Not many people care to admit it, but Hollywood is run by fear. Fear is an emotion generated by things that are not known or understood, and in the movie business, no one ever knows what's going to happen. (William Goldman was right when he said, "Nobody Knows Anything.") All those accountants, producers, publicists, entertainment TV shows, ad campaigns, etc. are all an attempt to get a handle on the unknown, an attempt to control the uncontrollable. Anything can happen. The world's biggest movie star can jump up and down on a couch and suddenly become a weirdo outcast. Or the star of a dismal turkey like Showgirls can turn around and find herself cast in a Woody Allen film. This fear, in essence, is why so many movies are so bad. The more investors and business people try to control their investment, the more they clamp down on it, and the more it gets smothered.

See, movies can live and breathe like an organic life form, but they have to have a chance. If brave producers step back and let the movie come to life in the hands of a genuine artist, they could wind up with something extraordinary like Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men (229 screens), a film that somehow pleased critics both highbrow and middlebrow, won a handful of Oscars and has nearly grossed $75 million. This film has already entered the cultural canon as a classic of cinema. More or less the same can be said of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (224 screens), which, having lost the Oscar for Best Picture, is now in a position of being an underrated underdog. But those are exceptions to the rule. No one is immune to the fear: a few years back the Coen Brothers teamed up with sleazy producer Brian Grazer, of all people, and came up with their first dud, Intolerable Cruelty.

The stars must have aligned in a whole new way in the DVD universe, because we have an exceptional number of interesting indie release this week. My top pick is Simon Rumley's The Living and the Dead, which my colleague Scott Weinberg described as "bizarre, chilling and strangely hypnotic." As he wrote in his review, it "isn't a 'horror movie' in the most traditional sense, but is a thoroughly disturbing experience all the same. And by 'disturbing,' I mean: Really twisted, unique and fascinating to puzzle through." The DVD from TLA Releasing includes a "making of" feature, trailers and a stills gallery.

Eve of Understanding stars Rebecca Lowman as Donna, a woman who embarks on a road trip to deliver notes and knick-knacks to a motley crew of people at the behest of her recently-deceased mother. When she saw it at AFI Dallas last year, Cinematical's Kim Voynar wrote that first-time director Alyson Shelton "largely succeeds in what she's trying to get across, largely because Lowman's strong performance keeps us interested in Donna and what happens to her even in the film's weaker spots." The DVD from Vanguard Cinema includes two "featurettes," photo gallery and "director's statement."

Oscar night is over, and everyone is basking in the glow of the winners. Or, excuse me, the "recipients" of the Oscars. Not too many years back, the politically-correct police changed the language from "and the winner is" to "and the Oscar goes to" because that made the losers sound less like losers. It's a joke now when someone says, "It's an honor just to be nominated," but I believe that's true. I think it would be unbelievably cool to be nominated, even if you were in the Best Documentary Short category and the bouncers tried to keep you from entering the theater. This week's column is dedicated to the losers that were honored just to be nominated.

My favorite film of the year, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which is gone from theaters and available on DVD, received two nominations and lost both, which I expected. But this is a film that, like Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur and many other Westerns, will grow in stature despite its lack of Oscars. The year's other big Western, 3:10 to Yuma, also lost its twin nominations, but will probably endure as long as there remains a small, dedicated audience for Western adventures. On the other hand, I find that very few films in the "disease of the week" genre have much life after the Oscars. But The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (161 screens) will be different, for two reasons: 1) it was actually really, very good, and 2) it didn't win anything.

Best Foreign Language Film

Nominees:

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

The Kite Runner

Lust, Caution

Persepolis

Predicted Winner: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

It smelled like awards fodder from a mile away: a disease-of-the-week, based-on-a-true-story movie directed -- in French -- by arguably the most pretentious American filmmaker alive. But damned if it doesn't come together like gangbusters; it's a genuine work of cinematic invention with exactly the right ideas, textures and moods.

