savage gangster trying to suck Mortensen back into his violent old ways.

"I just really enjoyed working with him," Harris said. "He's a really decent guy, a wonderful actor, a great-looking actor. I thought the two of us could capture this kind of unspoken love, appreciation that these guys have for each other. And his sense of humor. He's got kind of a weird sense of humor I like."

A best-actor Academy Award nominee for 2007's "Eastern Promises," Mortensen follows "Appaloosa" with two more films this fall. In "The Road," adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel, Mortensen plays a man struggling to survive with his young son in a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape.

In "Good," which also played the Toronto festival, Mortensen stars as a novelist, professor and all-around decent man who is gradually lured into Nazi complicity in 1930s and '40s Germany.

2008 HONORARY MAVERICK AWARD WINNER: KEVIN SMITH!

The Honorary Maverick Award was derived from its symbolic meaning to the Woodstock arts colony, representing an individual whose life and work is based on creativity, independent vision and social activism. Director/screenwriter/ actor/ editor/comic book writer Kevin Smith fits the bill like a glove! One of the most unique voices to emerge during the American independent filmmaking renaissance of the 1990’s, Smith made his first film Clerks, in 1994, for $27,575, based on his experiences as a New Jersey convenience store clerk. It was soon followed by, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Jersey Girl, Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, Dogma and Clerks II. He is currently preparing a horror film, entitled Red State and an untitled comic book/sci-fi movie.

2008 Woodstock Film Festival full line-up

The Woodstock Film Festival celebrates its ninth year with another outstanding collection of nearly 150 “fiercely independent” films, panels, concerts and special events, Wednesday October 1 through Sunday October 5, 2008.

The exceptionally diverse program takes place in the arts colony of Woodstock and the neighboring towns of Rhinebeck and Rosendale.

Tickets are on sale online and at the new Box Office location at 13 Rock City Road, just across the street from Festival Headquarters at the Colony Café, in the heart of the most famous small town in the world! The full schedule of events will be available on-line at www.woodstockfilmfestival.com.

The 2008 festival presents 44 premiere films, the highest number since the festival began in the year 2000, consisting of 10 world premieres, 4 North American Premieres, 8 National Premieres, 13 East Coast Premieres and 9 New York premieres.

More than 2100 films were submitted from around the world, another record for an event that has become known in independent film circles as one of the foremost regional independent film festivals on the planet.

“Each year brings with it a new crop of extraordinarily talented filmmakers who offer fresh and exciting approaches to filmmaking,” said WFF Executive Director Meira Blaustein, “We are proud to celebrate the work of those who take on issues that effect our lives as they try to illuminate, in their own singular way, what lies in the dark, and what is hidden from our eyes and our hearts.”

Senior WFF Programmer Ryan Werner has been working with WFF for more than seven years and notes that the industry has clearly recognized the festival’s accomplishments:

“Our strategy at Woodstock has always been about attracting quality films, not just scoring premieres, “ said Werner, who is the Vice President of Marketing, at IFC Entertainment. “As it happens, this year we do have more premieres than ever before and they are of superb quality, so I think we are starting to see people realize just how special Woodstock is. It's our most diverse line-up ever, and I think one of our best."

Safeguarding a Japanese Master’s Place in Film

For many critics and cinephiles who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, Nagisa Oshima, now 76, has long held the mantle of Japan’s greatest living filmmaker. Younger viewers, for the most part, have had to take them at their word since his films are scarcely available on home video and rarely revived for repertory screenings.

With this once-towering figure almost in eclipse, it is hard to overstate the significance of “In the Realm of Oshima,” his first major retrospective in the United States in more than 20 years. The series, which runs from Saturday through Oct. 14 as part of the New York Film Festival, includes all 23 of his fiction features. Its title alludes to “In the Realm of the Senses,” a 1976 hard-core provocation and the one Oshima film whose notoriety survives.

The retrospective, which will travel to about a dozen other North American cities, is a labor of love for its curator, James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario, who has worked on it for 10 years, tracking down obscure print sources and negotiating a tangle of rights problems. In the context of an amnesiac film culture, it is also a heroic intervention, a bid to safeguard a master’s place in the canon.

