Thus it was with great surprise and anticipation that I picked up a copy of Yoram Allon, Del Cullen, and Hannah Patterson's recent book, The Wallflower Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors (Wallflower Press, 535 pages, $24.95, ISBN: 1.903364.03.4). The announced first volume in a trilogy that will also serve up volumes on Asian-Third World directors and British-European directors, this first one is distinguished, if not made indispensable, by its willingness to include as many directors as possible, even if they have made but one film.

This does lead to a few oddities, however. Why is one-shot-wonder Steven Baigelman included, and even praised, when William Lustig, one of the great New York City horror helmers like Larry Cohen, Abel Ferrara and Frank Henenlotter, is left out? In fact, Henenlotter is left out, too. Why is Tim Robbins given such a generous appraisal? Why is Frank Oz given such a generous appraisal? On the other hand, it is good to see Joseph Ruben and Ron Underwood receive critical seriousness.

I think the reason for this critical unevenness, if you will, is because the book is written not by one person bringing a sole consciousness and critical consistency to the material, but by a team of 74 critics ranging from the obscure to the relatively famous. This has two other consequences. First, there is no explicit ranking. I know that ranking rankles Hollywood. Sarris was never honored by any directorial group, as far as I know, because he dared to say that there was a difference between Jean Renoir and John Huston, yet he did more to enhance the standing of directors in general than any other writer in the '50s and '60s. Still, does one want awards, or critical exactitude? Second, there is an inconsistent effort to trace thematic concerns through the careers of the directors discussed. When themes are noted, too often they are superficial or obvious. The whole point of auteurist criticism is to find the consistent visual and thematic elements that bonds a director's career together and which proves that he or she is not just a Hollywood hack, as so many producer dominated directors are today.

Obviously in a project this big, errors are going to slip in, and I do not relish pointing them out. Nevertheless, here is what I have found from a relaxed browsing through about 15 per cent of the book so far. For one thing, an editor or copyeditor has imposed the phrase "centers on" or "centers around" as a prelude to a plot summary in far too many listings (Pakula, Bernard Rose, scores of others). The editors' preface refers to something called the International Movie Database. Perhaps this is what the service is called in Europe, but if indeed this is not a typo for the Internet Movie Database, I'd sure like to know its URL. On page 384 someone writes "effecting" when they mean affecting.

But of course facts in the actual director citations are more important. The listing for Alan J. Pakula refers to the Jane Fonda's characterization in Klute as "superb," then goes on to call her character Daniel, and then later Bree Daniel, instead of the character's actual name, Bree Daniels. This listing also says that The Pelican Brief "centres on" a "plot to assassinate two Supreme Court judges," when in fact that plot has been realized and the movie is about the person who solves the mystery. Consenting Adults is presented as a Martin Sheen movie "centering on" a family that learns that "their perfect all-American son is gay." I have no idea which Martin Sheen movie this is, but it isn't Consenting Adults, which is a Kevin Kline suburban thriller with an early brilliant performance by Kevin Spacey. It's odd that the author missed this, as Pakula is praised in the listing as a great thriller director. Oh, by the way, the listing also doesn't mention that Pakula is dead.

The introduction by Sight and Sound editor Nick James, whose name is on the cover instead of the editors, is rife with errors. He says the '60s and '70s "was" a cinephile era and later refers to "these" quartet of films. When listing a series of "epic-scale" male auteurs he tacks on Kathryn Bigelow, perhaps out of democratic desperation for equality. He refers to the "bank heist" in Reservoir Dogs when it is a jewelry store job; and credits Joel Schumacher with German birth. The very book he is introducing says that Schumacher was "born in New York in 1939." Perhaps Mr. James did not have the book at hand when composing his introduction.

On the other hand, James makes several good points. He notes that the typical mode of the 1980s US indie film might be "loosely characterized as disjointed, instinctual or magic realist narrative structures married to a cool, downbeat visual style." He laments that "nearly everything that is not a blockbuster, a teen comedy, a kid's animation or a women's picture is a Miramax-type movie." He also complains, "who would have thought that Gus Van Sant would be capable of such a quintessential 'Miramax movie' as Good Will Hunting." But James's imprimatur on the project is a reminder of how much the book sounds like an issue of Sight and Sound, with its inconsistent balancing act between the rigorous and the fun while always choosing the wrong "fun" films, its institutionally authoritative voice, and its insistence that a good movie have a political agenda, as narrowly defined by the S&S staff.

I am sounding perhaps much more critical than I mean to be. For one thing, I have barely cracked a book which surveys 500 directors, though it is telling to find so many errors in a brief casual reading. For another, it is exactly the kind of book I like most of all, and I have enjoyed much of it so far; it's been informative and fun to argue with. I'm looking very much forward to the next two books in the series, which will cover filmmakers from regions very hard to research from an American base.

