Over at indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman has an excellent piece up on Michael Moore's proposal that theaters across America designate a night each week at "Doc Night at the Movies." Citing the dismal box office returns for docs in the past year (only Moore's Sicko, No End in Sight, and In the Shadow of the Moon grossed over a million dollars), Kaufman seems intrigued by Moore's proposal, if somewhat skeptical it would work. Kaufman raises some interesting points about the feasibility of a "Doc Night," including these questions:

• Who will select the documentaries that are chosen? And on what basis will they be chosen?
• Will the documentaries already have distributors or not? Or will there be a mix?
• Will participating filmmakers pay a fee? Or conversely, will they get a split of the ticket sales?
• If most multiplexes are film-only, and the majority of documentaries are finished in a high-definition digital format, how will they be screened? Will expensive projectors be rented? Or will filmmakers need to pay for costly film transfers?

... and perhaps the most interesting question: Will Moore's next film also go out through the program?

Back in January, we wrote about director AJ Schnack's (Kurt Cobain: About a Son) efforts to create awards for non-fiction filmmaking that would be ... somewhat more relevant than the Academy Awards. Back when the Oscar shortlist for docs came out, Schnack wrote an angry diatribe about the process and the films selected (and, more importantly, those that were not selected) that echoed the sentiments of many of us who write about, or make, documentary films.

Although I'm not at all displeased that Alex Gibney ultimately won the Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and would have been equally happy if No End in Sight had won, there were some glaring omissions in the Oscar shortlist that were truly appalling, most notably In the Shadow of the Moon and King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

My pick of the week is Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, which far exceeded my expectations. Casting his younger brother Casey Affleck as a savvy private eye investigating a child kidnapping might have been a disaster, but Casey turned in an exceptional performance, as did Amy Ryan as the missing girl's severely damaged mother. The film has a handsome, autumnal look, and the surfeit of close-ups should make it ideal on the small screen. Miramax's DVD includes an audio commentary by Ben Affleck and his co-scenarist Aaron Stoddard, behind the scenes footage, a casting featurette, deleted scenes, and an extended ending. (See Erik's DVD review here)

Our own James Rocchi said that In the Shadow of the Moon is "one of the best science documentaries in recent memory, and also much more." Directed by David Sington, the film features new interviews with the surviving Apollo astronauts and archival footage of the moon missions. I'm a space nut from way back and I'm sorry I missed this in theaters, but I plan to sit very close to the television when I watch this. ThinkFilm's DVD appears to be a bare-bones edition.

In the mood for a coming-of-age tale from Australia? Introducing the Dwights might tickle your fancy. Revolving around a "somewhat eccentric family" of entertainers, Erik Davis called it "sweet, quirky, sincere." (You'll have to read his review again to be reminded why he was left blushing at one point.) Warner Independent's DVD doesn't appear to have any additional features of note, so a rental might do the trick.

Other indie releases include John Turturro's musical drama Romance & Cigarettes, with an audio commentary and deleted scenes, and comedy / drama / romance Blue State, featuring Anna Paquin and Breckin Meyer.

What surprises were on Oscar's shortlist for Best Documentary? Which worthy contenders didn't make the cut? How is the documentary field changing in the face of new technologies? Does "Reality TV" really have an effect on documentary audiences? And is Michael Moore's long shadow finally moving on after years of looming over the field? Joining James this time on The Rocchi Review is journalist and performer Tamara Krinsky -- the Associate Editor of Documentary Magazine and the co-host of "That Indie Film Show" on Iklipz.com. You can download the entire podcast right here -- and we hope you enjoy; those of you with RSS Podcast readers can find all of Cinematical's podcast content at this link.

I'm thankful for a lot of things this year, my son being first and foremost, but I wouldn't get too far down the list without coming to movies and food, and then food in movies. Showing characters eating or relating to food in some way can be a quick and easy way to capture a magical moment. You can reveal something about a character, you can take a break from an otherwise hectic narrative, or you can simply bask in the sheer, physical beauty of food, the same way another movie might show characters dancing. The following is my second annual "thankful" list of food scenes in current movies playing on 400 screens or less.

I'm thankful for the use of the term "savory snacks" in Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (285 screens). When Jack (Jason Schwartzman) returns from having made love with the Indian stewardess (Amara Karan) in the train's bathroom, his brothers ask: "where's our savory snacks"? I'm thankful for the adorable Sarah Silverman and the way she sighed her way through the line "I want someone to eat cheese with" in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (3 screens). And I'm thankful for Scarlett Johansson eating potato chips in bed in The Nanny Diaries (26 screens) -- her only way of dealing with the end of a horrible, horrible day.

Documentary filmmakers deserve much more love and attention than they receive. One way to get more attention is to make the list of 15 documentaries short-listed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Variety has this year's list and cites three Iraq War-themed films as being "center stage": Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's Body of War, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight (which Cinematical's Kim Voynar gave high marks when it played at Sundance) and Richard Robbins' Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

Kim is a self-styled "documentary dork" -- her words, not mine -- and wrote a column two months ago about films she thought "have (or ought to have) a shot at Oscar gold." She included No End in Sight, as well as the following docs that all made the short list: Sean Fine and Andrea Nix-Fine's War/Dance, Michael Moore's Sicko, Daniel Karslake's For the Bible Tells Me So, and Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's Nanking. Kim was pulling for Logan Smalley's Darius Goes West, which sadly did not make the list. Other notable exclusions included David Singleton's In the Shadow of the Moon and Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Here are the remaining eight that did make the list. First, the ones we've covered so far: Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen's The Rape of Europa, Weijun Chen's Please Vote for Me and Peter Raymont's A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman. Next, the ones we haven't seen yet: Steven Okazaki's White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which has played on HBO), Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side (due for release in January), Bill Haney's The Price of Sugar and Tricia Regan's Autism: The Musical.