Richard Peña, the program director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which organized the show jointly with the Cinematheque Ontario, said he realized that a retrospective was long overdue when he taught a seminar at Columbia University a few years ago on “Cruel Story of Youth,” Mr. Oshima’s breakthrough second feature, from 1960, and found that none of his students had heard of the filmmaker.

He added that Mr. Oshima’s reputation had suffered from the increasing timidity of art-house tastes: “For a while there was a kind of hostility to the radical experiments in form that Oshima came to incarnate.”

If Mr. Oshima’s legacy now seems a bit murky, it is partly because he was, by design, a tough filmmaker to pin down. Several thematic threads run through his movies — sex, crime, an alertness to the social and political dimensions of his characters’ transgressions — but there is no stylistic signature. Mr. Oshima swerved between extremes, reshaping familiar genres (family epics, youth films) and inventing new ones (freely mixing modes like documentary realism and avant-garde surrealism), always searching for radical forms to match radical content.

Born into a family with samurai ancestry and socialist leanings, Mr. Oshima studied law at Kyoto University, where he became active in the left-wing student movement. His youthful ideals extended into his film career, and his interest in cinema as a revolutionary tool — along with his gift for acid polemics and his pop touch with political material — earned him repeated comparisons to another ’60s titan, Jean-Luc Godard. (Tired of being called Japan’s answer to Mr. Godard, Mr. Oshima suggested that Mr. Godard be considered the Oshima of France.)

Miracle at St. Anna (2008)

At the beginning of “Miracle at St. Anna” an old man sits in his apartment watching a movie on his black-and-white television set. The film is “The Longest Day,” the sprawling 1962 World War II drama starring John Wayne and nearly every other white movie star of the era, and it provokes a bitter reaction. “We served our country too,” says the viewer, a postal worker and Army veteran named Hector Negron.At the beginning of “Miracle at St. Anna” an old man sits in his apartment watching a movie on his black-and-white television set. The film is “The Longest Day,” the sprawling 1962 World War II drama starring John Wayne and nearly every other white movie star of the era, and it provokes a bitter reaction. “We served our country too,” says the viewer, a postal worker and Army veteran named Hector Negron.

“Miracle at St. Anna,” directed by Spike Lee and based on a novel by James McBride, who wrote the screenplay, exists in part to make the obvious, overdue point that men like Hector (Laz Alonso) — Latino and in particular African-American soldiers — fought as bravely and as hard as the characters in those Hollywood combat epics. But setting the record straight after so many years and so many movies is not necessarily a simple undertaking, and this film sometimes stumbles under its heavy, self-imposed burden of historical significance.

Like the French director Rachid Bouchareb, whose “Days of Glory” followed Arab soldiers fighting for France against the Nazis, Mr. Lee sticks to the sturdy conventions of the infantry movie, adapting old-fashioned techniques to an unfamiliar, neglected story. And the cinematic traditionalism of “Miracle at St. Anna” is perhaps its most satisfying trait. At its best, this is a platoon picture, and if it’s not exactly like the ones Hollywood made in the late ’50s and early ’60s, that’s part of Mr. Lee’s argument: it’s the movie someone should have had the guts or the vision to make back then. Better late than never.

It should not be surprising that “Miracle at St. Anna” is occasionally corny and didactic. Every now and then, the action slows down to make time for a speech or a carefully staged argument about racial injustice. But if you’re tempted to roll your eyes, recall that such speeches — on the subjects of liberty and democracy and the mortal threat to those ideals posed by Hitler and his army — have always been a staple of all but the most hardboiled and cynical World War II movies. And in this one, as in “Days of Glory,” the high-minded talk and theme-announcing scenes illuminate a thorny and crucial paradox, namely that the countries fighting against totalitarian race-hatred had some serious race problems of their own.

Learning to Be the Future of France

The young bodies crowding “The Class,” an artful, intelligent movie about modern French identity and the attempt to transform those bodies into citizens through talk, talk, talk, come in all sizes, shapes and colors. With their cellphones and pouts, these bored, restless junior high students look pretty much like the fidgety progeny of Anytown, U.S.A. One difference being that these African, Arab and Asian Parisians live in a country that insists its citizens have only one cultural identity, even if it is an identity— as France’s smoldering suburbs vividly suggest — many of these same young people don’t feel welcome to share.

