A few weeks ago a DVD of Laurent Cantet's 2000 film Human Resources arrived on my doorstep. I hadn't seen it, but it rung a bell for me, and it took me a little while to remember: the Shooting Gallery series! I couldn't believe I had forgotten about it. It was a huge event in less-than-400-screen lore, successful as well as artistically daring. I poked around and discovered that this brave little distributor had -- of course -- gone out of business. In 2000 and 2001, the Shooting Gallery lined up three series of six movies each, releasing each one for a two-week period, usually on a specific movie screen in selected cities, and then replaced it with the next in the series. If something took off and became a hit, it could play longer. I didn't see all the films, but there were some amazing entries, and certainly some films that otherwise would never have seen the light of day.

The first series unfolded in the spring of 2000. The quirky, dreamy, black-and-white comedy Judy Berlin, starring a then up-and-coming Edie Falco ("The Sopranos"), came first. It didn't exactly break any box office records, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has a small following today. Next up came Peter Mullan's Orphans, which I didn't see, followed by Such a Long Journey, which was yet another story from India about an old-fashioned father balking at the ways of his modern children, but beautifully realized. (The great character actor Om Puri was on hand for a supporting role.) Southpaw was a snappy little boxing documentary about promising Irish fighter Francis Barrett. The sixth film, from Japan, was Adrenaline Drive, a kind of crime story crossed with a drawing room comedy. It seemed ripe for an American remake, which never came.

It's hard to believe that it's been almost a year since indie film director-writer-actress Adrienne Shelly was murdered shortly after finishing her last film, Waitress, starring Keri Russell. The Adrienne Shelly Foundation, established to honor Shelly's memory, will give grants and scholarships to "support the artistic achievements of female actors, writers, and directors who are either working on current short and feature film projects, new productions, or are seeking to transition from acting to writing and directing."

The Foundation's inaugural benefit to raise funds to support its grant and scholarship fund will be held November 12, 2007 at NYUs Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, followed by a VIP reception. The evening's program will include a live performance by Alanis Morissette, followed by a reading of Shelly's screenplay The Morgan Stories. A bevy of stars, including Morissette, Matt Dillon (with whom Shelly co-starred in Factotum), Edie Falco, Mary-Louise Parker, Paul Rudd, Ally Sheedy and Gina Gershon (and more TBA), will perform the reading.

The gala event will also serve as the kick-off for the Foundation's eBay Celebrity Auction, which will auction off about 25 "celebrity items and experiences." I think it's a cool idea to do the auction through eBay, where they can reach anyone, whether they live in NYC or not -- it gives people outside Manhattan an opportunity to support the Foundation while also winning some cool auction items. What can you bid on? Things like walk-ons and set visits to your favorite TV shows, lunch with various celebs, celeb-autographed items, Sundance Film Fest VIP passes, and tickets to concerts and television shows (ooh! They have tickets to Rachael Ray! My 10-year-old would SO love to have those! Back off away from that item, the rest of you ... they're mine!).

You can view the full list of auction items on the eBay site. For more info on the gala affair, and how to get tickets to it or be a sponsor, check out the Adrienne Shelly Foundation's website.

I'm excited enough that Rod Lurie is returning to politics with Nothing but the Truth, a film loosely associated with the story of Valerie Plame. But I'm becoming more excited that it will feature a wide range of talented actors, from Kate Beckinsdale to Alan Alda to Matt Dillon to Vera Farmiga to David Schwimmer to Edie Falco to Harry Lennix to the just-announced Angela Bassett and Noah Wyle. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Basset and Wyle join the ensemble as supportive figures. Bassett is to play editor-in-chief to Beckinsdale's reporter and Wyle is to play the lawyer defending Beckinsdale's character, who ends up in jail for not revealing a source.

More than 13 years after being nominated for an Oscar (for What's Love Got to Do with It), I'm happy to see Bassett getting more meaty roles. In addition to this part, which will probably be too small to garner too much recognition, she is set to star opposite Don Cheadle as the titular wife in the biopic Toussaint, and she's sure to be seen by millions and millions in Tyler Perry's next movie, Meet the Browns. Wyle, too, is deserving of making his mark on the big screen now that he's done playing Dr. Carter on E.R. Coming up for him is a father role in the 1963-set coming-of-age film Boy of Pigs and his directorial debut, a romantic comedy titled Prince Test.

The interesting thing about Nothing but the Truth is it somewhat seems to combine Lurie's The Contender (possibly my favorite political film ever), which also focused on a woman under heavy scrutiny, and his recent box office disappointment Resurrecting the Champ, which similarly dealt with the world of journalism. For the sake of this great cast, I hope Nothing but the Truth is closer to the success level of the former.