Now it's your turn to vote ...

Three new indie releases were left out in the cold this weekend but critical fave Juno vaulted into the overall top 10, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. Two of the new releases are from India: Welcome, a comedy directed by Anees Bazmee and starring Akshay Kumar, Nana Patekar and Anil Kapoor, earned $5,180 per screen at 40 locations; Taare Zameen Par, the directorial debut of actor Aamir Khan, who stars as a teacher trying to help an unhappy young student, made $4,330 per screen at 70 engagements.

The other new release, extreme skiing doc Steep, could manage only $1,340 per screen at 17 engagements in winter-sport friendly areas. I wished that the film dug deeper into the questions it raises, but I'm surprised at the cool reception by its target market. Was everyone out on the slopes?

In its third week of release, pregnancy comedy Juno expanded to 304 theaters and raked in $11,184 per screen, which bodes well for its upcoming expansion (Tuesday, December 25) when it moves into 850 theaters. With its PG-13 rating, it looks like it's well-positioned to grab a big chuck of the teen audience that's home from school this week.

Atonement also expanded, though its success continues to be overshadowed by Juno. Joe Wright's period drama earned $6,630 per screen at 297 engagements. The Kite Runner was the third indie that expanded; it made $3,080 per screen at 377 locations, not bad at all for a drama without stars. In that same range of success could be found both The Diving Bell and the Butterfly ($3,890 per screen; 28 theaters) and The Savages ($3,520 per screen at 60 engagements).

No Country for Old Men has topped many critics' list for best of the year; now in its seventh week of release, it declined to $1,389 per screen, but that's at 1,222 theaters. I would imagine the theater count will soon drop, but it should stay in theaters until the Academy Award nominations are announced next month.

Two holdovers outperformed new releases in the indie weekend box office totals, according to estimates compiled by Leonard Klady at Movie City News. Jason Reitman's teen pregnancy comedy Juno grossed $35,500 per screen at 40 engagements in major markets, more than twice as much as Joe Wright's period wartime romance Atonement ($15,720 per screen but at nearly three times the locations: 117).

Both Juno and Atonement will expand to more than 200 theaters this coming Friday, where they'll have to compete with five major releases over the long holiday weekend. Juno will ramp up to more than 850 theaters on Christmas Day and more than 1500 screens on Friday, January 4. Will its reputation as a critical darling keep it rolling along, or will it need more endorsements from teen audiences?

Among new releases, Marc Forster's character drama The Kite Runner did the best, pulling in $14,490 per screen at 35 locations. Cinematical's James Rocchi wrote in his review: "It makes us truly see the people ... in many ways for the first time; that's the film's greatest achievement, and ultimately the best reason to see it." Nanking, a doc about the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, opened in one theater in New York City and earned $6,200. Our own Kim Voynar called it a "deeply affecting film [that] doesn't offer any easy answers."

Adam Rifkin's surveillance camera peek-a-boo project Look got raked over the coals by certain critics -- check out selected quotes gathered by David Hudson at GreenCine Daily -- yet still averaged $5,150 at the two screens where it opened. That means it did better than Francis Ford Coppola's return to the big screen, Youth Without Youth, which managed $4,630 per screen at six locations -- not quite disastrous, but not very encouraging, either. Jeffrey M. Anderson wrote an excellent, measured review, which examines the film in the light of Coppola's entire career.

At first glance, the screenwriter who gave the world Troy wouldn't seem like the natural choice to adapt a literary novel of childhood joy and adult challenges. But David Benioff isn't just the writer behind brawny action films like Troy and the upcoming Wolverine: Origins; he's also a novelist, who adapted his own book for Spike Lee's brilliant, overlooked 25th Hour. After screening The Kite Runner at the closing night of the Mill Valley Film Festival, Benioff spoke with a roundtable of journalists in San Francisco about collaborating with novelist Khaled Hosseini, the challenge posed by certain cultural differences and the combination of brute force and finesse required to fit an epic novel onto film. Cinematical's questions are indicated.

