Imagine if The Dark Knight or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull initially opened in limited release, and then took a month or so to reach you in "flyover country." But on the same day that they hit those first theaters in New York and L.A., they were also available on your television, via Video on Demand. Would you wait a few weeks to see the blockbusters on the big screen or would you lack the patience and go ahead and download the movies to your cable box? Of course you would choose the VOD route. I probably would, as well.

Despite this column, I cannot claim to be a purist when it comes to theatrical film exhibition. I subscribe to Netflix and even sometimes watch old movies on the Watch Now streaming player. I now own a video iPod, and while I haven't yet tried watching a feature, I have had no problem watching shorts and television episodes on its small screen and am not totally against eventually downloading a whole movie from iTunes. And although New York's Film Forum is currently showing a ton of United Artists classics, many of which I've never seen at all and a number of which I've never seen on the big screen, I haven't been able to make my way to Manhattan to appreciate the retrospective.

Good news for all you New Yorkers -- one of my favorite films of last year's fest circuit, Chop Shop, is now playing at New York City's Film Forum. The film played Cannes and Toronto last year, and just came off a screening at the Berlinale. Filmmaker Ramin Bahrani, who just won the Independent Spirit's Someone to Watch award, previously made the critically acclaimed Man Push Cart, and his follow-up is every bit as good as that film.

Chop Shop revolves around a young boy named Ale, who lives and works in a chop shop in NYC's tough Iron Triangle district. Added bonus: at the 8PM screenings tonight and tomorrow night, Bahrani will be on hand for a Q&A following the screening. The film will play at Film Forum through March 11.

Daily Green Cine has a nice round-up of reviews of the film; you can also read our review of the film from the Toronto International Film Festival, and our interview with Bahrani.

We're adding a new feature on Cinematical Indie: The (Mostly) Indie Film Calendar. Each week, we'll give you a round-up of what's going on in indie film (and sometimes just cool film news and screenings) in cities near you. If you know of cool stuff happening that's related to film -- a local fest, a series of classic restored films, lectures, workshops, open calls for casting of an indie film -- send your tips to me at kim(at)cinematical(dot)com and we'll add them to the calendar.

Here are this week's happenings in film from New York to LA and points in between ...

New York City: Film Forum, a hot spot for all things indie, has some interesting things going on. Filmmaker Jennifer Fox will be on hand for the screenings tonight at 8:15PM and Saturday at 1:15PM and 5PM of her film Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman. The film runs through July 17. Also showing: Woody Allen's Manhattan (through 7/19), and Jean Pierre Melville's Le Doulos (limited time only, so get on over there for that one!). Coming soon at Film Forum: Live-In Maid (7/18-7/31) and Metropolis (7/20-7/26).

Los Angeles: This week in Los Angeles, Outfest -- the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival -- is going on. With six galas and 70 features, there's lots to see, including a screening of a restored copy of Bill Sherwood's Parting Glances, outdoor screenings, panel discussions, and parties, parties, parties! Check out the full schedule for the fest on the official Outfest website, then get your butt off your couch and go see some films.

Seattle: One of the things I'll miss most about Seattle is Northwest Film Forum, which not only shows great movies, but does a lot of work to help make them as well. This weekend, Northwest Film Forum is showing the awesome (albeit deeply depressing) Raise the Red Lantern, Walking to Werner (held over through July 15), and L'Iceberg. Monday they're doing a one-night screening of the films of Seattle filmmaker Barbara Ireland, and Tuesday night they'll host the Filmmaker's Saloon, a "panel discussion and socializing event for the local film and dance community." For filmmakers and filmmaker wannabes, upcoming workshops at NWFF include Introduction to Flash and Garage Band for Directors. Check out their website for complete schedule of events.

Also upcoming in Seattle: On July 21 at 2PM (location TBD), The Film School's Speaker Series, by Warren Etheredge, will host Sandra Nettelbeck, whose film Mostly Martha has been remade into the upcoming No Reservations starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart and Abigail Breslin. Nettlebeck will discuss her film the remake, and what's different between the two. July 28, TFS brings Oscar-nommed director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) into town to sneak-preview his latest doc, Taxi to the Dark Side, which played at the Tribeca Film Festival. Taxi is about torture practices used by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, told through the story of an innocent taxi driver who was tortured and killed in 2002. Gibney's a sharp guy and a solid filmmaker -- that one's a must-see for you Seattle film buffs. Tix for both available at Etheredge's website, The Warren Report.