Incidentally, this form of free-range movie going in multiplex theaters is going to become harder. As I walked into the Lloyd Cinemas the other night to see Thirteen Ghosts I was stopped the manager (named Gene) and told to hand over my sack for inspection. There was a much higher security presence in the building, and the staff walked up and down the aisles more often. I hardly think that a little theater in Portland, Oregon, is going to warrant terrorist action, but you never know. The forthcoming awards shows that will soon fill the airwaves seem a more likely target.

In a more recent article by Washington Post reviewer Tom Shales we get a different picture of the AMC situation: "American Movie Classics (AMC), TCM's chief rival, in about 20 million more homes, is sloppier with its movies, many of which, of course, are not classics or even classics of kitsch. And some aren't American either. Last year AMC added commercials between films, after years of going without them. It was a dirty trick to play on loyal viewers…AMC can go take a flying leap. They haven't been the same since they banished Bob Dorian anyway. Apparently they're trying to lower their demographic profile, partly by lowering the standards of the movies they show. They're showing more shoddy and tattered prints than usual, too." I have not returned to the channel since then. My personal boycott is caused partially by resistance to seeing commercials on a station I have already in essence paid to view; but also because AMC is tapped out for me. The station has show nearly everything, mostly Paramount movies, that I've wanted to catch up with. And AMC bowdlerizes its movies. Turner Movie Classics does too, so it's a good idea not to watch any film made after 1962 on that channel, but at least it also presents its films in the proper aspect ratio. Plus, there is now also the Fox Movie Channel. Launched in October of 1994, it became Fox Movie Channel in March of 2000. One resists falling further under the sway of Rupert Murdoch, but Fox has several things to recommend it. For one thing, there are no annoying hosts; trivial and information about the film is presented in graphic format before the movie begins. And Murdoch shows his films in the proper aspect ratio. Also, there are no commercials. Yet.

And it's as if Lynch has spent his career expanding on the scene at the end of Kubrick's Paths of Glory in which the German girl (and later Mrs. Kubrick) is dragged on stage and forced to sing to entertain the weary, at first derisive French troops. In his latest film, Rebekah Del Rio sings Roy Orbison's ballad "Crying" a cappella in Spanish, and is revealed to be lip-synching when she faints. Del Rio is dragged onto a stage in a bizarre late night cabaret with definite associations with Eraserhead.

The film's two lead characters witness the performance. Betty (Naomi Watts) is an aspiring actress relocating from Canada to Los Angeles. "Rita" (Laura Harring) is the mysterious amnesiac Betty found hiding in her aunt's spacious apartment. The two start out as girl detectives, but end up lovers, and it is after their first tryst that "Rita," still searching for clues to her identity, drags Betty to the late night alternative theater. Need one add that the purpose of the scene, as with many others in this film, remains inexplicable? Obviously, Lynch is interested in performance as a psychological and social act. He is also interested in destroying typical narrative structures in order to get at whatever truth, if there is any, that he is searching for. In Mulholland Drive, originally proposed as a TV series, Betty and "Rita"'s investigations touch on a vast conspiracy that exposes the way movies are really made. Unfortunately, the film suffers from its origins as a TV show. Too many plot ends and characters are introduced to no immediate or answerable purpose. In the end, then, Mulholland Drive is one of those films you either love or hate. One either falls in with its dreamy rhythms, or is exasperated by its lethargy and inconclusiveness. Many passages are achingly slow, stretched out and reiterated like afternoon soap operas. The pilot part of the film ends when Betty and "Rita" flee an apartment after discovering a corpse. After that, Lynch added newly shot material, and took the film in different direction. From that point on, Lynch Bunuellianly invades the mind of the deceased woman, now played by Watts, and doubles back to explore the events that led her to this ignominious death.

Several interpretations of Mulholland Drive have already appeared, attempting to grapple with this narrative shift. But surely it's clear that the story moves conventionally forward from "Rita's" amnesia and encounter with Betty, only after which is the film is lured into another zone, and essentially we see in the film's latter portion happened before the movie proper started, with a little shape shifting to draw parallels to "Rita"'s taste in women. Betty now plays the unknown woman they were looking for, and "Rita" plays herself. The narrative trick has been done before: Bunuel in That Obscure Object of Desire had two actresses play the same character, perhaps indicating the arbitrariness of desirable objects, but here offering an essay on character and change. It's clear that, as a show, Mulholland Drive would have been a blend of Twin Peaks with the old summer replacement show Coronet Blue, which had a similar plot arc. But like Todd Solondz in the also recent Storytelling, Lynch is drawn to a bifurcated narrative which, as it did in Lost Highway, offers the director best access to his bizarre metaphysics.