“The Class” isn’t directly about civil unrest and French identity as a republican ideal, though these issues run through it like a powerful current, keeping the children and adults (and the filmmaking) on edge. Rather, the director, Laurent Cantet — using a small team and three high-definition video cameras — keeps a steady eye on the children, these anxious, maddening little people flailing and sometimes stalling on the entryway to adulthood. He shows them giggling, arguing, boldly and shyly answering questions. He marks their victories and failures and, with brutal calm, shares some of the other lessons schoolchildren learn on their way to the office, factory, shop, unemployment line and perhaps even prison: sit down, raise your hand, stand up, get in line, keep quiet.

That’s tough stuff, but “The Class” slides its points in at an angle, letting them emerge from the children’s chatter instead of hanging its politics around these tender necks like placards. For audiences accustomed to big-screen pedagogical imperatives soaked in guilt and deep-fried in piety, this makes for an exotic change (though the HBO show “The Wire” covered similar ground) and might sound perilously dry. But “The Class,” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May and opens the New York Film Festival on Friday night, is as much an emotional experience as a head trip. Mr. Cantet would prefer you to think (he is a French filmmaker, after all), but he’s enough of an entertainer to milk an occasional tear.

Quasi-Reality Bites Back

In some of these, ordinary people play versions of themselves. In others, historical events are reconstructed with uncanny immediacy and fidelity. And there are still others that use highly refined tricks and techniques to strip away the veneer of artifice and immerse the viewer in the syncopated rhythms and rough textures of daily life. One festival selection that is indisputably and self-avowedly a documentary, Ari Folman’s “Waltz With Bashir,” is also a cartoon, using animation to reconstruct nightmarish scenes of actual war as well as the dreams of some of the men who fought it.

The blurring of boundaries between performance and captured fact, or between fiction and whatever its opposite might be, characterizes this festival (which opens on Friday and concludes on Oct. 12) from start to finish. The opening slot, frequently reserved for a picture expected to infuse the high seriousness of the event with a touch of patron-pleasing, show business glamour, belongs to “The Class,” Laurent Cantet’s warm and gritty chronicle of a year in the life of a high school in a tough Paris neighborhood. The film arrives in New York with Cannes’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, as part of its pedigree. (Of the 28 entries in the New York festival, 18 were previously screened last May in Cannes.) It is at once the most formally daring and the most populist opening-night selection in many years.

The main character, a teacher named François, is played by François Bégaudeau, an actual teacher and the author of “Entre les Murs” (“Between the Walls”), the autobiographical novel on which Mr. Cantet based this movie. François’s pupils — young faces of the melting pot that France has, with some reluctance and anxiety, become — are played by nonprofessionals, which is to say by young people pretending to be some version of themselves.

Lakeview Terrace' debuts in top spot at box office

Jackson's tale about a cop terrorizing his new neighbors, released by Sony's Screen Gems banner, led a rush of new wide releases that generally did only so-so business.

"Obviously, as compared to like the summer season, the bar has definitely been lowered in terms of what movies are making," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. "This definitely is a slowdown period, as is typical for this post-summer malaise we always seem to run up against."

Debuting at No. 3 with $8.3 million was Lionsgate's romantic comedy "My Best Friend's Girl," starring Kate Hudson as a woman who comes between best buddies played by Dane Cook and Jason Biggs.

Opening in fourth place with $8 million was MGM's animated comedy "Igor," featuring the voices of John Cusack and Molly Shannon in a story of a hunchbacked lab gofer trying his hand at being a mad scientist.

Couturier Valentino shows softer side in new film

That was when American journalist Matt Tyrnauer first met Valentino Garavani.

Tyrnauer was profiling the fashion designer for U.S. magazine, Vanity Fair but admits he "wasn't a fashion writer" and didn't know what to expect.

But as he settled in with Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti, his business partner of 50 years, he became enchanted by their relationship -- the heart and soul of Valentino's fashion success.

The idea of filming the spry Italian pair -- Valentino is 76, and Giammetti is five years his junior -- struck him later on when he was writing the article.

