Maclean’s magazine has an update on Blue State, the self-produced Anna Paquin vehicle about a liberal American who moves north to Canada after the re-election of George W. Bush: The writer/director, Marshall Lewy, describes the film as a romantic comedy road movie like Sideways. “But instead of wine, the backdrop is politics.” Lewy’s a New York native who lives in L.A., and like the main character in Blue State, campaigned for Kerry in Ohio. He had lots of friends who... Read more

BBC News reports that Daniel Craig, who just finished work on his first James Bond film, has been cast as Lyra Belacqua’s father Lord Asriel in The Golden Compass. The film will mark a reunion of sorts between Craig and at least two of his co-stars, given that he has already worked with Nicole Kidman on The Visiting, the latest Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake, and given that he has already worked with Eva Green on Casino Royale. Read more

My kids are six and a half months old now, and they are increasingly enjoying their ability to make sounds with their vocal cords. I am also told that now might be a good time to get them started on “baby sign language”. So it seemed like as good a time as any to check out Barbet Schroeder’s Koko: A Talking Gorilla (1978), a documentary recently released on DVD by Criterion. The first time I ever heard of Koko was... Read more

My children will be six-and-a-half months old this weekend, and so far they cannot stand, walk, hold their bottles, blow their noses or wipe their bums — and one of them is only just beginning to figure out how to crawl — but by golly, they can rub their eyes when they’re tired and they’re trying to fight off sleep. It’s the cutest thing in the world. And given all the things they haven’t figured out how to do yet,... Read more

You remember how there was a big kerfuffle when Bryan Singer, who had directed the first two X-Men movies for 20th Century Fox and ended the second film on a strong cliffhanger, left the trilogy in the lurch to go direct the first new Superman movie in almost 20 years for Warner Brothers? And you remember how fans were dismayed when the third X-Men movie went through a number of possible directors only to wind up in the hands of... Read more

Time for a few new quickies. 1. We all know that Snakes on a Plane, which opens tomorrow, has not been screened for critics in advance. And now I suspect that Material Girls, the Hilary-and-Haylie-Duff movie which also opens tomorrow but which I had never heard about until this morning, was also kept away from the critics, since I never heard about any screenings and there are no reviews listed yet at Rotten Tomatoes or MetaCritic. Can’t say I’m complaining... Read more

Click here for a fascinating fusion of Google Maps and Google Video. The video is Claude Lelouch’s short film C’était un rendez-vous (1976), and the map shows exactly where his car is as he drives — at very fast speeds — through the streets of Paris. My father made a similar film with our Super-8 camera only a year or two after Lelouch made his short film, except that my father didn’t drive very fast — he just sat in... Read more

Old news, perhaps, but check it out. Three films that have nothing in common besides the studio and the actor. And even “the actor” is stretching it, since one of these films is almost three hours long and the actor appears in it for, oh, what, two minutes? (Though I guess Terrence Malick fans might appreciate the extra exposure.) Read more

Every now and then I have wondered what became of Bruno Kirby. The last time I saw him was in Donnie Brasco (1997), and the last time I heard his voice was in Stuart Little (1999; my comments), where he played one of the other mice. But before that, I had grown rather fond of him, since he seemed to be in every other movie that I discovered during my college years, whether playing the young Clemenza in The Godfather... Read more

Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly offers his own two bits on the Mel Gibson controversy. One bit that leaps out at me: WHY IS MEL SO MAD? During the incident, he sounded like a classic angry drunk. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that when Gibson spewed his anti-Semitic poison at the L.A. officers who pulled him over, it was, to a greater or lesser degree, the booze talking — and it’s also conventional wisdom that that in no way... Read more