In just over a month, Rod Lurie is Resurrecting the Champ, he has got a remake of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs on the way and now he's gearing up to direct another script of his -- something more like The Contender and less like raping violence. The film is called Nothing but the Truth (get the reference?), and it's a drama about a Washington D.C.-based female reporter who outs a CIA agent and is sent to prison for not revealing her source. Now that should definitely sound familiar -- the film is paralleling the case of Valerie Plame, whose CIA agent status was exposed after Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, wrote an opinion piece that criticized the Bush administration.

While the cast has not been finalized, a number of actors are in talks -- a collection of which would make a sweet pot of political drama. If all of the talks work out -- Kate Beckinsale would be the journalist, Matt Dillon would step up as the prosecutor, Vera Farmiga would be the CIA agent, Edie Falco would be the editor of the paper that publishes the story and as a wonderful cherry to the selection, Alan Alda would play the attorney trying to free Beckinsale from jail. That's more than enough to hook me, and I'd love to see more serious Beckinsale, free from the action and thrills. The question that remains -- will we get a commutation-gathering Scooter Libby in a sequel?

Nina Deer's (Elisha Cuthbert) life is infused with sex. At school, she is attached at the hip to her best friend Michelle (Katy Mixon), a girl who is seemingly unable to talk about anyone without announcing that she wants to "f*ck him," or demanding that know if Nina thinks he wants to do the same to her. When not talking specifically about sex, Michelle wonders aloud about the genitalia of the boys in the area, specifically that of basketball star Connor (Shawn Ashmore) who, yes, she also wants to do. At home, meanwhile, it's clear that Nina is being sexually abused by her father, a fact that dominates virtually every moment of her life. With Michelle, she plays the part of the easily-shocked, virginal friend. With her father (a miscast Martin Donovan, looking uncomfortable and out of place), she's something else entirely, and finds herself deeply conflicted about their relationship. She knows she's being abused, and fantasizes in great detail about killing her father, both to punish him and free herself. On the other hand, though, she's profoundly aware of her sexual power over him, and takes secret, forbidden pleasure in the way he responds to her. Throw into this mix a mother (Edie Falco) who prefers the oblivion of painkillers to the reality of her own household and a newly-arrived deaf and dumb godchild (Dot, played by Camilla Belle), and you've got the The Quiet, a movie seething with unrealized potential.

The first anniversary of 9/11 is the nearly invisible backdrop of The Great New Wonderful, a questionable leap into the dramatic deep end from Danny Leiner, the auteur who gave us Dude, Where's My Car? and Harold and Kumar. Taking its inspiration (and possibly even some musical cues) from the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, it quilts together the lives of several upscale New Yorkers. A sliver of connection between them is attempted only once, when most of the cast piles into the same elevator in an office building. Other than that, they are soloists, performing arias of muted psychic pain; the only thing they have in common is a desire to shake off the memory of that day. Maggie Gyllenhaal, with her silent movie-star face, pulls down the lion's share of screen time as a tightly-wound, social-climbing cake designer. Stand-up comic Jim Gaffigan is nicely cast as a twitchy office drone who, after an unnamed 'incident' at work, must undergo counseling with Freudian analyst Tony Shalhoub. Tom McCarthy and Judy Greer are a thirty-something married couple at their wit's end with their young son, who slings racial insults at schoolmates and terrifies his parents at night by walking around in a gorilla mask and reading books on how to skin animals. These vignettes are the most buoyant of the piece.

Much, much less successful are a rambling love story featuring a mummified Olympia Dukakis and a nearly incomprehensible segment involving two Indian immigrant security guards, whose broken English is subtitled throughout their portion of the film, I guess for comedic purpose. To say that these segments weigh down the rest of the film would be a ghastly understatement, like saying the Madonna segment in Four Rooms kind of weighs down the rest of that film. These sections are so unfocused they encourage you to stare up at the ceiling, and ponder bigger questions, like: Why was it necessary to wait nearly five full years for the first batch of 9/11 films? Classless though it may be to admit, the wounds of that day are no longer fresh and the emotions have been diluted and scrambled together with years of manipulative jabber from all quarters. Politics has even swept into this film. Star Maggie Gyllenhaal was conspicuously missing in action during the press junket for The Great New Wonderful, almost certainly due to fears that she would be peppered with questions about her personal opinions.

Who doesn't love "a Lifetime movie on crack?" That's what Variety's David Rooney called The Quiet when he reviewed its Toronto screening last year and, though he clearly didn't mean it as a compliment, Sony Pictures Classics (showing reassuring faith in both Lifetime and crack) acquired North American distribution rights to the film last week.