"I thought you know what, this could be a movie and it wasn't the fashion element, it was the relationship, it was the love story," Tyrnauer tells CNN at the Venice Film Festival.

This was Tyrnauer's great discovery: Prior to his Vanity Fair profile, little was known about Valentino's relationship with Giammetti.

The friendship between Valentino, fussy as royalty and a stickler for detail and the shrewd and eternally patient Giammetti dates back to 1960, a year after Valentino opened his first fashion house in Rome, Italy.

Soon after, Giammetti dropped out of university to rescue Valentino's business from bankruptcy. In 1962 Valentino made his international debut in Florence, Italy's fashion capital at the time.

"People say Valentino and Giancarlo are like a marriage and I say it's bigger than a marriage," says Tyrnauer, "But I think it's bigger than love, I think it's friendship in the platonic sense and that's the story I wanted to tell.

" ... And they happen to build an enormous fashion empire and change fashion along the way," he continues.

So, Tyrnauer floated the idea of capturing everything in a documentary to the pair. Valentino's response: " ... I say why not."

Thrilled, Tyrnauer rushed to gather a camera crew and headed for Rome.

September 23, 2008 -- Updated 1316 GMT (2116 HKT) * Share this on: Mixx Digg Facebook del.icio.us reddit StumbleUpon MySpace S

"Somehow it mentioned in the article that 'the late Abe Vigoda' was not [there]," Vigoda recalls.

The error was corrected, but the damage had been done. Vigoda's "Barney Miller" character -- the decrepit, downcast Det. Phil Fish -- didn't help the image. Never mind that the real Vigoda was a vigorous man just turning 60 at the time; the question of whether he's shuffled off this mortal coil has followed him around ever since. There's even a Web site devoted to his life-or-death status.

But Vigoda takes the attention with good humor (and occasional appearances on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien"). Now 87, he can look back on a successful career with at least two immortal characters: Fish and the "Godfather" lieutenant, Sal Tessio.

Vigoda was a successful New York stage actor when "Godfather" director Francis Ford Coppola came calling. (Among his credits: Robert Shaw's 1968 play "The Man in the Glass Booth," with F. Murray Abraham.) Though he hadn't read the book -- and was Jewish, not Italian -- he had a presence Coppola liked, and was finally cast as Tessio.

Publisher Who Fought Puritanism, and Won

In its heyday during the 1960s, Grove Press was famous for publishing books nobody else would touch. The Grove list included writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and the books, with their distinctive black-and-white covers, were reliably ahead of their time and often fascinated by sex.

The same was, and is, true of Grove’s maverick publisher, Barney Rosset, who loved highbrow literature but also brought out a very profitable line of Victorian spanking porn.

On Nov. 19 Mr. Rosset will receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in honor of his many contributions to American publishing, especially his groundbreaking legal battles to print uncensored versions of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” He is also the subject of “Obscene,” a documentary by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, which opens on Friday at Cinema Village.

Mr. Ortenberg and Mr. O’Connor are themselves refugees from book publishing, and this is their first film. “Barney was basically my idol, my mentor and my role model for most of my publishing career,” said Mr. Ortenberg, who used to run Thunder’s Mouth Press, publisher of, among other books, “The Outlaw Bible of American Literature.” “I just thought, here was a great story about a major cultural impresario most people don’t know about. It was just dumb beginner’s luck, I guess. I had had a lot of experience with intellectual content, and I knew something about editing, and the movie was small enough that whatever mistakes we made, they didn’t wind up costing huge amounts. We learned as we went along.”

The documentary has a literary rock score — songs by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Warren Zevon and Patti Smith — and includes, in addition to the usual talking heads, some surprising archival footage. There’s an excerpt from Al Goldstein’s old cable television show, “Midnight Blue,” in which Mr. Goldstein quizzes Mr. Rosset about his four marriages and in general interviews him not as a major cultural figure but as a fellow smut peddler. There are clips of Europe that Mr. Rosset filmed as a teenager (his father, unfortunately, instructed him to keep the camera moving constantly), some footage he took during World War II and some poignant home movies of Mr. Rosset cavorting with his family on his Hamptons estate. Mr. Rosset, who made and squandered several fortunes, eventually had to unload the place to cover his losses.