The metaphysics of Lost Highway seem particularly oblique, and that of Mulholland Drive equally so. Given Lynch's seeming beliefs in dangerous spirits and bio-invasion, you'd think that Lynch buys into the Los Angeles notions of New Ageism and pseudo-science. Instead here he seems to mock the L. A. lifestyle, and is particularly scornful of two director surrogates, both presented as inept frauds. There are two directors in the film, sleazy self-portraits of sleazy, craven, incompetent grapsers. But it is essential to say that the last part of the movie, the new material, is the best part of the film. There, Lynch paints a psychological of someone who has not attained the heights of the loathsome directors, who wasn't able to play the game, manipulate her career, not care about others as the Hollywood people presented are able to do. Taken on its own, this segment of frustrated love, betrayal, and self-hate is poignant and one of the most compassionate sequences of filmmaking Lynch as achieved.

A classic mainstream director, Ross quietly appealed to the middle classes and the older generations left behind by the Star Wars crowd, limiting himself to that blend of theater and movies that lures Oscar voters. He started out as a dancer and choreographer in the theater, but after breaking into the movies, Ross ended up doing light comedies with a theatrical foundation. Perhaps he was hilarious in person, but cinematically he went for the easy laughs, which always means of course no true laughs at all, as his films were meant to endorse presumptions—that young women who die young die beautifully (Steel Magnolias), that daughters are always troublesome but essentially good in the end (The Goodbye Girl, I Ought to be in Pictures)—rather than challenge conventional thinking, as every pundit will tell you good satire and comedy are suppose to do.

However it happened, Ross gravitated to films about people somehow leading double lives, wanting to be one thing but doing something else, literally as in Undercover Blues, or metaphorically (almost everything else, from The Owl and the Pussycat to The Turning Point), usually within the context of light romantic comedy. He didn't do anything particularly special with this "theme"; it's merely the sort of material he seemed to like.

A metteur en scene, he didn't metteur the scene very well, perhaps viewing himself as the servant of the text, and deciding to keep himself out of it, if he even had anything to give. The texts just weren't very good, however, and needed fluffing up from someone with a vision. From the egregious masochism of the failed writer played by George Segal in The Owl…, to the confusing, perhaps hidden motivations of the characters in Boys on the Side, the sort of material Ross metteured was rooted in the clumsy, large dramaturgy of live theater rather than the microscope of cinema.

His closest contemporary analog is probably Joel Schumacher, another director with roots in a different field who has no feel for the cinema beyond broad strokes and coded messages, but he also resembles Penny Marshall, who brings the same quality of bland TV shooting to all her high profile projects. It's always been a source of hilarity to buffs that Ross directed Woody Allen's Play it Again, Sam, yet in fact for all its visual blandness the film is smoother than most of Allen's comedies at the time, which means glossy professional that is personality-free.

In the end, Ross helmed only one truly outstanding film, The Last of Sheila, but that's a complex work more from the cunning, bitchy minds of Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins than the stolid experience of Ross, and succeeds because of its great cast rather than because of Ross's auteur identity. Some movies that should have been great, such as Pennies from Heaven from Dennis Potter's template, or The Seven Percent Solution, a Holmes pastiche from Nicholas Meyer's novel, seemed detached, insufficiently thought out.

Ultimately, Ross's aesthetic is compromised by casting woes. There were few casting coups in his career, mostly casting calamities: Robert Duvall as Dr. Watson? Kevin Bacon as a dancer? Steve Martin as a gangster? Whoopi Goldberg? In the end, Ross seems to have fulfilled his personal career goals, if only by pandering to Simonized texts; on the other hand, he gave a confused, retrograde audience the old time fare they missed, which no doubt made a few people happy. When we get around to assigning Ross his position in the Director's Project, his rank will fall in the harmless but not esteem-worthy category of Cable Ready.

The web version of the weekly Portland, Oregon, "alternative" newspaper contained the full interview with Busse, who sold a story to Salon.com that a reporter at WW recognized as significantly influenced, so to speak, by a story on the same subject that appeared in the Oregonian, the state's largest daily. To quote the salient part of Nigel Jaquiss and John Schrag's Willamette Week story: "On Sept. 19, Salon published a story by Busse titled "Down for the Count." An informative tale about the demise of prison boxing, the article paints a vivid picture of the last fight card staged at Oregon State Penitentiary. It's a masterful piece of writing, complete with detailed physical descriptions of the two combatants, highlights of their first two rounds and comments from attending guards. The problem is only one journalist was allowed to attend the bout…and it wasn't Busse. Rather, Michael Wilson covered the fight for The Oregonian, which published his story May 6." Wilson is also the author of the Memento Sunday feature I praised last month in this diary.

