The Screengrab

By Mike D'Angelo 

In one sense, Standard Operating Procedure is anything but. Errol Morris has few rivals among documentary filmmakers, but he isn't renowned for tackling hot-button issues torn from yesterday's headlines; most of the folks who've sat down before his patented Interrotron camera have been either fascinating eccentrics (Gates of Heaven; Fast, Cheap & out of Control) or aging provocateurs willing to discuss controversies from decades past (Mr. Death, The Fog of War). For all its lurid notoriety, Abu Ghraib seems almost too ordinary a subject for someone as outlandishly gifted as Morris, and while he's done his usual formally sophisticated and journalistically thorough job, S.O.P. is the first movie he's ever made that gives off a faint but unmistakable whiff of déjà vu.

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NEW YORK: Thursday, December 13, Film Society of Lincoln Center has an intriguing double bill: Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, a new documentary directed by the critic Kent Jones, and produced and narrated by Martin Scorsese, will be shown along with the classic Lewton production I Walked with a Zombie. Installed on the RKO lot and given his own production company and a bagful of nickels, Lewton developed horror films in his own distinctive house style, long on angled shadows, underpopulated sets, and the tingly dread that talented directors like Zombie's Jacques Tourneur could create out what remained unsaid and unseen. Jones will be on hand to talk about his own movie and introduce Zombie.

On Sunday the 16th, Lincoln Center has another double bill, this time starring the face that launched a thousand bathtub-gin parties: the iconic flapper heroine of the silent era, Clara Bow.

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If you like heart-warming show-biz success stories, you need to check out this account of how Gabourney Sidibe, a twenty-four-year-old sometime performer too level-headed to pursue an acting career full-time at the expense of a steady paycheck, won the leading role in the movie version of the poet-novelist Sapphire's Push at an open audition; it has everything but a big star breaking her leg just before the curtain goes up and Warner Baxter telling Ms. Sidibe that if she doesn't go out there and become a star, the finance company will repossess the prop man's daughter's braces. It's all the more resonant because Ms. Sidibe is a plus-sized African-American woman, which is to say that she's not someone who could have stormed Hollywood confident that there would at least be a surplus of available roles for which casting directors might deem her appropriate. "When she was younger," reporter Jake Mooney writes in The New York Times, "she was teased about her appearance. More recently, when she hung out with her theater friends, some other girl, taller or skinnier, always got all the attention. 'I was comic relief,' she said. 'The best friend.'" For hope and inspiration, she would turn to the example of Mo'Nique, "the plus-size actress and comedian. . . and pray to be like her." In Push, which will be directed by Lee Daniels (Shadowboxing), Mo'Nique will be playing Ms. Sidibe's mother. — Phil Nugent

The next James Bond film (which is being called Bond 22 until someone comes up with an even more meaningless title to stick on it) certainly doesn’t read like a James Bond film. In fact, it reads like a movie designed to make the Academy sit up and take notice: its director, Marc Forster, helmed two films (Monster’s Ball and Finding Neverland) that won Oscars and just completed a third, The Kite Runner, that may receive similar acclaim. Its screenwriter, Paul Haggis, has been nominated for five Oscars, has won two, and is generating huge amounts of Academy Award talk for In the Valley of Elah. And no less a source than Max von Sydow claims that the role of perennial Bond nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld will be played by Mathieu Amalric, who’s currently wowing the critics in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. With Forster telling the New York Times that his vision of the character is dark and tormented, and pontificating that "the most interesting place for a James Bond movie to go is inward — deeper into Bond himself," will Bond 22 be the first 007 film to court critical respectability? Or is Forster just vaporing to defend the giant paycheck he’s going to get? — Leonard Pierce