I guess I'll start with the obvious question, which is: Given that this is a film about a culture completely different from our own, how instrumental was it having (author Khaled Hosseini) on-hand to support you?

David Benioff: It was a great help, and I think I got really lucky, because I've had friends working on adaptations where the relationship between the screenwriter and the novelist is ... tense. And sometimes you have a writer who writes a book and sells the film rights and says "Thank you for the money ..." and just doesn't want to be involved -- and sometimes they want to be so involved -- I can think of examples, like the Sahara guy. (Clive Cussler).

But in this case, Khaled (Hosseini) was both very supportive, but very understanding that the movie was going to be very separate from the book. And he was a great resource; I mean, I could do as much research as I wanted and read books about Afghan history and so on, but I'm not from there, I'm not a Muslim, I didn't grow up in Kabul ... and to be able to call Khaled or e-mail him -- it was mostly a lot of late night e-mails -- and then to wake up in the morning and to have a response from him, a very detailed response from him, explaining what the movie theaters were like in Kabul in the '70s, or what the protocol would have been in a certain situation ... it was a great resource. It was incredibly helpful, and I think it made the script much better than it would have been otherwise.

Cinematical: Obviously, you have a very good relationship with Mr. Hosseini -- and this is not asking you to speak ill of the book -- but what in the book made you roll your eyes, thinking "God, I don't know how you bring this to the screen?"

DB: I don't know if there's a moment, particularly, or just the length of certain sections. For me, when I was reading the book, I was completely captivated by the childhood scenes in Kabul and then felt maybe a slight loss of momentum in the American scenes. You know, many of the (American) scenes I actually love -- and many of them are in the movie -- but I felt like I had to compress that. There's no way to keep as much of the early childhood stuff as we did keep from the book and keep as much of the American things without the movie veering into (a length of) three hours and 30 minutes.

So for me, it was really compressing the American scenes in the center section there, and a lot of compression at the end; at the end of the book, after the climactic fight with the Assef in the Taliban compound and they flee into Pakistan -- then a whole other plot starts, where they're trying to deal with immigration, and dealing with an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) official, and that was never in the script. It was really a decision partly because of time, and partly because I felt like once we had the climax, having another 45 minutes of story time post-climax ... I felt like I would be wriggling in my seat. It just felt like, structurally, it would be a mistake.

Born in Afghanistan in 1965, Khaled Hosseini left in 1976 as his family was relocated to Paris as part of his father's work for the diplomatic service. It was fortunate timing; while preparing to return to Kabul in 1980, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan plunged the nation into decades of chaos some would suggest it has yet to emerge from. Gaining political asylum in America, Hosseini's family moved to San Jose, California; after attending medical school, Hosseini worked as doctor in Los Angeles -- and wrote his first novel. Not only was The Kite Runner published, but it was on the New York Times best-seller list for over two years, and eventually printed in over 42 languages. Now, after years of development and no small share of controversy, The Kite Runner has come to the silver screen; after screening the film for the closing night of the 30th annual Mill Valley Film Festival, Hosseini spoke with a roundtable of journalists in San Francisco about the challenges of adaptation, the genesis and possible fallout of the film's controversial scene of sexual assault and his own memories of Afghanistan. Cinematical's questions are indicated.

Cinematical: What did you learn about the process of movie making going through this experience?

I underestimated the sheer amount of labor it takes to shoot the seemingly simplest scene, just the amount of work that goes just into setting up a scene and how each member of the team has to do their job exactly right, otherwise the whole thing falls apart. It's very labor intensive. It's also very monotonous. It's exciting in a way, but -- you're doing the same thing over and over and over again. So there's a sense of monotony. I underestimated how exhausting it was. The hours are very long and physically it's very demanding. I don't know how some of these guys do it for 10, 20, 30 years, especially the crew. It's a lot of hard work.

How involved were you in the process?