Busse's tortured interview answers to Jaquiss's rather reasonable questions really have to be read in full to be believed; but just as bad are the comments by the usually very news savvy Merc editor Steve Humphrey, who basically blamed Salon for not checking its facts. As a Mercury contributor, or perhaps a former Merc contributor (it's had to tell), I have to say that this inability to see lines that shouldn't be crossed is endemic to the institution.

When the paper started up, I was the theater reviewer for eight or nine months (until I could no longer bear seeing any more Portland theater). During the transition to my successor, candidates for the post were mentioned to me. They were always actors or playwrights. When I mentioned that nothing these people ever said in print about a play would be believed, even if they were truly honest, because they would be perceived, fairly or not, as compromised, my views seemed to have no effect. "This paper is about being fun," I was told by Phil Busse. "That's why we have a restaurant owner reviewing some restaurants for us." I explained that I had a problem with that, too, but I was speaking a different language that no one there understood.

Later, I wrote a review of the two-disc Criterion Spartacus that someone there changed to the supplements-free Universal version, embarrassing me and the paper. Impervious to that shame, the paper refused to run a correction; the error wasn't deemed important enough to correct, even though it made everyone look stupid or careless.

The minuscule staff of the Portland Mercury, which uses house pseudonyms for a few of its regular columns, is like a cult. They all believe the same things, and see the world the same way as their charismatic leader. They seem unable to have any perspective on what they are doing, and just don't perceive the rules of journalism as applicable to their "fun" paper. It's also a cult that's unusually hard to join; in that sense, I guess it is more like an exclusive, roped-off disco where everyone inside writhes cooly to music no one else can understand.

As the scion of the much loved and respected Seattle Stranger, the Portland Mercury, which began publishing in Portland around April of 2000, was greeted with enormous good will by the city's small core of actual newspaper readers who were sick of the bland official "alternative" paper—good will that the paper promptly began to piss away. The one unexpected consequence of its appearance is that it has served to compelled the WW to be a better paper, a state of affairs that should soon cease now that the PM threat has truly subsided. Unlike its parent paper, the Smirkury seems allergic to solid reporting of interesting stories, and to fine writing and true wit. Some of the worst, most pathetically embarrassing writing I have ever read has appeared in the Smirk, especially in its music pages. But then, it's all just in fun, isn't it?

"I have something to show you," says the friend. "I know you will be interested in seeing it."

Like Redford meeting Deep Throat in All the President's Men, I had to come at an oddly appointed time and not disclose my whereabouts to others. Arriving at my friend's house, I was ushered into the foyer.

With breathless, barely contained glee, my friend said, "I know you like Russ Meyer."

I brought the friend up to date as we passed from the foyer into the expansive, exquisitely acquitted house. "Well, yes, I am writing a screenplay called Topic A about him. As you recall," I patiently reminded my friend, "it is about the night Russ Meyer came to Portland."

The friend led me deeper into the house, saying with some impatience "Well, I have something to show you." This particular friend is a collector. And one of the greatest glories of my friend is to find the most obscure, rare, expensive, and fragile movie memorabilia. It doesn't hurt if the object is also something that a colleague is also looking for and failing to find.

It's a common syndrome in moviedom at this level: getting there first, getting something first, seeing it first. This bestows crowing rights. Then, a week later, as the DVD sits unwatched, the complete run of Movie magazine sits unread, or the next advanced screening comes up, the grasping film buff is off on another hunt, for that rare poster, that ticket to an exclusive screening, that disc.

We entered my friend's the lavishly outfitted study. The lights were low, so as to protect the posters on the wall: the King Kong poster over there, the Frankenstein on the ceiling. This friend has a mammoth library (unread) of screenplays, magazines, and film books, plus an array of secondary mementos, including, of all things, a replica of the statuette of the red garbed girl seen in the background of Crumb's office in Zwigoff's movie. This friend also has probably every DVD ever printed, almost all acquired free. Before that, now preserved in a temperature-controlled basement storage facility, was the video tape collection, which included among its glories the five hour rough cut of Apocalypse Now and a tape of Kubrick's Fear and Desire. There isn't much in the way of actual prints, though I may not be privy to these hard secrets (I've heard rumors of at least a print of 8 1/2 in that basement).

My friend led me to an enviously long wooded table in the center of the room, an artifact acquired in a library sale. Tonight, the surface was empty, but for a small pile, illuminated by a green shaded table lamp.

