We've always been distrustful of the notion that "art film" must always mean "depressing slog".  For that matter, we've always been distrustful of the notion that "depressing slog" must always mean "unenjoyable film".  As Chicago author Amy Krause Rosenthal once wrote, defending her decision to avoid feel-good Hollywood fare, when she sees a movie with a bunch of rich, beautiful people who end up getting whatever they want the most, her own life seems like a failure by comparison, and she ends up being depressed -- but when she sees a movie with a bunch of miserable, unhappy people who just can't get their shit together, her own life seems pretty good by comparison, and she ends up being happy.

That said, we can't really dispute the Guardian's Catherine Shoard, who writes  -- inspired by the British opening of the mercilessly grim Austrian arthouse flick Import/Export -- that sitting through some such 'masterpieces' is the cinematic equivalent of an endurance marathon.  Will the movie be more or less depressing than 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days?  Will it be more or less ugly than Rosetta?  Will it have a greater or lesser number of extremely unattractive naked people than Japon?  Shoard then sets forth a checklist of required unpleasantries for any readers contemplating their own arthouse masterpieces, including "kinky yet joyless sex",  inclement weather, feral children, beat-up mopeds, and humor that isn't funny ("a clarinet on the soundtrack tends to signal when it's time to smile").  

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Opening in Germany this weekend is Udi Edel's Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.  A dramatization of the rise and fall of the West German Red Army Faction -- also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang -- that its producers insist is meant to deglamorize the 'terrorist-chic' reputation of the radical outfit, the movie has already attracted huge amounts of criticism for doing just the opposite.

Of course, it's no surprise that it's a controversial film.  The RAF were, after all, bombers, kidnappers and killers, and in today's terror-stricken environment, it's unlikely that any fictional treatment of the Baader-Meinhofs, no matter how critical, would be exempt from criticism for making heroes out of terrorists.  Though Der Baader Meinhof Komplex is intended to be a prestige picture  (it features an all-star cast, and has already been named as Germany's entrant into the Best Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards), it's encountering significantly more resistance than did Steven Spielberg's Munich, which covered some of the same psychic territory.

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It seems like only a few years ago that the bloody horrors of the high-definition DVD format wars pitted brother against brother and traumatized a generation of couch potatoes.  But really, it was only a few months ago that HD-DVD, now as forgotten a cultural phenomenon as Crystal Pepsi, was finally defeated at the hands of Blu-Ray.  Now, with movie fans the world over having only one new delivery vector on which to spend their excess cash, it is the grim moment that we must face the casualties of that war, and the biggest may be movie magic itself.

At least, that's according to Guardian film blogger Phelim O'Neill, who's been doing a bit of soul-searching as regards the desirablilty of seeing literally everything that Blu-Ray can show us.  A common complaint amongst hi-def enthusiasts is that the medium plays havoc on old movies; in the pre-CGI days of low-tech theatrical special effects, sets, makeup, and camera trickery were often spared from being too obvious by the fact that the camera generally didn't catch it all.  In high definition, every paper-thin wall, every pasteboard mock-up, every wig and every guy wire is apparent to even the laziest viewer. 

But that's not O'Neill's beef.  His complaint involves modern movies, where incompetently executed CGI can look far phonier than the back-lot studio sets of yesteryear; where "any surface with even a slight kick to it reveals camera crews, bystanders, movie equipment"; and where "important plotlines and revelations go unnoticed as you spend minutes staring at the fabric of costumes, the wallpaper".  Movies, he argues, were never meant to be a mirror to reality; they were always meant to be a hazy, diffused fantasy, and the more realistic they become, the more they lose the special qualities of unreality that make them such a successful artform.

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As we've discussed previously at the Screengrab, the documentary film is perhaps the most controversial and dynamic genre in contemporary motion pictures.  While with most critics, there seems to be a consensus that we are in a sort of golden age of documentary filmmaking, with documentarians suddenly reaching the same level of fame as mainstream movie directors, and a few documentaries making a killing at the box office, others express doubts about what kinds of documentaries are being made, while some insiders are concerned about new techniques in documentary filmmaking that blur the line between fact and fiction.

One of the hot topics in the British documentary field -- and one that's sure to make it to our shores sooner rather than later -- is the fact that many documentarians, unable to secure funding from the usual Hollywood moneymen for their sometimes-controversial movies, are turning to what the Guardian  calls "the third sector"; that is to say, charities, non-profit organizations, and advocacy groups.  Actor/filmmaker Gael Garcia Bernal, for example, has sought the aid of a number of NGOs, media outlets, and other not-for-profits for his new documentary, Resist.  In addition to traditional sources like federal arts funding, documentary filmmakers are seeking the aid of such groups to help them bypass the traiditional Hollywood financing and distribution schemes.  "The involvement of charities means that not only will the film inspire people to act, but we can also give them a way to put this inspiration to use afterwards," sayds Bernal.