Austin: Austin's a great town for film, and this weekend at the Alamo Drafthouse is no exception. If you just haven't gotten enough of Michael Moore lately after his appearances on CNN and Larry King Live, you can catch his newest doc, SICKO, at the Drafthouse's Lake Creek location this weekend. Tired of hearing the name Harry Potter? Saturday and Sunday at noon, take the kid(s) in your life to a special screening of The Secret of Nimh, the movie that made rats cute years before Ratatouille. Coming up next weekend: A special midnight screening of one of my fave Hitchcock films, Rear Window, Daft Punk's Electroma, and another screening for the kids (or those of us who haven't quite grown up yet, Dark Crystal.

Dallas: If you live in Dallas, you know that the city has really grown in access to arts over the past decade, and there's a lot more going on with film down there than there used to be. The AFI Dallas Film Fest had great support from locals, but it only comes once a year. What to do the rest of the time? Well, for starters, on July 17 at 7:30PM, you can head over to Victory Park for an outdoor screening of everyone's fave friendly-alien flick, E.T. Bring the kids, a picnic dinner, and a box of tissues for that ending ("I'll be riiiiight heeeeere ...") and have a great time. On July 19, pop over to Studio Movie Grill in Addison for Mr. Weird's Grindhouse Volume 1, featuring a big-screen screening of Night of the Living Dead, preceded by an awesome 45 minute compilation of trailers and commercials from 1968 and trailers from zombie movies!

Oklahoma City: Yeah, Oklahoma City (my hometown, where I just relocated with my family) actually has some indie film happenings these days! Booyah! Every Thursday through Sunday, the museum screens independent, foreign and classic films. This weekend at the Oklahoma CIty Museum of Art, they're showing Alice Neel, a documentary about the painter by her grandson, Andrew Neel. Alice Neel painted portraits of such notables as Andy Warhol, Bella Abzug and Allen Ginsburg; her grandson's film explores her life and her work. Also at the Museum this weekend is John Ford's cheery and uplifting Grapes of Wrath. Coming soon: Broken English, Away from Her, Summercamp! and Once. Excellent selections, all. (Now if only we'd get a Landmark Theater here to give us a little more access to indie films ... nudge nudge ).

Want your city covered? Send your film news and links to me at kim(at)cinematical(dot)com ...

There's arguably no better city for a movie lover in America than Manhattan. On a rainy Sunday you can head out to the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, which always has incredible screenings going on in addition to their amazing exhibits. You can go to the Ziegfeld, a huge, old fashioned, one-screen jewel that is probably the most beautiful movie theater I've been in. And then there's Film Forum, which shows a mixture of new independents, "lost" treasures, foreign films, and the classics. And all you Bond fanatics who reside outside of the Big Apple might want to sell your home (the money should get you a studio apartment for about three months in New York, if memory serves) and move to NYC because Film Forum is hosting a James Bond Marathon, starting next month.

The film fest runs from April 27 to May 17, and will be showing all of the pre-Dalton Bond flicks (except one, they took the liberty of removing Moonraker). Film Forum is also showing a bunch of non-Bond 60's spy films, such as Our Man Flint and The Ipcess File, and there's some great extras in the mix too: Five vintage Bond trailers will be shown before Live and Let Die and there will be a sing-along (presumably of the Bond themes) following From Russia With Love. Oh, and there's double features and a movie called Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine! With Vincent Price and Frankie Avalon! What are you waiting for? For a lot of younger fans who grew up watching these films on video and DVD, this is one hell of an opportunity, and you've got to support these events when they come to your town. Too many of these great theaters are disappearing.

The debate over Erich von Stroheim's reputation as a filmmaker exists in a state of suspended animation: it's more or less settled, but could conceivably fly open one day if the 9-hour version of his masterpiece, Greed, is ever discovered. The film was a page-for-page rendering of Frank Norris' classic American novel McTeague, about a man of limited intellect who fails at his ambition to be a dentist and winds up chained to a dead man in Death Valley. With a shooting script only ten pages shorter than the novel, it took a grueling year to shoot and ended up provoking an actual fistfight between von Stroheim and Louis B. Mayer. Upon completion, it was screened for a select few at its full length, then Mayer ordered that it be hacked down to two hours and allegedly ordered the remaining seven hours of footage to be destroyed. Unless that information is wrong, and several dusty film cans pop up in a basement somewhere in the year 2036, we're stuck with what we have.