Into the Mennonite World to Explore One Man’s Test of Faith

The sun floods the wide sky in “Silent Light” like a beacon, spilling over the austere land and illuminating its pale, pale people as if from within. A fictional story about everyday rapture in an isolated Mennonite community in northern Mexico — and performed by a cast of mostly Mennonite nonprofessionals — the film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.

Mr. Reygadas’s faith may be more rooted in his own gifts than in God, but it’s the sheer intensity of this belief — which he confirms with every camera movement — that invests his film with such feeling. This stubborn, passionate intensity is evident in the mesmerizing, transporting opener, in which the seemingly unmoored camera traces a downward arc across a nearly pitch-black night sky dotted with starry pinpricks. Accompanied by an unsettling chorus of animal cries and screams (what’s going on in there?), the camera descends from its cosmic perch into the brightening world and then, as if parting a curtain, moves through some trees onto a clearing that effectively becomes the stage for the ensuing human drama.

If you haven’t fled for the exits (cowards!), you will be hooked, as much in thrall to the harmonious beauty of the images as to the foreignness of their setting. Yet strange as this world initially seems, with its quiet rhythms and obscure German dialect, its conflicts soon prove familiar: Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), a farmer with seven towheaded children and a devoted wife, Esther (the Canadian writer Miriam Toews), has fallen in love with another woman, a neighbor, Marianne (Maria Pankratz). Though tormented by the affair, Johan feels that Marianne is his truer match, the woman who will correct the mistake he made by marrying Esther, whom he also loves and from whom he has, with tragic, unintended cruelty, hidden nothing

Fuzzy Renaissance

POOR Miss Piggy. Like most aging stars in Hollywood, that prima donna pig, along with most of her Muppet pals, has struggled to find substantial roles. Almost nobody under the age of 30 remembers “Pigs in Space.” All everyone wants to talk about is this Hannah Montana person. What’s a down-on-her-luck puppet to do?

The Walt Disney Company feels her pain. Since it bought Miss Piggy, Kermit and crew in 2004, executives have struggled to figure out how to put them to work. Efforts in 2005 to rejuvenate the furry creatures created by Jim Henson sputtered as the Muppets got lobbed between corporate divisions, and a new television series — a parody of “America’s Next Top Model” called “America’s Next Muppet” — died in the planning stages.

Now Disney is giving it another go by revving up the full power of its culture-creating engines. Instead of the take-it-slow approach, this time the Muppets are getting the “Hannah Montana” treatment, being blasted into every pop-culture nook and cranny that the company owns or can dream up. The balcony blowhards Statler and Waldorf would be impressed with the ambitiousness of the plan — even if it does come with equally outsize challenges.

“We think there is a Muppet gene in everybody,” said Lylle Breier, a Disney executive who is the new general manager of Muppets Studio.

Disney Channel is presenting new specials — the first ran last month, the second will be shown in October — in which Muppets interact with “High School Musical” stars and the Jonas Brothers, among other teenage wunderkinder. A stream of comic videos is in production for Disney.com, where a new Muppet channel recently made its debut, and viral videos have been unleashed on YouTube. NBC will broadcast a Christmas special in December, and special skits will arrive on certain ABC DVD releases. (One skit with the working title “Desperate Housepigs” is on a coming “Desperate Housewives” DVD.)

A new feature film, still untitled, is planned for 2010, with more in development. Meanwhile the Muppets will work overtime elsewhere, appearing on a new float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, on “Nightline” interviewing political candidates and on various talk shows. More Muppet-theme attractions are being discussed for Disney theme parks.

And then there is the merchandise. Coming soon: Muppet clothing at Urban Outfitters and Limited Too stores; Muppet-theme items like stuffed animals and tote bags, at Macy’s; and a Muppet boutique at the New York flagship of F. A. O. Schwarz.

Disney does not want to create a flash in the pan; it sees the Muppets as a franchise that can sit side by side with, say, Winnie the Pooh. But creating any flash at all is the challenge. With the exception of a guest appearance here and there, the characters have largely been in cold storage for the last three years. And because the Muppets have been without a regular television gig for more than a decade, many children and younger teenagers don’t know them.