My friend stopped me at the table. "Here it is. Haven't you wanted to see it for years?" I said, "Yes," as I looked down on the three volumes of A Clean Breast, the autobiography of Russ Meyer.

The books were immense, with a solid binding and surprisingly thick paper. Published by Meyer himself, the set is available from his website for $350. Only my friend could afford such a luxury, without having to forego many others.

My friend allowed me to flip through the three dust jacket-free, robin's egg blue bound volumes (I had to wash my hands first, though). I immediately looked in the index for myself.

In 1979, I interviewed Meyer for Cinemonkey magazine. He was then promoting his last film, Beyond the Valley of the Ultravixens. I interviewed him in the lobby of the Benson Hotel (where Nixon wrote the Checkers speech), where he was accompanied by Kitten Natividad. She did not reveal her breasts to us. However, she did mention in passing that she was also a friend of Richard Brooks. That was in a way more interesting than the fact that she was currently Meyer's muse. Meyer was the complete promoter; every sentence that emerged from him was a double entendre. But he was also articulate about his cinematic strategies. And unabashed about his interest in large breasts.

Later that day, I saw the film at a private screening room with the other reviewers, and caught on to a promotional trick of Meyer's; Kitten went into the audience and pressed her chest against a carefully selected, obviously needy and female-deprived reviewer sitting in front of me. At the screening of the film the next night at the Bagdad theater in Southeast Portland, I took a close friend who, like Meyer, was also a large breast man. I positioned him with me in the fourth row, with my friend on the aisle. My scheme was only almost perfect. Kitten smothered the face of the gay guy in the third row, in front of us, not the fourth. Ah, well.

I had another encounter with Meyer a few years later. This was in the mid-'80s, when Meyer was invited up to Portland to host a revival of his films at the Cinema 21, one of the city's few rep houses. Meyer was bringing Faster, Pussycat, SuperVixens, and Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!. I had written a brief review of Pussycat when it played at the Portland State under the auspices of the school's Film Committee , and the showing was packed, not due to the review per se, but because Meyer had re-arrived. That night, I witnessed the birth of Cocktail Nation, still unnamed, a new generation coming of age and embracing the '50s aesthetic, "wearing grown up" dress instead of jeans and drinking mixed drinks instead of beer.

This sea-change led to the party for Meyer when came to Portland later to introduce his films. Cindy Matson, now the producer of Film at Eleven, and her husband Zorn, decided to host a cocktail party for Meyer at their NW 23rd avenue apartment. Between Meyer and the Cinema 21, they were able to make arrangements. Held before the first film's screening, the party was a riotous success, except for the fact that many of the women Cindy invited were afraid to come. Meyer, alone, was his charming self, always willing to pull out his wallet and show a photograph of his girl, an impossibly large Czech model. The evening was so rife with comic potential I resolved to fictionalize the event and turn it into a screenplay.

The first I heard of the Meyer book was in the late '80s. I received a call at the weekly newspaper where I worked. He was most eager to include some words from the Cinemonkey interview. I didn't believe it was him at first, and I recall that he was a little miffed that I would think it was a prank (unlike Hollywood, people in Portland are not used to receiving telephone calls from Icons). You can imagine my lack of surprise when I discovered that after all these years, I was not in the book's index. Oh, well. I was only able to spend a few minutes with the set, but noted that it is mostly photographs and quotes from reviews and interviews, interspersed with Meyer's autobiography, written in a style that can only be described as like his movies. I await further exegesis on this major publishing event from the appropriately reputable publications.

In Christopher Hitchens's new Letters to a Young Contrarian (Basic Books, 141 pages, $22, ISBN 0.465.03032.7), he practically ends the book with a funny Adorno quote. In Minima Moralia, Adorno says, according to Hitchens, "that an artistically satisfying film could doubtless be made, meeting all the conditions and limitations imposed by the Hays office (the Hollywood censor of the day), but only as long as there was no Hays office." What a wonderful quote! I wish I could explain it.

Hitchens's delightful little book is a "what I believe" essay posing as a series of short Rilkean letters to an imaginary corespondent on the question of how to dissent, a book which is meant to be part of a new series from Basic Books called the Art of Mentoring. Among the topics discussed are defining a dissenter, wit, the roots of argument, skepticism, how to live, the temptation of doing nothing, asking the obvious, religious belief, anti-theism, a daily test, and other things. The volume is easily consumed in one sitting (I read it today while out doing the laundry). Hitchens has of late been garnering yet more attention. He has run several columns in the Nation on the 911 events, and inspired the ire of Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, and other former friends. I've read all the columns and have no idea what anybody is really talking about, or what they mean in plain and simple terms. But then, I am not a thinker. I am a fan. I'm a visceral reactor, not a ponderer, exactly the sort of person Hitchens decries in his new book.