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In what may or may not be a testament to the state of the French film industry today, some of the most interesting movies out of France in recent years have been directed not by veteran filmmakers, but by movie neophytes taking their first shot at standing behind the camera after experiencing great success in other artistic media.  Last year's highly praised The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was helmed by Julian Schnabel, generally known as a visual artist, and if The Possibility of an Island, the directorial debut of controversial novelist Michel Houllebecq turns out not to be one of the best movies of the year, it will at least be one of the most talked about. 

The Possibility of an Island, based on a novel by Houllebecq himself in 2005, certainly has an intriguing enough concept:  it reads like a disjointed surrealist take on science fiction -- a post-apocalyptic mash-up of A Boy and His Dog, Solaris and The Holy Mountain, with cloning and bikini contests thrown in for good measure.  Whether or not it will actually succeed is another matter; thus far, critics have not been kind.  The Guardian's Geoffrey MacNab sat down with Houllebecq to discuss the process of moviemaking, how it differs from writing, and whether or not he intends to contune on as a filmmaker.  "Maybe it is a superficial motivation," he says of filming many of the movie's scenes in Andalucian Spain, "but I always go to the locations when I write a novel.  In this case, some of the locations were so impressive that the idea for the film came frm that...I enjoyed the preparation of the movie.  I mean, the period immediately before the shooting when you choose everything, all the details.  When you create the world."

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The great thing about movie writing is that there's so much to love.  Since film is the most intensely collaborative of media, a good move can be appreciated on any number of levels, and even a bad movie might have something to recommend it.  That's because a movie isn't one thing, it's dozens:  it's a screenplay, a collection of performances by actors, a moving picture, a trailer, a logo, a soundtrack, a trailer, and a dozen other artistic endeavors all assembled into a single production.  As you can tell from other Screengrab features like our "OST" soundtrack reviews and Paul Clark's trailer reviews, we love the process of looking at a film not only as a whole, but as the discrete elements that make up that whole.  Which is why we're very enthusiastic about "Poster Service", a new feature on the Guardian's film blog.

Enlisting the aid of Paul Rennie, the head of the graphic design department at St. Martins College, the "Poster Service" series takes a look at some famous (their first installment was Gone with the Wind) and not-so-famous (this week features Pink String and Sealing Wax, an Ealing comedy that was a hit in Britain but little-known elsewhere) in an attempt to discern, from a designer's perspective, why some movie posters work and some don't.  Referring to the Selznick classic, Rennie observes that "the title of Gone with the Wind immediately communicates an association with the genteel sophistication of the southern U.S.  Against a backdrop of the Civil War, the associations of [its] typography alluded to a more luxurious and sensual environment than that of the WASPish north.  It's just right for a particular kind of passion romance."  Of Pink String and Sealing Wax, he notes, "the Ealing film posters are remarkable on two points.  Firstly, and against all the odds, they are recognisable works of art by artists whose work extends beyond the usual concerns of graphic design, cinema and fine art.  Secondly, they embrace and give passion to the political dimension of satire and social-realism -- especially rare in cinema."

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When José Padilha made Bus 174, he was praised by many critics as having created a documentary that treated the poverty, addiction, desperation and corruption in Brazil's favela slums with exceptional sensitivity and care.  Now, a few years later, after his film Elite Squad (a narrative film that was originally meant to be a documentary) has become the most expensive -- and most profitable -- film in Brazilian cinema history, a lot of the same critics are calling him a quasi-fascist.

What happened?

In a revealing interview with the Guardian, Padilha -- alternating between defensive hostility and sincere pleading -- makes the case that whatever people think of Elite Squad, it does nothing but portray the everyday reality he set out to film.  The story of Bope, a police special forces unit that goes after Brazilian drug dealers and street gangs with the same murderous brutality with which the gangs go after each other, is so naked and unrelenting in its portrayal of the deadliest police killers since Cobra that it's easy to imagine the director meant it as an ode to oppression.  And his star, Wagner Moura, is so charismatic it's hard not to read his bloodthirsty, enthusiastically torturing Captain Nasciemento as a hero.

