GreenCine Daily has a wonderful transcript of a Sundance roundtable talk with Hal Hartley, Tamara Jenkins, David Gordon Green and Gregg Araki on their current works and the state of independent American cinema today. While I originally started reading it mainly for the Hal Hartley comments (you can actually pretty easily jump around in the discussion without it getting confusing), I actually ended up reading the whole thing.

I’m really quite looking forward to Hartley’s new Fay Grim, which continues the “Henry Fool saga” started in 1997’s Henry Fool, and which Hartley is now jokingly comparing to the Star Wars saga. With the previous two Hartley films — The Girl From Monday and No Such Thing — having to me felt like somewhat searching for a direction, I am really curious to see where Fay Grim will take us.

Those of you who haven’t seen many or any of Hal Hartley’s movies, I would recommend Amateur and Henry Fool as starting points. Hartley has been one of the quirkiest screenwriter-directors of the past decade and half, and is certainly worth exploring if you appreciate cinema (and not just independent cinema).

A University of Chicago study reported by EurekAlert suggests that when it comes to movie sequels, a named title (Graffiti Bridge) is more appealing to the audiences than is a numbered one (Graffiti Bridge here being Purple Rain 2). Read about the study here.

As many of you know, I run a separate website that concentrates on the Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. Most of my yesterday was spent re-designing the website (the old version was bland), and it is more or less ready now. Do take a look and tell me what you think.

Akira Kurosawa News and Information