Hitchens is an excellent prose stylist with a huge vocabulary and a daunting catalog of quotes in his head (or on his desk). In a typical "letter" he cites, quotes, or mentions no less than John Osbourne, Vaclav Havel, E. P. Thompson, Rosa Parks, Solzhenitsyn, and Oscar Wilde. What's sad is that your average citizen, possibly even your average reader, won't have heard of any of these people, much less read them. Hitchens does have a habit of name dropping ("my dear friend Salman Rushdie"), and for a book as brief as this, he cites Maimonides as the source of all Jewish humor no less than twice. And for all his iconoclasm, Hitchens still betrays an affection for the Viennese quack Sigmund Freud. Also, I believe that it's the adrenal gland, not the adrenaline gland (page 32), and there's a confusing italics problem on page 42. But then because I can do nothing else I am a nitpicker.

Still, the theme of the book, as Hitchens puts it himself, is "advocating what I consider to be the glories of Promethean revolt, and the pleasures of skeptical inquiry," and he achieves his goal admirably. I doubt if any sensitive reader can finish the book without desiring to rush out and read Zola on the Dreyfus case. But back to that Adorno quote. I think it means that it's easier to comply with internal rules that arise naturally as artistic decisions rather than imposed by autocratic bureaucracies. Or perhaps it means that bureaucracies naturally inspire dissent. Whatever it means, it's a beautiful quote.

Suddenly, CNN is offering feeds from Arab television showing Gulf War-era green-hued night vision images of lights like fireflies nonsensically rising and falling. The images looked more like a video game than the prelude to Armageddon. Also given that these vague images were all that we were allowed to see, interest in the war quickly palled.

The action that started it all, the suicide strikes on the twin towers and the Pentagon, were much more televisual, happening unbelievably even as you were watching them, and portraying the human cost of the actions much more immediately. The retribution and vengeance that Americans presumably hunger for is being denied, at least on a visual level, despite the instigation of the longed-for military initiative that was designed to sate it. The networks did take a few minutes to show the villain Osama Bin Laden announcing at some undetermined time that yet more 911s would occur, inducing the appropriate measure of terror in the public even as the military actions designed to eliminate their potentiality were going on elsewhere in the world in a ghost like manner.

Within this context of terror, it seemed uncannily appropriate to receive in the mail Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe by Stephen Keane, from Columbia University Press's Wallflower Press Short Cuts series (144 pages, $16.95, ISBN 1.903364.05.1). The book proves to be a valuable if somewhat dry addition to the rather slim literature on the disaster films. Keane is a film teacher at Leeds, but surely even an academic can have a little fun with this ludicrous genre. Nevertheless, Keane offers up a short if comprehensive book that at times feels a bit too much like a Ph.D. thesis surveying the extent literature on the subject, citing Sontag, Durgnat, Yacowar, and others who have previously codified this genus. What Sontag and the others have noted is that disaster films are usually disguised as something else— biblical epics, science fiction films. Embedded into a beard genre such as a peplum allowed the disaster elements to come across more as lavish spectacle than as a gross appeal to an audience's cruel side.

Until the '70s that is, when disaster films more or less became a genre in their own right. Many of Keane's remarks are glumly timely. He discusses another genre expert, William Wheeler Dixon, who he says "looks at the ways in which disaster is being increasingly presented by the media as a form of entertainment. Whether this is looked at in terms of films or news coverage, the point is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference." Another point well made in the current context is an earlier remark that "the context for all of this intertexual media coverage in Volcano is the fact that 24-hour news channels have increasingly come to present disaster as live entertainment, the resultant confusion being: are there more disasters than ever before or is there just more television?" Even more presciently, Keane notes that, "In 1993 international terrorism became an acute domestic concern with the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, resulting in a feeling of vulnerability further compounded by an 'enemy within' Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. The explosion that opens Die Hard with a Vengeance certainly echoes the attack in New York, but the timing is also such that the ending of the film had to be re-shot in light of Oklahoma (with the action transferred from an exploding building to an exploding boat)."

Keane spends a necessary amount of time just working through definitions of the disaster, which is as hard to place as noir. The genre is difficult to identify and define. I remember having a lengthy argument in the cafeteria at college with an annoying acquaintance (whose name, coincidentally, was the same as that of an actor playing a prominent serial killer in a then-recent horror movie). He was adamant that Jaws was a disaster film. I was puzzled by that assignment and gently demurred that if anything it was a monster movie. He became almost hysterical, screaming, "It's a disaster! It's a disaster!" He was insistent that he was right; but as we were sitting in a cafeteria and not really listening to each other, there was no way for either to "win" the argument; it was a defining moment for me, as it showed the futility of argument, paradoxically in a college environment where spirited debate is suppose to lead to enlightenment, not calcification in one's dim views.

