- Some sad news as of yesterday - Sven Kykvist, one of the world's greatest
cinematographer, passed away at age 83. He left an unforgettable mark on the film world with his intimate, sparsely-lit photography for Ingmar Bergman's 60's and 70's films Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, Fanny and Alexander, and many others, not to mention Crimes and Misdemenors, Celebrity, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

- Went to check out The Black Dahlia the other night and enjoyed it greatly, although it is definitely not a film I would reccomend to anybody except the most hard-core of DePalma fans. It's a labyrinth of old film references, conventions turned on their heads, and about a thousand little details that all add up to a film guaranteed to delight or confound audiences. According to its 31% Tomatometer rating, it seems that the majority of American critics are in the confounded camp, dismissing it as style without substance and a plot that meanders and doesn't really go anywhere (but honestly, could you really say anything different about The Big Sleep?), although all of that seems to be entirely intentional. Like last year's King Kong, it's a movie that's more an examination movies themselves, and our obsession with them, and that seems to have gone straght over the heads of those who were expecting straightforward narratives about murder mysteries and giant gorillas.

- The Science of Sleep comes out tomorrow! If it's anywhere near as good as the trailers make it look, Michel Gondry could safely be called one of the greatest young filmmakers working today. And the IMDb summary for his next project, Be Kind Rewind, sounds amazing: "A man (Black) whose brain becomes magnetized unintentionally destroys every tape in his friend's video store. In order to satisfy the store's most loyal renter, an aging woman with signs of dementia, the two men set out to remake the lost films, which include Back to the Future, The Lion King, and Robocop."