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One of the oldest and most respected independent distribution houses in the United Kingdom, Tartan Films, is taking down its shutter.  Plagued by financial difficulties and distribution concerns, Tartan has closed down its offices, dismantled its American arm (Tartan Video USA), released all of its employees, and begun the process of selling off its highly respectable catalogue to other distributors.  In recent years, Tartan had been best known for its "Asia Extreme" series, which brought movies like Oldboy and the original Japanese version of The Ring to the West, but the catalog of the 26-year-old company included everything from Bergman's Wild Strawberries to The Death of Mr. Lazarescu.

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Last week, we brought you news of the Spanish Film Festival in London, in which Iberian directors struggled with their nation's cinematic identity and tried to come to terms with the fact that they are operating in a market where there is little interest in or knowledge of any Spanish film not bearing the Pedro Almodóvar imprint.  The festival inspired the Guardian's Paul Julian Smith to contemplate the existence of an "Almodóvar Curse", in  which the  Volver director's success might ironically be bad news for the Spanish film industry as a whole.

Well, apparently, someone got word of the piece to the man himself (we like to think that Mr. Almodóvar is a regular Screengrab reader), andhe was inspired to fire off a response.   His response is erudite and measured, if a tad defensive-sounding; he blames the fact that the vast majority of films shown in British theatres are English-language releases, with a miniscule 1.3% of all U.K. screens being devoted to non-English-language films not just from Spain, but from all other countries combined.  "It is deeply unfair, and also rather silly, to blame me for an absence of Spanish films at UK cinemas," he says; "Interest cannot be monopolised.  It can be 'attracted', or 'generated'.  But it cannot be monopolised, because it belongs to the person interested...how could I possibly monopolise international interest; through some form of mass hypnosis?"

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Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most critically acclaimed directors of his generation.  The shelf-haired auteur has produced film after film of stylish visuals, off-kilter humor, sexual frankness and emotional depth.  He's one of the few filmmakers on the international scene whose very name is enough to open a movie and make it profitable.  And he's managed to put his homeland of Spain on the cinematic map like no other filmmaker since Buñuel -- and without spending half his life in Mexico and France, to boot.  By almost any reckoning, any country would consider him a godsend to their film industry.

So why do more and more people in the world of Spanish film keep talking about something called "the curse of Almodóvar"?

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WIth a BBC Radio documentary on the movement set to debut this weekend, the Guardian's Simon Hoggart spends some time remembering the Free Cinema movement of the late 1950s.  Now largely forgotten, the movement was nonetheless hugely influential at the time, popular with the working class whose lives it reflected on screen an instrumental in creating a new narrative focus in both British film and television.  (For Hoggart, there's a personal touch as well:  his father, Richard Hoggart, wrote a book in 1957 called The Uses of Literacy that reflected many of the same values and ideals as that of the Free Cinema movement.)

Looking at the movement from the perspective of 50 years later, it seems to represent a revolution so basic it's staggering that it ever seemed necessary:  Free Cinema (so named by its founder, the pioneering director Lindsay Anderson, because it was free of both the patriotic demands of wartime production and the commercial demands of mainstream cinema) wanted to do no more and no less than tell the stories of working-class Britons from all over the country, rather than simply focus on the stories of southern England's middle class and the aristocracy.  And yet the movies were so radical in their production methods (they were made with the cheapest available Bolex cameras, on budgets little more than a few hundred dollars) and so unique in their means (a number of them were funded as part of a community arts grant from a then-socially conscious Ford Motor Company, something that's almost unthinkable now) that the whole movement seems like something from a fantasy world.

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Leave it to the French to make the most existential sports film of all time.  It's a pity that soccer (or, as it's known everywhere else in the universe, football) isn't particularly popular in the United States, because that means not a lot of people in America will get a chance to see Vikash Dhorasoo's Substitute, one of the most compelling -- and angst-ridden -- sports movies ever made.  For a film that it would be a compliment to call 'amateurish' -- Dhorasoo was given a Super-8 camera only weeks before he started filming the movie, and some of its lighter moments come early in the film when he can't seem to quite get the hang of how it works -- it's an extremely fascinating one, probably one of the most interesting sports documentaries ever made.  Thrown together as a sort of lark-cum-confessional by its director, it shows a keen insight into the competitive psychology, provides a depressing but sympathetic look at how dull and desperate life can be for professional athletes who aren't lucky enough to be in the upper eschelons -- and does this on basically no budget, putting the glory-whoring pretentions of ESPN and the like to shame.