But that's another subject. The point is that in Yacowar's genealogy of disaster films, he makes room for monster films such as Godzilla and Swarm. This inclusiveness muddies the water to much for my taste, but I don't want to get into yet another shouting match.

Miramax's policy seemed to embrace the notion that movies are an insult to reality, which in a way is true, since Serendipity was filmed in Toronto rather than the Manhattan it seems to hold up as the ground zero of romantic fate. I agree with Todd McCarthy, who wrote in his Variety review of Serendipity that "Not so outstanding is the decision to matte out or otherwise obscure the late World Trade Center from shots that should have included the twin towers. Post-Sept. 11 releases such as "Don't Say a Word" and "Serendipity" offer incidental views of the buildings, and while these might momentarily jar the audience out of the fiction, the effect is nothing as compared to the gaping sense of Where Are They? when confronted with shots of Lower Manhattan absent its familiar landmarks. When are the filmmakers pretending this film was shot, yesterday? Deletion of the towers from the picture is infinitely more disruptive, not to mention insulting, than leaving them in." This is a peculiarly American form of Stallinism: removing the past from images for fear of hurt feelings rather than the spread of political apostasy. Miramax's idea evoked the inevitable inferiority feelings moviemakers have in relation to the rest of the culture, which is the reason why Hollywood people always give Oscars to British actors and directors, with their stagy, theatrical notions of what cinema is, over "vulgar" vital, and visual Americans.

The industry has postponed three films, Collateral Damage, The Sidewalks of New York, and Big Trouble, for various reasons all having to do with reminders they contain of 9/11. The terrorists have done what the Senate has been incapable of doing: making Hollywood censor itself. Of the three films, I have actually seen Big Trouble, which screened the day before the 9/11 events. A nuclear bomb on a plane figures in the plot. Big Trouble was pulled presumably because releasing a film in which bombs and planes, though not witty themselves, were the cause of wit in others, was deemed to be in bad taste. Does it take a major terrorist action to render Big Trouble recognizable as a movie of bad taste?

The worst aspect of this affair is the implicit acknowledgment that movies are an insult to reality, that movies trivialize the real events around us. The industry will no doubt have this attitude until the first TV movie about the 9/11 attacks goes into production. And by rushing to alter their movies to conform with the new reality created by the terrorists, to erase cinematically what the terrorists have deleted in reality, Hollywood has handed the terrorists a double triumph.

This is the Spanish movie released in 1997 that Cameron Crowe has re-made as Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise now in the lead, and Penelope Cruz recreating her role from the original. Directed by Alejandro Amenábar from a script credited to him and Mateo Gil, the film is a mysterious, but in the end somewhat derivative, tale that matches some of the failures of Amenábar's current word-of-mouth hit, The Others. Basically these are failures of imagination, clarity, and poverty of effect and pace. With moments reminiscent of various sci-if films ranging from The Matrix, Chris Marker's La Jetée, The Quiet Earth, The 13th Floor, and The Game, and the tone of a Twilight Zone episode, the film concerns César (Eduardo Noriega). In the film's opening he awakens and drives away from his apartment. But there are no people anywhere. He wakes up again, from what seems to be a nightmare, and we are re-introduced to César as a vain, competent cocksman who has to endure the complaints of his plainer friend Pelayo (Fele Martinez). Later, at César's birthday party, Pelayo brings his new girlfriend Sofia (Cruz), whom César opportunistically attempts to seduce as a way of evading another girl named Nuria (Najwa Nimri), a one night stand turned clingy. But César soon finds himself deeply attracted to Sofia. When Nuria seduces him yet again only to drive them off the road, César ends up alive but disfigured.

Now, during these scenes there are flashbacks or flash forwards of César, wearing a mask, under the observation of a psychiatrist, who is preparing César for a murder trial. These sequences are unclear chronologically until the very end of the film. In any case, now disfigured and lonely, César copes with his new world. He falls in again with Pelayo and Sofia, but this time wearing a mask prepared for him by the team of doctors he consults. Then, when César is on the brink of despair, the doctors come up with a procedure that restores César's appearance to what it once was. At this point, however, reunited with Sofia, he begins to have delusions. Now the film switches more or less permanently to the mental hospital where César is held, the new "now." Here, the doctor (Chete Lera) tries to get through to the mask-wearing César; but a snippet of a documentary on cryogenics on television sparks a memory. Accompanied by the doctor and a guard, César visits a cryogenic institute. There he learns, in the film's surprise ending, that it is 150 years after his car accident, when he was cryogenically frozen; everything he has remembered since is a memory he has manufactured for himself while in this state. Stunned, like Keanu Reeves coming out of his coma in The Matrix, he commits suicide.