Ms. Breier said recent focus groups indicated that some children could not even identify Kermit and Miss Piggy, much less ancillary characters like Fozzie Bear and Gonzo the Great. The wisecracking, irreverent Muppets (a combination of puppets and marionettes) also don’t fit that neatly in the Disney culture, as they differ from most of the company’s bedrock characters in two big ways: Kermit and coterie were primarily created to entertain adults, and they live in the real world. Henson was so insistent that they stand apart from his “Sesame Street” creations in personality and tone that he (misleadingly) titled the 1975 pilot that would boost their careers “The Muppet Show: Sex and Violence.”

Undeterred, Disney expects the Muppets to expand their fan base beyond nostalgic older generations to the age group between 6 and 12 that has powered “Hannah Montana” and “High School Musical” into international blockbusters. But how do you make 50-year-old puppets, even those as beloved to many people as these, relevant in a “Wall-E” world?

The Muppets are hardly moribund, but they do represent one of the most striking examples of franchise fumbling in Hollywood history.

“The Muppet Show” made its debut on CBS stations in 1976, introducing the classic characters Disney owns today. (The Muppet characters that populated the inaugural season of “Saturday Night Live” a year earlier were different.) “The Muppet Show” was full of song-and-dance numbers and skits, often featuring absurdist humor, along with backstage antics. Dancing chickens were thrown in for good measure.

Some of the biggest names in entertainment at the time populated each episode. Rudolf Nureyev and Miss Piggy, clad in towels, sat in a sauna and sang “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”; a bejeweled Elton John performed “Crocodile Rock” with Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the show’s house band.

Witty, somewhat subversive dialogue and the hilarious-looking Muppets themselves quickly won audiences over. The show, which ran for five seasons, at one point was syndicated in 100 countries. The ubiquitous franchise spawned hit movies (“The Muppet Movie”), hit songs (“The Rainbow Connection”), loads of merchandise and, eventually, an animated series called “Muppet Babies.”

But those glory days are long gone. After Henson’s death from a rare bacterial infection, at 53, in 1990 his five children took control of the company. They set about working on new adventures for the Muppets — but not before dragging them into a nasty court fight with Disney over terms for a Muppet attraction Henson had completed for Walt Disney World. And the franchise’s pop-cultural resonance slipped; the last Muppets movie, “Muppets From Space,” sputtered at the box office in 1999.

In Hollywood, Credit Remains, at Least for a Few Big Names

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood, apparently, is still in the money.

The crisis on Wall Street is roiling companies around the globe, but bank-financed credit is continuing to flow into the movie business, albeit on a much more moderate basis.

On Friday, as government leaders cobbled together a historic rescue of the American financial system, Media Rights Capital, one of Hollywood’s most prominent independent production companies, closed on a $350 million revolving credit fund led by JPMorgan Chase and Comerica. The financing effort began just six weeks ago, said Asif Satchu, co-chief executive of the film company.

“In a credit climate that on its surface has completely shut down, this deal proves that there is money available,” said Marni Wieshofer, a senior vice president of Media Rights Capital. Mr. Satchu added that “banks are still in the business of putting money to work; they’re just making many fewer bets.”

The new financing will be used to expand the production company deeper into film, television and digital projects and will be used in conjunction with the company’s initial $425 million capitalization. Media Rights Capital has helped to finance such films as “Babel,” starring Brad Pitt, and is behind a high-profile digital video collaboration between Seth MacFarlane, the creator of the “Family Guy” television series, and Google.

The deal follows the announcement last week that Steven Spielberg had secured $700 million in credit through JPMorgan to start a new production company in partnership with Reliance Big Entertainment of India.

Movie companies have looked to complex financing deals with private money in the last two years to offset risk and help cover sharply higher production costs. But in recent months that pipeline has slowed to a trickle because of the credit meltdown, with even the likes of Paramount Pictures becoming unable to find acceptable financing terms.

Last week, as the economic crisis escalated, Hollywood started to fret anew. But the Media Rights Capital deal, in partnership with Mr. Spielberg’s money, indicates that film companies considered to be low risk can continue to tap the credit market.