Some movie lovers carry around actual lists of films they haven't yet seen, to remind themselves of what's to come. I don't carry any such list, but if I did, one film on it would be 1927's Children of Divorce. This standard love-triangle weepie was first shot by studio man Frank Lloyd, then shelved by Paramount Pictures for being as bland as its title. Then, a stroke of luck: the studio ordered the film to be half re-shot by its assistant director, none other than 33-year old Josef von Sternberg, who was soon to enter his most creative years. Sternberg is said to have relished the opportunity to experiment, deluging the film with his trademark light-and-shadow-play, tossing out static long-shots in favor of intrusive close-ups, and otherwise taking full advantage of the haunting, teardrop face of 22-year old Clara Bow, who played the film's heroine, Kitty. Sternberg is also said to have supervised a thrilling finale, in which Kitty learns that the plot's romantic knots can only untie with her death.

Beginning this weekend, Cinematical contributor Martha Fischer and myself will begin to bring you highlights from the long-anticipated Pre-Code festival at Manhattan's Film Forum. The festival, which runs from December 1 through December 21, will showcase a large sampling of films released prior to 1934, the year when Hollywood adopted the infamous Hays Code. The code was a strict set of industry guidelines on what could and could not be shown in an industry film, and was rigorously followed for the next 30-odd years. The code forbade such things as nudity, revenge killings, depiction of drug use, interracial coupling, crime methodology (you can't demonstrate to the audience how to crack a safe), child-birth scenes, and depiction of priests as criminals, among many other things.

While we don't yet have an exact list of what films we will be reviewing for you, a quick consultation with Martha earlier today has given me a good idea of which films are more likely than not to be written up. You can almost certainly count on us to cover 1932's Call Her Savage, staring Clara Bow as an incurable wild woman who brains her husband with a stool one day and heads down to the local gay bar. Hoopla, another Clara Bow sizzler in which she educates a dizzy farm boy about the ways of the world, is also on our list. 1933's Blood Money, a heist film condemned by the Legion of Decency for inciting "law abiding citizens to crime" will not be missed. Nor, in all likelihood, will the Joan Blondell vehicle Broadway Bad or the Spencer Tracy film Bottoms Up, about a scam involving the movie business.

Other films being screened that we hope to cover, time permitting, include The Bowery, Now I'll Tell, The Yellow Ticket, The Tria of Vivianne Ware and Sailor's Luck. Stay tuned to Cinematical for all the coverage, and if you're in the Manhattan area, check out more information about the festival on Film Forum's Web site.

December, 1560. Gonzalo Pizarro leads his band of explorers-cum-treasure-hunters-cum-soldiers out of the Peruvian Andes. Weighed down by the out of place trappings of modern warfare and ludicrous luxury items, the tiny band is dwarfed by its surroundings and chillingly out of place. On the fringes of the group stands a man wearing an incongruous bright pink shirt, a battered helmet, and a strange set of armor that seems to consist entirely of studded leather straps. When he moves, he leans backwards and walks stiffly, his body clearly ravaged by a difficult, violent life. Mostly, though, he watches, his enormous green eyes taking in the fear, malleability and desperation around him, while his impossibly broad, feminine lips embrace their permanent sneer. Like he does, we knew immediately that his time will come.

This man is Don Lope de Aguirre, the title character of what is arguably Werner Herzog's greatest film. Played by the inimitable Klaus Kinski, Aguirre dominates the film in every way, effortlessly manipulating the men around him by quietly turning his own ambitions into theirs. Despite Kinski's wild eyes and the character's eventual eruption, there's a surprising subtlety and intelligence to Aguirre, who grows in complexity with each viewing. Though at first he appears to be nothing but a terrifying, ambitious madman (the film's title, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, comes from Aguirre's own description of himself), repeated viewings reveal much more about the character, and shed further light on his companions.

Starting on December 1, Manhattan's Film Forum will begin one of its most anticipated retro-festivals to date: a three-week sleaze-a-thon of Hollywood films released just prior to the introduction of the Hays Code. The code, a detailed compendium of industry guidelines on what should and should not be seen in a Hollywood film, was laid down in 1934 and ruled the roost in tinsel town for the next thirty years. Among other things, the code expressly forbade nudity, interracial coupling, desecration of the U.S. flag, revenge killings, use of illegal drugs, crime methodology (you can't show the audience how to crack a safe), scenes of child-birth, depiction of priests as criminals, illicit bedroom decor, casual liquor use and "white slavery"!

Cinematical will hopefully be on hand to cover some of the classics being screened, including 1932's Call Her Savage, starring Clara Bow as a whip-wielding wild woman named Nasa Dynamite who brains her husband with a stool one day and then heads off to the local gay bar. (Her incurable wildness is later explained by the revelation that she is half-Indian) There's also Born to be Bad, with Loretta Young as a woman who thinks she's won the lotto when her young son is run over by a millionaire. Raoul Walsh's Yellow Ticket, with Elissa Landi trying to escape Czarist Russia by posing as a prostitute, will also be screened. Joan Blondell vehicle Broadway Bad, which ran once in 1933 before being slapped with an outright veto by the Hays office, is also on the bill.