Now the Academy's Documentary Branch will review the 15 films and narrow the list still further to the final five nominees, which will be announced on January 22.

The Toronto International Film Festival is over, we have a couple months respite before Sundance, so naturally thoughts turn to the Oscar race. While I'm as curious as anyone else which films will end up garnering the big nod (and I will be really surprised if Juno doesn't get a few noms, especially for screenwriting), as an indie girl I'm most interested in the docs and foreigns. I'm a documentary dork, and one of the things I most look forward to covering at any given film fest is the doc slate -- which, as both David Poland and Anne Thompson have noted in post-Toronto columns, have been weak this year relative to the past couple years. No one really seems to be sure why this is, exactly, although the surprising success of March of the Penguins in 2005 fueled an interest in documentaries that led, perhaps, to a bit of a glut.

The trouble with documentaries is that, penguin love aside, docs are not something your average person is going to go out of their way to shell out ten bucks to see at a theater. Rent from the video store or add to your Netflix queue, perhaps, but when you're looking for a film to see on date night, the depressing topics that tend to make up much of the available documentary fare are not really the first thing that comes to mind. When's the last time you said, "Hey, honey, I know what to do tonight -- let's get dinner at that place over in Little Italy we like, and then let's go see that new Iraq war doc!" Given a choice between a bummer doc and, say, Superbad, most folks are going to opt for the laughs over the conscience-pricking dose of reality.

Industry attention is still focused on the Toronto festival, but most moviegoers just wanted something good to watch this weekend. Of the four new indie films released in limited engagements, Jeff Garlin's I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With topped the chart, earning $14,000 at its single screen, according to estimates by Box Office Mojo. Garlin is best known for his role as Larry David's long-suffering manager in the HBO improv series Curb Your Enthusiasm (which returned for a new season Sunday night). Karina Longworth interviewed him at Tribeca last year. He wrote, directed and stars in Cheese, "based on his one-man show on being a fat, gig-less, and lonely actor in search of someone to love," according to Ella Taylor's review in Village Voice. The film scored an 80% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

The other three new releases were not far behind, each averaging about $10,000 per screen. Again taking a look at the Rotten Tomatoes approval ratings, In the Shadow of the Moon did best, at 91% positive (Cinematical's James Rocchi liked it too), with The Hunting Party and Fierce People trailing badly, at 41% and 33% positive, respectively. Shadow of the Moon is a doc about the surviving NASA astronauts, Hunting Pary features Richard Gere and Terence Howard as TV journalists chasing stories in war zones and Fierce People is Griffin Dunne's coming of age story, with Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland.

Among holdovers, Death at a Funeral ($2,183 average on 316 screens in its fourth week) and The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters ($1,717 per screen at 39 locations, also in its fourth week) continued to perform nicely. But everyone's favorite underdog, musical drama Once, is the real indie star of the summer. In its 17th week, Once made $1,595 per screen at 141 locations. Go, Once!

David Sington's new documentary In the Shadow of the Moon has a hook as simple as it is effective: Ask the surviving Apollo astronauts about their experiences. Combining new interviews with archival footage -- from NASA and other sources -- In the Shadow of the Moon's both transcendently beautiful and impressively down-to-earth. The footage of the moon missions -- some of it never seen before -- is both beautiful and magnificent; the interviews with the astronauts (with the notable absence of Neil Armstrong) are human and humble. There are no interviews with cultural commentators or scientists or NASA administrators -- just the small group of men who've been to our nearest celestial neighbor: This is who we are; this is what we did.

Sington's written and directed science-based material for TV, but In the Shadow of the Moon isn't just a TV piece writ large on the big screen; it's cinematic in scope, style and execution. In many ways, the difficulty with a documentary like In the Shadow of the Moon isn't finding archival material but rather trying to whittle a colossal mass of material down into a coherent, comprehensible size. Sington's editing team turns the hours and hours of archival and news footage about the moon missions and manages to condense them into a 100-minute story of wonder and adventure.

This week on Trailer Park, darkness falls across the land.

1-18-08
The turning point in this trailer is when a party is plunged into darkness. This preview, which has been playing with Tranformers, is one of the coolest trailers I've seen in... well, possibly ever. A farewell party in New York City is interrupted by a power failure and a massive explosion several miles away. The roar of something huge is heard in the distance, and a large piece of shrapnel turns out to be the Statue of Liberty's head. Over on IMDB this is still being called the Untitled J.J. Abrams Project. Speculation is running wild on this one. Just check out all the comments on Erik's posting about the film's teaser website. I for one am dying to see what this is all about.

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
As Jette recently mentioned here, this teen horror flick has dropped off the summer release schedule entirely, been picked up by a new distributor and reassigned an early 2008 release date. In this fairly dark tale of teen lust and angst, a former ugly duckling has fallen in with the popular crowd. Every boy in her class has lusted after her, and during a weekend excursion to a remote ranch, several highly hormonal young men hope to get to know Mandy a whole lot better. Things turn ugly, though, and people start dying. The trailer resorts to lots of quick cuts, preventing the viewer from seeing who is getting offed, but there's a manic energy here that I find intriguing. Check it out: