The Screengrab

If you've been enjoying using this Internet thing to watch short films and sign anti-Uwe Boll petitions but have started wondering when it's going to begin impacting the way feature films actually get made, you might want to check out My Movie Studio. This is an Internet-based scheme designed to attract mobs of investors and unlikely sources of talent and bring them together in a plan to change the face of movies as we know it, or at least have some chuckles while perhaps making a few bucks. The site invites anyone who can come up with a dumb enough on-line pseud to set up a "pitch page" and describe their idea for a really cool movie. "Your Movie Pitch," as the rules lay it out, "is the plot of your movie, distilled to its most essential elements. Make it punchy. Make it specific. Give it a tone. Make it memorable. You can add anything you'd like to support your pitch: a synopsis, poster art, character art, storyboards, a longer treatment, a trailer you made with your friends, songs you think would be great in the soundtrack, original score by you—whatever you think will get people excited about your idea."

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Melvin Van Peebles has been well-established as a maverick independent filmmaker and provocateur since at least 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song. His new film, Confessions of an Ex-Doofus-Itchy-Footed Mutha, confirms that he's also still got a way with titles. He also still has an admirable willingness to make a public jackass of himself and an impressive ability to coax other people into coming along for the ride. Aside from that, though, there isn't a lot else to say about this smeared-looking video fantasy, spun off from one of his old stage shows, Waltz of the Stork. There might have been a few things that should have been said to Van Peebles before he made it, but I don't know who would have been deputized to say them. When the man's own son, Mario, has signed off for a cameo appearance as a pirate, it's hard to say who might have been best qualified to stage an intervention.

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Some of the documentaries at Tribeca this year feel like messages in a bottle sent from the recent past, efforts at preserving material that will be useful to those who eventually write the definitive histories. Pray to Send the Devil Back to Hell is a mixture of old news footage and fresh interviews dealing with the fifteen years of chaos and carnage that followed the declaration of civil war in Liberia in 1989. Ragged as the movie is, it makes for an inspiring viewing experience, and its tribute to the "women's peace movement" of Liberia succeeds in taking something that, at the time, may have seemed like a footnote to the big events and making the case that it was instrumental in bringing about many of the happier developments in this story. The women's peace movement grew out of the escalating sense of hopelessness that developed as President Charles Taylor and the "warlords" jockeying to replace him both used violent terror as their main tool in their battle for power. Things finally got bas enough that the Christian and Muslim women of Liberia, for the first time in their history, joined forces to campaign for peace through public protests and more intimate strategies, such as what one of them calls "sex strikes." The campaigners betray no hesitation in declaring themselves the representatives of peace by virtue of their gender, and united as a group against men, who they regard as "guilty" of supporting violence "either by commission or omission." As they see it, the men are the ones with the power in their society, and if they didn't want the bloodshed to continue, they could do something to stop it. Instead, they've used their power to bring war--and to approve the use of rape as a weapon in warfare.

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NEW YORK: Though it's not clear just how widespread this information was among the average moviegoers of the day, in retrospect it's only become clearer and clearer that Jean-Luc Godard owned the 1960s. None of the gazillions of filmmakers who tried to copy or emulate him at the time found a way to do it without looking ridiculous, and Godard himself has spent the last forty-odd years wondering why nobody believes him when he insists that his later work is much better. Deal with it: Godard's sixties movies, which began with the 1959 Breathless and ended with the 1968 Weekend, which ends with the words "End of Cinema" and which was followed by, of course, more movies, amount to an enduring alternate history of their period, one caught on the fly, and seemingly composed and moods and signals snatched from the air. They are completely of their moment and haven't really dated, and they pointed in a direction that no one has really been able to follow, Godard included. Starting today and continuing through June 5, Film Forum has the whole kicking, biting, flirting package, including the first of Godard's post-Godardian films, the 1969 Le Gai Savoir, and Sympathy for the Devil, which really doesn't belong in this company but has to be included in any comprehensive salute to Godard and the 1960s, 'cause it's got Rolling Stones in it.

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The English film Boy A, one of the strongest dramatic features in this year's Tribeca Film Festival, is a sympathetic character study of a person that most of society would vote to flush: a twenty-four-year-old man (Andrew Garfield) who's just been released from prison after serving a fourteen-year sentence for a murder committed when he was ten years old. The movie, which is based on a novel by Jonathan Trigell, was directed by John Crowley from a script by Mark O'Rowe. They previously worked together on the Intermission, an invigorating jumble of a movie with a slew of characters colliding with each others as their storylines criss-crossed. Boy A has a smaller cast and a much tighter focus: everything comes down to the character who, during his trial, was turned by the tabloids into a monster known by the protective alias "Boy A." Preparing him for release into the world, his gently paternal counselor (Peter Mullen) christens him "Jack" and advises him to immediately start applying for as many jobs as he can, because "the more forms you fill out, the more real your name's going to become to you."