The festival opens on Friday, December 1, with a new print of the Spencer Tracy screwball comedy Me and My Gal and runs through December 21. For more information, contact Film Forum.

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A trio of insanely great series recently started in New York City, once again displaying the cultural embarrassment of riches with which those of us lucky enough to live here grapple on a daily basis (I'm not complaining, trust me).

Friday saw the opening of Summer Swashbucklers at Manhattan's Film Forum, a series of 30 pirate and adventure films -- most made between 1920 and 1950 -- that will unspool over the next three weeks, many of them in double features. Among the films in the series are such Errol Flynn classics as Captain Blood (his first starring role, in which he displays a surprising knack for screwball humor) and The Adventures of Robin Hood, the elder Douglas Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers, and Gunga Din, starring the junior Fairbanks and Cary Grant.

Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn, the BAM Cinematek has put together two truly magnificent series that will run concurrently though the month of August. The first half of each week features the work of controversial American master Sam Peckinpah, from the shocking Straw Dogs (that one's showing Tuesday the 15th -- go see it, if you haven't) to the Steve McQueen starrers The Getaway and Junior Bonner. Then, from Thursday to Sunday each week, the theater is given over to a series called Leading Men of French Cinema. As you might expect, the films showcase the work of a wide range of French stars, in films that are equally diverse. Highlights of the series include Purple Noon, Rene Clement's 1960 version of The Talented Mr. Ripley (starring Alain Delon at his most impossibly beautiful), Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (starring the wonderful Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Les tontons flingueurs, which stars Lino Ventura, a wrestler who transformed himself during the 1960s into an unexpectedly appealing screen presence.

While September is sure to bring good series of its own, these are all well worth sweating on a subway platform to see.

In case you're wondering why it's taken so long for American theaters to switch over to digital projection, the technology is expensive. One digital projector used to cost millions (now a bit less), and cinema chains just haven't had the dough to replace all, or most, of their equipment with the new stuff. Considering they couldn't get the studios to foot the bill, they seemed to be okay with the slow changeover. It isn't like theaters pay to develop film prints and ship them around the world, so it wasn't a loss to them. Still, they have had pressure to switch, particularly now with all the buzz about 3D versions of the Star Wars films. Finally, cinemas are eying the prospects more clearly.

The major U.S. chains, owned by Regal Entertainment Group, AMC Entertainment, Inc. and Cinemark USA, Inc. are about to borrow $1 billion in order to furnish 13,000 screens (one-third of the country) with digital projectors. A joint venture of the three companies, National CineMedia LLC is working with JP Morgan Chase & Co. to raise the money from hedge funds and private-equity firms. The money will be paid back over seven years with help from the studios (this is still being worked out).

Personally, I've been enjoying the slower process, and this coming from somebody who spent three years working with the annoyances of platter-system film projectors. I love the way film looks and I probably won't change once I do see a movie in digital (I know, it's about time I check it out). Nonetheless, I am always excited about advances in the cinema industry, and am therefore excited about this news, if it is true (it comes from anonymous sources on the fund-raising side of the deal). As long as places like Film Forum always use the old projectors, I don't mind at all if the multiplexes do their thing.

It's time for another round of Film Blog Group Hug, where we uncover all kinds of hidden goodies written by film bloggers all around the Web:

• The Lana Turner Blog-a-Thon took place last week. You can read a number of bloggers' thoughts on the actress and her film career, not to mention viewing some striking photos.
• Film Freak discusses the films of John Hughes during the writer-director's Eighties teen-movie heyday. I would disagree with the statement that "John Hughes was the Quentin Tarantino of his day," but I was never a big fan of his films, beyond a very slight, guilty fondness for Sixteen Candles. (I think I identified too much with the older sister in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.)
• Peter at Alarm! shares his reaction to Jean-Luc Godard's film Band of Outsiders. He's nearly convinced me to see it myself, even though I normally have trouble watching Godard's movies.
• The House Next Door reminds those lucky New Yorkers about Film Forum's "Essential Wilder" series this month. The Cinecultist has already attended one of the screenings, A Foreign Affair. I love living in Austin, but did a single theater in town do anything to note Billy Wilder's 100th birthday? Nope. Boo.