Most Americans, if they remember the 2006 World Cup at all, remember it for France's spectacular meltdown:  Zinedine Zidane, hero of France's previous Cup victory, became frustrated and enraged in the finals against Italy, headbutting a defender and contributing to his team's loss on penalties.  But his frustration was nothing compared to that of his teammate Vikash Dhorasoo:  raised in a working-class suburban tenement from which he escaped through willpower and his skill at soccer, he fought long and hard to become the best he could, and when he was selected as part of the French National Team, he dreamed of becoming the first player of South Asian descent to become a star in the world's biggest sporting event.  It was for this reason that his friend, French filmmaker Fred Poulet, gifted him with a camera:  to record his dream coming true.  But it was not to be:  Dhorasoo, not the best player on the team but still a footballer of great skill, was never given much of a chance to succeed on the team.  When the team was doing well, he wasn't needed, and when they weren't they couldn't risk putting him in.  His coach used him only as a substitute and wouldn't give him a reason why, and during the entire World Cup, he played only eight minutes in two matches.  His teammates won't talk to him for fear of breaking the French team's notorious code of locker room silence; he can't use any official footage of the games because of copyright restrictions; he can't communicate with the German family that hosts him during the game; and, worst of all, as he laments, "I'm a footballer, and I'm not playing football."

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Americans are often so wrapped up in the kind of navelgazing prompted by our own entertainment industry that we forget how foreign countries are more than just markets to which we can ship our films for extra box office juice.  The history, culture and politics of every nation has a powerful effect on how they react to cinema, and two stories in the Guardian illustrate the continuing ability of film to heal old wounds -- or open them up again. 

Polish director Andrzej Wadja already had built up a stellar reputation, and at age 80, seemed likely for a future when he would simply be remembered as one of the last of a well-regarded generation of Polish filmmakers.  Wadja, however, isn't ready to bow out gracefully, and indeed, has very likely made the film that will be remembered as his greatest.  Katyn, which tells the story of the massacre of over 20,000 Polish soldiers slaughtered by Soviet troops in the eary days of the Second World War, has already been hailed as a great cinematic acheivement, scoring an Oscar nomination and heaps of praise for its skill, emotion and uncompromising approach wherever it's played; but for Wadja, it was more than just an artistic endeavor.  His father was one of an astonishing eight thousand Polish officers killed at Katyn, with an eye towards permanently crippling Poland's military class in order to preemptively shatter resistance to Soviet rule.  The massacre has been hugely controversial since it first happened; the Nazis exploited it in order to portray themselves as an acceptable alternative to the Russians, the Russians themselves attempted to blame it on the Nazis and obfuscated its details for decades; and the Americans and British helped cover it up in order to preserve their wartime alliance with Russia.  All of which begs the question, will Katyn play in Russia?  Andrzek Wadja vows that it will, saying that while he has yet to find a distrubutor there, "the film is not against the Russian people.  It is about the horrors of the Stalin regime.  It is enormously important for this film to be shown in Russia if Polish-Russian relations in the 21st century are to be based in truth, not lies."

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Today, there are more film festivals all over the world than ever before.  (Hell, Marfa just had one, and they don't even have a movie theater.)  This is indisputably a good thing for moviegoers, as it gives them a chance to hobnob with filmmakers, get a little touch of cinema magic wherever they happen to live, and catch a glimpse of movies that probably aren't otherwise going to be playing at a theater near them anytime soon.  But more and more, business insiders, from producers to filmmakers to the press, are starting to ask the question:  is it a good thing for the movie business? 

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In this week's Guardian film section, blogger/critic John Patterson reminds us that, amongst the other debts we owe to Judd Apatow, we can also thank him for helping shred one of the last remaining bougeois taboos in cinema:  the one that state that the human penis cannot be seen at any cost. 

Patterson reports that it took a string of comedies, from Superbad to Forgetting Sarah Marshall to the upcoming Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, to shatter the ironclad reluctance of American bluenoses to the merest suggestion of the national generative organ.  The penis is, after all, as Patterson notes, a comical thing -- "just ask any woman."   Prior to the recent proliferation of the dick as joke (not to be confused with the dick joke), big-screen appearances of the little man were confined to pornography, well-meaning art films, and any movie starring Harvey Keitel.  

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Julian Schnabel, director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, talks to the Guardian's Francine Stock.  And talks.  And talks.  And talks. 

Schnabel has always had a reputation as...well, a polite person would say "somewhat difficult".  An impolite person would say "a complete asshole".  Since making the transition from visual artist to filmmaker -- a transition which he still won't discuss in anything but the thorniest terms -- he certainly hasn't lost his ability to be really contentious, as this interview (conducted at the British Film Institute Southbank) makes clear.  He argues with Stock over the proper attribution of a Pablo Picasso quote, consults an eleven-year-old boy on the possiblity of a film adaptation of Kerouac's On the Road, asks "Whoever heard of the Coen Brothers?", and generally behaves like the tyro he used to be when he was just a New York scenester.  