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The documentary Guest of Cindy Sherman is the unchallenged hot-gossip item of the Tribeca festival. The film, which credits Paul H-O (that's "Paul Hasegawa-Overacker" to his mama) and Tom Donahue as co-directors, uses a lot of footage from Gallery Beat, a New York public-access show that Paul H-O starred in during the 1990s, applying a snarky, "in" tone to coverage of the local art scene. Over the years, Paul — I don't really feel comfortable acting as if I'm on a first-name basis with the guy, but I'd just feel silly calling him "H-O" — became an accepted fixture of the New York art scene from barging into galleries on opening nights and shoving a microphone into people's faces, which may say something about how small and in-bred the scene is, though some would probably insist that it says something about how important New York public access broadcasting was in its glory days. Anyway, after the art star Cindy Sherman agreed, to the surprise of everyone, Paul included, to appear on the show, she and Paul became a couple, to the flabbergasted bewilderment of everyone, Paul included. All seemed to be going well in Paul's world for quite a while, as well it might, considering that Sherman was rich, acclaimed, beautiful, sweetly nurturing, and to judge from the photographic evidence available here, has aged less in the past twenty years than Paul has in the last two. But Paul, who had tried to crash the scene by making his own career as an artist before public access called out his name, felt increasingly self-conscious about the fact that his significant other was a big, big deal and he was a measly little nobody. (To give him his due, it does sound as if this situation was brought to his attention through some pretty cringe-worthy slights.)

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Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind nicely sums up the excitement and frustration of the film festival experience. Inspired by the work of Howard Zinn but outreaching him in poetic resonance, this 58-minute film by John Gianvito is a thrilling, one-of-a-kind picture, and by all rights ought to be the election-year movie of 2008. What's frustrating about it is simply the possibility that it may not be widely seen (though the first three minutes have already made their way to YouTube; watching it can give you a taste of Gianvito's method but little sense of how powerful it is in its total cumulative effect).

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In his recent, attention-getting Village Voice article proclaiming himself to no longer be a "brain-dead liberal", David Mamet chided those who fail to appreciate how great it is here in the land of the free and who sit around trying to think up reasons to be dissatisfied with democratic capitalism, just so they can have something to be sore about. In Redbelt, Smiley Mamet's latest stab at writing and directing a movie, the hero, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a hard-working, incorruptable black man who's trying his damndest to make an honest living running a martial-arts academy that does its bit for society by training police officers in methods of self defense. But when we meet him, he's already in danger of going out of business, and then evil Hollywood types steal his technique of pitting combatants against each other after selecting one to be "handicapped" for the bout. Robbed of the only thing he has that may have monetary value so that these sharks can cheapen it by using it in circus-like arena ring competitions, he's ultimately reduced to agreeing to compete in one of the bouts in hopes of at least winning some prize money, and then he discovers that the contests are fixed. ("Whenever two guys are fighting for money," mewls the crooked promoter played by Ricky Jay, "the fight is never fair.") Does Mamet ever see any of the plays and movies he signs his name to, or is he so committed to the capitalist system that he has a bunch of cranks hired off park benches staffing a sweatshop where they grind this stuff out by the yard?

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Paul Scofield has died, at the age of 86. He had been suffering from leukemia. Widely regarded as one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his generation, Scofield had a richer career in the theater than in the movies, where his recessive, slightly chilly presence as much as his devotion to the stage may have prevented him from ever becoming a major star. Yet he won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his fourth film and second Hollywood-funded production, playing Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons (1966), director Fred Zinnemann Oscar-garlanded film version of Robert Bolt's play. (Scofield had earlier played the Nazi villain in John Frankenheimer's The Train, starring Burt Lancaster. Maybe he and Lancaster got on well, because one of his few other adventures in Hollywood hackwork came in the 1973 Lancaster vehicle Scorpio.) Scofield already had a Tony for the Broadway production of the play, in which he had made his American debut.

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The 1986 comedy Eat the Peach has the kind of modest, unpredictable charm associated with the early films of the Scottish writer-director Bill Forsythe. Its unforced affection for its working class characters' oddball notions and offbeat tendencies also recalls such Jonathan Demme films as Melvin and Howard, which may have something to do with Demme's decision to lend his name as "presenter" of the finished film. It's set in a rural patch of Ireland so desolate and hungry that you wouldn't be surprised to notice Mad Max fighting punk bikers on the horizon. The hero, Vinnie (Stephen Brennan) and his affable sidekick and brother-in-law Arthur (Eamon Morrissey) are themselves motorcycle enthusiasts, but they don't have any great enemies to battle, and after the local computer factory shuts down and the boss, having delivered a drunken tribute to the excellence of this beautiful land, returns to Japan, they don't even have day jobs. They repair to the bar, where they watch an Elvis Presley movie called Roustabout, in which the king rides his own hog around and around in a circular ramp called the Wall of Death. And soon the two men are busy slapping together a wooden version of the Wall of Death in Vinnie's backyard, while his small daughter looks in wonder and his wife Nora (Catherine Byrne) looks on in a kind of resigned despair. Soon they're taking on minor smuggling jobs to help subsidize the building of the wall; they tell themselves that when it's finished, there'll be a line of paying customers from all over, waiting to watch them ride it.

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