Last Thursday saw the curtain close on Film Forum's six-week long festival of bullets and broads. Some 70 film noir undercards, mostly from the genre's heyday of the 40s and 50s, were screened in all their black and white glory. Judging by the near sell-out crowds on most of the nights I attended, the fest was a huge success. (There were reportedly some die-hard noir aficionados who took in every single film) The biggest discovery of the fest was The Sleeping City, a surgically sharp little thriller about a supposedly clean and tidy city hospital that has a river of black noir sludge running beneath it. Starring noir staples Richard Conte and Coleen Gray, it proved to be a runaway audience favorite. Another winner was 1954's Pushover, with Kim Novak in her debut role as a frosty blonde moll who Fred MacMurray salivates over like sexual flubber. A little chase film called Woman on the Run that uses the streets of San Francisco to great effect also gained many new fans. I'd happily cough up for a DVD edition of any of these titles.

As a movie theater, Film Forum has positive attributes (better movie screens than the IFC, a hot chick who mans the popcorn machine) and negative ones (no drink holders on the seats, a pacifist philosophy with regards to cell-phone abusers, [Not to mention major issues with temperature control -- why is it ALWAYS freezing in there? -Ed.]) but for a festival like this, it's a perfect venue. And who says this needs to be an isolated event? There's a whole universe of B-grade film noir out there. On the other hand, if the powers that be want to continue the B-festival vibe but take it in a different direction, I suggest that a B-Western festival would hit the spot. Shalako, anyone?

For those who missed Cinematical's periodic coverage of the fest, here is your comprehensive link list to our reviews: Thunder Road; The Lineup; Murder by Contract; Phantom Lady; The Sleeping City; Woman on the Run; The Suspect; Pushover; The Brothers Rico.

At its start, Don Siegel's The Lineup comes across as an unusually well-written, smoothly directed police procedural. Opening with a sharply constructed suitcase snatching at a busy train station, the movie quickly introduces us to Lieutenant Ben Guthrie (Warner Anderson) and his partner Al (Emile Meyer, whose speaking voice sounds uncannily like that of John Spencer), a pair of middle-aged, seen-it-all cops. The two have an easy partnership, and though their dialogue is sometimes overly expository, the way they enter rooms, and relate to other cops is strikingly natural and realistic, showing the attention to detail that a big studio like Columbia could afford to give even its smallest pictures in the late 1950s.

As Ben and Al wend their way through the bag-snatching case, they discover drugs hidden in the stolen bag, and their suspicion gradually shifts from the thief (who killed a cop while fleeing the scene) to the suitcase's owner (a smarmy, too-smooth opera singer who has "guilty" written all over him, and yet somehow isn't), and finally to a large crime syndicate, victimizing innocent travelers by turning them into drug mules who unknowingly import product from Asia. Just when the movie seems to be settling into a typical police procedural mold, however, the camera shows us Eli Wallach on a plane, studying grammar. His name is Dancer, and he's an unsophisticated thug trying to learn how to fit into the upper classes; he's with an associate named Julian (the wonderful Robert Keith, a long way here from the tough-guy cop he played in Guys and Dolls just three years earlier), who is older, smartly-dressed, and George Sanders-aloof. And, suddenly, everything changes.

If 1958's wonderful Murder By Contract is any indication of director Irving Lerner's talents, it's a crime that he's not better-known. Made on a shoe-string budget with a group of solid, no-name actors, the film is an entirely original look at the life of a hitman, from his first job to his last. Lerner tells his story with a remarkably economy, shaping characters and scenes with little to no dialogue, and wasting no time with unnecessary introductions. Combined with that business-like coldness, however, the film offers a surprising sense of humor that gives it a depth that few of its low-budget, no-name companions could match.

Murder By Contract is the story of Claude (Vince Edwards), a man whose normal, stable, mainstream life isn't earning him the money he needs to move ahead in life. His primary focus is buying a house for himself and his unseen girlfriend, and he decides the most practical path to that goal is contract killing. Claude is meticulous and infinitely patient; in order to become a better killer, he trains himself not to feel, and to kill only with tools that are not illegal (knives, his hands, etc. -- no guns). When he feels he is ready to begin work, he contacts Mr. Moon (Michael Granger), a man who, though he denies any knowledge of the dark things at which Claude hints, agrees to call him -- eventually. And only once. The scenes of Claude waiting are among the best in the film: Virtually wordless, they are brief, poetic glimpses into his soul, and elaborate more fully on his character than pages of dialogue ever could. In just a few shots, we see his limitless patience, his focus, and his determination; by the time Mr. Moon calls, only three or four minutes of screen-time have passed, but we know Claude well enough to understand exactly why he chose contract killing as his key to the future. Nothing affects him: Not stress, not the passage of time, and not doubt.