I was kind of a cultural consultant, a story consultant. Maybe the best way to illustrate it is with an example; I went to L.A. and sat in an office with the producers and we looked at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pictures that a scout had taken around the world. And they wanted me to kind of chime in and say if there was any locale that could be used to as stand in for 1970s Kabul. And we looked at Turkey and Tunisia, Morocco and India, Pakistan, but western China, the minute those pictures started coming up, I said, 'This place.' So they went out there and the Afghans who have seen the film are startled at the resemblance.

So that kind of thing – questions about dress, about food, about the way a home is decorated, a variety of things of that nature. But I didn't write the screenplay. Obviously, David (Benioff) did. I read the screenplay and we all kind of chimed in our ideas and David wrote another draft, but really it's his creation.

How do you feel the film captures Amir's betrayal of Hassan, the scene where the boy is attacked? From the work you had do creating that scene, how do you feel about seeing it on screen?

I think the scene was shot tastefully. I think in other hands, it could have really been exploitative, kind of graphic, and I don't think there's any need for that. When the boy walks out of the alley and you see the droplets of blood in the snow, I always feel this incredible moment in the audience where they go, 'Oh!' Suddenly, it elevates the film to another level. The stakes are raised at that moment. It's really a devastating moment.

Slant Magazine has put out its twin top ten lists for this year, and while I have some serious concerns about those lists -- they couldn't find room for Paul Verhoeven's masterpiece even in the honorable mention category! -- their superlatives boxes are some of the funniest I've seen anywhere. Here's a few of my favorites from their list: Most Homoerotic Use of a Computer goes to 300. Worst Performance By an Inanimate Object goes to Titus Welliver's mustache in Gone, Baby, Gone. I have to agree with that one. Worst Use of CGI goes to Jack Nicholson's skydiving scene in The Bucket List. And my absolute personal favorite of them all: Dramatic Climax Best Suited for a WWE Storyline goes to The Kite Runner. If you haven't seen it, you'll know exactly what that means when you do.

By the way, I've noticed that Slant has also jumped on the bandwagon of delivering high, if left-handed praise for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie. In his original review, Ed Gonzalez said the movie was "so completely and violently divorced from any normal concept of narrative thinking it becomes Dadaesque." Now, the Slant duo have given the film a prominent mention in their year-end wrap-up for its "avant-garde insanity." I recently heard about another well-known critic who is seriously mulling the possibility of including Aqua Teen in his top ten list for the year. When he told me, I honestly thought he was joking but now I see it's not just him. Although it never occurred to me before, now I think I actually have to see this movie. It sounds like I'm missing out on something.

Coming Soon has a new interview with Daniel Craig, and he's talking Bond 22. The script is done, and filming is expected to start very soon to avoid conflict with a possible Screen Actors Guild strike (different from the WGA strike -- ay caramba!). Craig confirms that Bond 22 immediately follows the events of Casino Royale, and praises director Marc Forster, saying, "If you look at Forster's current body of work, that in itself makes me very excited. If you look at Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland, and then Kite Runner, which is just stunning, it's such a diverse look at the world, I'd want us to have that. Marc is very solid."

You Ian Fleming fans might be disappointed with one tidbit from the interview -- Craig says the new script isn't based on Fleming's work at all: "There's nothing left, as far as I know." As for Craig's controversial mention of adding Roger Moore-style "humor" to the new Bond, Craig insists he was "lying," and adds "I'm not going to shy away from the fact that occasionally there should be humor. I just don't like gags. I don't like written gags. That's not the way I've ever liked working and I don't think that's funny myself." And Craig fans can rest easy, he says he's totally game for another Bond, as well as a sequel to the soon-to-be-released and surprisingly controversial The Golden Compass. There is no Compass sequel script yet, but there is an outline Craig says is "pretty good." Just pretty good? Show us a little enthusiasm there, DC! The Golden Compass releases December 7th, Bond 22 on November 7th, 2008.