For the film freaks on this forum (and I know that there are a few of you out there), I can highly recommend a fun compilation that was done for the recent 60th Cannes Film Festival. It's currently showing on the Canal+ channels here, and it consists of 35 short (2-4 minutes) films created by invited by the festival to celebrate cinema and their feel- ings about it, as suggested by the title -- To Each His Own Cinema.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0973844/ We're talking about shorts by directors like Lars von Trier (a dark but hilarious piece about what many film viewers have fantasized doing to those who talk in cinemas), David Lynch (as you might expect, surrealistic and incomprehensible to the max), David Cronenberg (pseudo news coverage of the last Jew in the world committing suicide in the last cinema in the world), Roman Polanski (Cinéma Erotique), Gus van Sant, Claude Lelouch, Billie August, Jane Campion, Michael Cimino, the Coen brothers, Andrei Konchalovsky, Ken Loach, Wim Wenders, Kar Wai Wong, and others. Great fun! People who just *love* the cinema, and have devoted their lives to their love affair with the cinema, taking a few moments from their busy schedules to create short love letters to their beloved. I don't know whether it'll ever be released on DVD or in theaters in the US, but if it is, and you share these directors' love of movies, you might want to join in the fun. As for the token FFL "TM content" rule, the David Lynch segment does not seem to be contained in the version of the film they're showing on Canal+. It was shown during the opening ceremonies of the festival, and I saw it then. Suffice it to say that it was weird. If you weren't in the business of making excuses for Lynch because he's a TMer, you might suspect that it had been made by a psychopath. The reaction of the audience at the ceremony was stunned silence, followed by sporadic polite applause. This might have something to do with why it's not in the version being shown on Canal+. My favorite is by Chen Kaing, and starts with a flashback to kids in a backwater village in China, trying to watch a movie in an improvised theater by pedaling their bikes to generate enough power to run the projector. They're watching a silent Charlie Chaplin film, and laughing to beat all because of course it's universal. A night watchman arrives and chases off the kids before they can see the end of the film. All of the kids but one. He's still sitting there because he's blind, and can't run away. Instead he says to the watchman, "Can't we finish the film?" Flash forward to 2007, and the blind kid is now grown, and is using his cane to tap his way into a movie theater. He's still in love with the movies, even though he's never been able to see even one of them. Those who love film understand. These directors all understand.