Intriguing as it is, the film doesn't bother to explain everything. For example César makes repeated references to his "partners" conspiring against him. Who are they? Why are they never shown? Partners in what? His catering company? We never see him working.

The American version is apparently not much different, if reports on AICN are to be believed. Crowe's film concerns a publishing CEO named Christopher (Cruise) who leads a sensual, vacuous life. His demonic one night stand here is named Brenda (Cameron Diaz) and his new lover is still Sofia (Cruz). After the car wreck, Christopher emerges both horribly disfigured and angry, while his jealous best friend (Jason Lee) tries to steal away Sofia. As in the source, Christopher retrieves his face, and settles down with Sofia, only to hallucinate. The psychiatrist diagnosing him before a murder trial is played by Kurt Russell, and all the tricks of the film are explained in the last 10 minutes. Apparently, Crowe has added numerous cultural references and a great soundtrack, including Radiohead at the beginning in a scene borrowed from the original, but set in an utterly empty Times Square. Other tunes are by REM, Peter Gabriel, Sinead O'Conner, the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Bjork, and Jeff Buckley.

I'm very much a fan of Cameron Crowe's films (and coincidentally, I know the real life Penny Lane), but this material is a radical departure for him. I suspect that what made this film interesting for Crowe was the poignancy of the romance between Christopher and Sofia, and a chance the film gave a former member of the Uncool to explore the life of (and exact some revenge on?) one of the Cool. But we will find out for certain when the film is released on December 14th.

Until than, one has Conversations with Wilder, now in trade paperback (Knopf, 376 pages, $22.50, ISBN 0.375.70967.3) for consolation. The book seems substantially the same as the hardback version. The volume continues to be a key text for the '00s, as Truffaut's on Hitchcock was for the '60s; I know two people who read Crowe's book obsessively, thrilled by its evocation of a time when craft mattered in movies. My favorite photo in this book packed with frame enlargements and stills (some horribly cropped) is on page xvii; it shows all of Wilder's screenplays, leatherbound, sitting in a row on a shelf, going all the way back to his pre-directorial work, and including the much coveted The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. I would love to see the original script for this movie I adore, and dream of a DVD with the restored footage (that footage is out there, somewhere, as the book hints). I want Wilder to leave the set to me in his will. By the way, "Vanilla Sky" refers to a painting seen in the film.

Conrad's book is a critic free zone. Instead, he prefers to explore his own lifelong fascination with the director in an effort to make as many connections as he can among the films themselves. Conrad seems to have two strategies. First, he takes Hitchcock's films as an unofficial autobiography. He seems to see the filmography as much more personal than any other critic before him. And second, Conrad returns to the sources of Hitchcock's films, finding a great deal of interest in what Hitchcock and his screenwriters left out or dropped from the various novels, short stories, and plays, often suggesting that what Hitchcock deleted were the very things that drew him to the material in the first place, but which would be too revelatory if finally included (the sadism of Laughton in The Paradine Case, for example).

Conrad's arias are breathtaking. He skips among many films and makes numerous connections, but the book never feels superficial. One randomly picked page reveals citations and linkages among the following subjects: Godard, Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man, Dreyer's Ordet, The Lodger, God, divine intervention, Mount Rushmore, Saboteur, The British Museum (it's page 46 if you want to see how he connects the dots). Conrad, an Australian teaching in England, offers up a rich diet of insights, associations, interpretations, and beautifully phrased analogies (motels like the one in Psycho "institutionalize our transitoriness"). Conrad's bottomless energy reminds the reader of the early David Thomson (Movie Man) before Thomson's desire to join the movie industry shifted his sympathies from directors to producers. It comes as a logical surprise, than, when Thomson himself reviews the book for the New Republic's October 1 issue (typically, after what seems like a celebration, it ends on the sour note disparaging Hitchcock).

I have only detected a few very minor possible errors in Conrad's book. I think he slightly misinterprets Hitchcock's meaning when the director said that "The best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well," quoted on page 88. Surely Hitchcock was not deriding actors, but noting that there are certain people the camera loves even when they are inactive. Also, I don't remember that Stewart's character in Rope is in publishing, rather than the killers' (former) teacher, but I haven't seen the movie for a while. Nevertheless, Conrad's book is an invigorating read. There are right now at least 15 recent Hitchcock publications on my shelf, most occasioned by the Hitchcock centenary, with more to come (such as Patrick McGiligan's forthcoming bio). But Conrad's book instantly demanded a thorough reading.