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Hey, have you heard that this is the year of the unwed mother? It's true! 2008's official dead horse is the trend towards movies featuring women who are unmarried, pregnancy, and strangely diffident about it. If you don't believe us, read, oh, every other film blog in the last twelve months or so.

In addition to daily blog-fodder, the Year of the Knocked Up and Wisecracking has inspired lots of back-and-forth opinionating among women, mothers, pro-choicers, anti-abortionists, and everyone else who has, or thinks they have, a stake in whether or not women should be having kids out of wedlock. Juno, understandably, has been at the center of the debate, with some unusual results: no less august a personage than right-wing cultural critic/humorless Walter Peck look-alike Brent Bozell, a man with a history of despising anything that might suggest the enjoyment of life, has come out in favor of the film because of its alleged pro-life message.

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The WGA strike is entering its seventh dreary week, and as anyone who's been forced to sit through an episode of Make Me a Supermodel would agree, we've all suffered enough.  Still, with no end in sight, even upstanding joes like Jon Stewart are scabbing it up, and the, erm, highly prestigious Golden Globe Awards are the first major casualty, with the Oscars possibly next to fall. 

But the thing about the Writer's Guild of America is that they're the Writer's Guild...of America.  Their beef is is with stateside producers and studios, which means that when the BAFTA Awards are held in London on February 10th, writers, actors, and directors will all be able to hobnob together just as if they aren't going to start screaming at each other once they get back across the pond. While not everyone in the UK is happy about it (the Sky One network had the bad luck to buy the rights to broadcast the Golden Globes starting this year), most industry insiders are predicting a bigger-than-usual Hollywood contingent at the BAFTAs.

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The previously publicity-shy Coen Brothers are practially media darlings with the release of No Country for Old Men, but one of the most enjoyable interviews they've done as part of the blitz is this one, with the Guardian's always-reliable John Patterson.  The boys seem downright gleeful -- giddy, even -- discussing the ultraviolence they bring to the screen in the Cormac McCarthy adaptation; likewise, they seem well aware of the inevitable comparisons to the works of Sam Peckinpah that the western setting and over-the-top bloodshed is likely to draw.  Ethan says "We were aware of the basic link just by virtue of the setting, the southwest, and this very male aspect of the story. Hard men in the south-west shooting each other - that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing...you show a hard-on guy in a western-cut suit and it already looks like a Peckinpah movie. Same kind of shorthand."  Over the course of the interview, they also provide insight into Javier Bardem's inhuman haircut, why they're not likely to ever take on a science fiction movie despite dabbling in almost every other genre, and the surprisingly high death toll of animals (cows, lizards, rabbits, dogs) in their films.  In fact, it's that thread of the conversation that leads to a surprising preview of their next, and still unnamed, film project:  "It's a proper western, a real western," Ethan explains, "set in the 1870s. It's got a scene that no one will ever forget because of one particular chicken."

Is there no end to the misery wrought by that beastly creation, the internet?  First it destroyed the music business; then it brought the movie and TV industry to a crashing end; and now, it's going after the only thing we have left:  pornography.  Yes, home porning is killing the smut industry, as this article in the Guardian makes clear.  Sites like YouPorn and PornoTube (that's some clever naming, there, fellas) are bringing the dedicated masturbators of cyberspace for free stuff that they once had to pay for, and the situation couldn't be more dire -- after all, at a rough estimate by the International Society for Rough Estimations, pornography accounts for 99% of the internet's revenue stream.  According to the article (which also features the delightful quote "The adult entertainment industry is starting to get aggressive"), pornographers are beginning to lay off their employees, which must make for some amusing unemployment applications.  One upside to the woes of the skin trade, though:  thanks to its, er, miminalist dialogue, at least they're not suffering much from the ongoing writer's strike.

Continuing news from the front lines of the WGA strike: commenting in the Guardian, indie screenwriter William Boyd lays out the facts of the case for a British audience and notes that in the digital age, there's much more to his outfit than Jack Warner's notorious "schmucks with Underwoods." Cinematical reports on a new study (details of which appeared in Sunday's New York Times) that suggests studios are losing money thanks to back-end-loaded participation deals, where big-name stars, directors and producers eat up such a large percentage of a film's total revenue that only the biggest movies turn a profit. Monika Bartyzels argues that the writers are only a scapegoat for studios looking to blame someone else for their own short-sightedness. And in Wired, John Scott Lewinski speculates that the strike might be just what the studios are after to use legal wrangling to get out of top-dollar contracts and high-end development deals. — Leonard Pierce