It takes a special kind of actor to dominate the screen in a role that requires him to remain physically prone and grow increasingly comatose over the course of a two-hour, thirty-three-minute movie. Ion Fiscuteanu pulled that feat off as the title character of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, the 2005 black comedy that stormed the festival circuit, heralded the resurgence of the Romanian film industry, and won Mr. Fiscuteanu the Best Actor prizes at festivals in Copenhagen and his native Transylvania. Now Fiscuteanu has died, at the age of seventy, reportedly after a bout with colon cancer, which was one of the hundred or so ailments that the clueless, distracted doctors in the movie tried to ascribe to his character in the movie. Fiscuteanu was best known for his theater work, but also appeared in a handful of other movies, most notably the 1992 The Oak. But he will probably be best remembered for his unlikely starring role as the luckless Lazarescu, a modern image of man's impotence in the face of bureaucratic indifference and neglect, barely mustering the strength to raise a middle finger in protest as he's wheeled through the exit door. — Phil Nugent

The contemporary American independent filmmaking scene as we know it was born some thirty-five to forty years ago, and John Sayles has as much right as anybody to claim midwife status. Any aspiring filmmaker whose films aren't designed for mainstream success would do well to consider the Sayles business model, whereby the director saved the funds he got from writing TV-movies and Roger Corman genre flicks and plowed them into his own low-budget productions. Now, as John Anderson reports in The New York Times, Sayles and other indie directors of his generation are facing a new problem: moving towards their sixties while continuing to work outside the industry and courting an audience that thinks of "indie film" as a young person's game. (In the new documentary Lynch, the sixty-one-year-old director of Blue Velvet can be seen courting an Internet audience, renouncing film for digital video and, with respect to getting funding, declaring his eternal gratitude to the French.)

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As the WGA strike drags on, America is perhaps more aware than ever of the issue of compensation for web-based content. With piracy an everyday fact of life for the studios and more internet content being produced every day, opinions on web issues are coming fast and furious from every corner: Jaron Lanier, an internet content provider (and former author of the manifesto "Piracy is Your Friend") has become an internet apostate and now sides with the striking writers who demand to be paid for web work, as his editorial in the New York Times makes clear. At Bit-Tech, however, indie producer Eric Wilkinson admits that his film, Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth, is getting as much attention as it is largely due to its having been widely pirated by Bittorrent sites. Perhaps our favorite take on the piracy issue comes from The Office writer/actress Mindy Kaling (who's currently on strike). Addressing movie theater PSAs that compare pirating films to stealing a car, she says, "You know what? I would steal a car, if it was as easy as, like, touching the car, and then thirty seconds later, I owned the car. . . and if, by stealing the car, the person who owned the car, they got to keep the car." — Leonard Pierce

Labor on the march! The Writer's Guild of America strike is a month old, and Hollywood is starting to feel the effects — a number of shows are set to start showing reruns and clip shows, while 'replacement programming' is about to rear its ugly head. Greg Saunders, writing on Tom Tomorrow's blog, discovers some sneaky anti-writer reporting on CNBC and shows us how to lie with statistics; news writers for CBS — who have been working without a contract for over two years — join the strike; and Michael Eisner, who doesn’t exactly have a rich history of supporting workers, tells the New York Times that the striking writers are "stupid" and "foolish" and that "there’s not a crumb to spare" for them in the digital media.  Eisner’s salary, bonuses and stock options in his final year at Disney totaled over $100 million — barely a fifth of his peak earnings! — and you didn’t see him go on strike, did you? — Leonard Pierce

After Julian Schnabel made his directorial debut with the 1996 biopic Basquiat, the art critic Robert Hughes called it a movie about the worst painter of the 1980s, made by the second worst. (Because Schnabel cast it from the ranks of all his fashionable New York character actor friends, he also made it possible for The New Yorker's Anthony Lane to describe it as the kind of movie in which "Christopher Walken passes for normal.") Rather surprisingly, Schnabel has kept at it, and now, seven years after his remarkable second film Before Night Falls, he's back with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on the acclaimed memoir by Jean-Dominique Bauby.

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