The film is described as a "sexually charged dramedy," which stars Camilla Belle as a teenager who, in addition to being deaf, hasn't spoken since she was seven, when her mother died. Orphaned, she is sent to live with her godparents (played by Edie Falco and Martin Donovan) who turn out to be just as messed up as you might expect in Lifetime movies on crack: Drug use, infidelity, and cheerleader fetishes are just a few of the quirks on display. The whole thing sounds not unlike The Opposite of Sex to me -- I wonder what it is about Donovan that gets him cast in dark, sexually frank movies about teenage girls.

SPC already has the film set up for release in LA and NY at the end of August; they're surely hoping for box office success, something that Rooney says is totally dependent upon "Teens dumb enough to buy [the movie's premise] or adults stoned enough to find it funny." Yikes. Hey, a voice-over has been added (again with The Opposite of Sex) since he saw it -- will that help, David?

• Date Movie - Nowhere in the formula "Comedy = Tragedy + Time" does "Cruelty" figure in, something that this caca-palooza -- "from 2 of the 6 writers of Scary Movie" -- sets out to correct from the very first scene. When they introduce us to morbidly obese Julia Jones (Alyson Hannigan), it is with ridicule as they paint her as a hideous beast that makes men vomit and turn gay. Of course, when we remember that 2 of the 6 writers of Scary Movie were Wayans Brothers, whose stock in trade is that kind of cruelty, it makes sense (even if these are another two writers.)

A parody of romantic comedies like Bridget Jones's Diary, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Hitch, this lame spoof goes for the easy laugh almost every time, beating to death with a golf club every gag with the subtlety of, well ... someone who beats someone else to death with a golf club. The "13" in the movie's "PG-13" rating would seem to be either a limit for either I.Q. or emotional age, as the movie's show pieces are either juvenile blue bits or have something to do with either poop, pee, puke or pus (the dreaded "4 P's"). Putting gifted comic actors like Fred Willard and Jennifer Coolidge in this stinky mess makes them both stinky by association, though as time goes by, the whole lot of them will only be guilty of contributing to a vast background of white noise that we will have learned to filter out when we grow up. Presently #64 on the IMDB's Bottom 100 of all time.
 

Three movies open wide this week and, though there are copious reviews to be found of both Eight Below and Freedomland, the third wasn't screened for critics. You know what that means, friends: Date Movie, though it will inevitably suck, will just as inevitably find itself at the top of the weekend charts come Sunday. Sigh. To distract us, though, we've got Puppies! And Racial Tension! Too bad they're in different movies - otherwise, man, that's box office gold.

• Eight Below: Nathan Lee of The New York Times calls it "Grade A pooch porn, an orgy of canine cuteness," and no one else is grumpy enough to argue. Few, however, are willing to say that cute dogs necessarily make a movie good. Instead, most find it bland at best, and possibly too scary and too violent (don't worry, we're talking about animal-on-animal crime here) for the youthful audience at which it is presumably aimed. Those who like the movie appreciate its old-school Disney animal "realism," and often wish there were fewer scenes with those meddlesome humans.
  

• Freedomland: This one is not exactly wildly popular among critics. Though my man Mick LaSalle is inexplicably a fan, pretty much everyone else considers Freedomland a bit of a mess. While there's no agreement about the performances of Julianne Moore and Samuel L. Jackson (they're either brilliant or overacting), no one is willing to say anything against Edie Falco, whose work in a supporting role seems to be the best thing in the film.
  

I'm not really sure how to characterize Freedomland. Marketed as a mystery-thriller, it doesn't quite manage to be either. The script is a mess, badly lacking in three rather crucial elements: plot, substance, and character development. This leaves the key cast - Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore, and Edie Falco - to basically spin golden characters out of flimsy straw material. The film is also badly lacking in direction and focus; I don't know what director Joe Roth was doing for most of the shoot, but the scatter shot effectiveness of the end result leaves me thinking he took a lot of coffee breaks.

Here's the framework of the film: a white woman (Moore) is found in a hospital emergency room, hands badly cut and bleeding, and claiming to have been carjacked (by the ubiquitous nondescript black man) as she was on her way out of the dangerous Armstrong housing project neighborhood. The cop assigned to preserve and protect Armstrong, Lorenzo Council (Jackson), is well-liked and respected by the project's residents. He is called to the hospital to take a statement from the carjack victim, but quickly two things become clear: the woman, Brenda, is a recovered drug addict who may or may not have been in the projects for an unsavory reason; and she is not telling everything she knows - not even close.  She finally reveals her four-year-old son, Cody, was in the back seat of the car, asleep.