I was only mildly surprised to see that, although George Romero has yet to find financing to allow him to complete the ... of the Dead cycle with the long-in-gestation Twilight of the Dead, Hollywood is happily handing out money to this guy for a remake of Romero's masterpiece Dawn of the Dead.

I wish Mr. Snyder the best of luck. And of course everyone has to pay the bills at some point in their careers. But I really wonder if the guy who directed this BMW commercial has a sensibility that's compatible in any way with Romero's mordant take on consumer culture. (Hope Sarah Polley gets a fat paycheck, at least.)

Meanwhile, I enjoyed this Kill Bill study guide at hkflix.com.

The International Cinematographers Guild has picked its choices for the top 10 most influential cinematographers of all time. (Well, actually, they list 11. Wonder what's up with that?)

Here they are, in alphabetical order.

Billy Bitzer
Jordan Cronenweth
Conrad L. Hall
James Wong Howe
Sven Nykvist
Vittorio Storaro
Gregg Toland
Haskell Wexler
Gordon Willis
Freddie Young
Vilmos Zsigmond

My thoughts? Hard to complain much. Even more interesting is the rest of the top 30: Nestor Almendros, Stanley Cortez, Allen Daviau, Roger Deakins, Caleb Deschanel, George Spiro Dibie, William Fraker, Karl Freund, Janusz Kaminski, Darius Khondji, Laszlo Kovacs, Arthur Miller, Robert Richardson, Owen Roizman, Leon Shamroy, Dante Spinotti, Harry Stradling, Robert Surtees, and John Toll.

I think Gabriel Figueroa (Los Olvidados, for starters) wuz robbed and would put Christopher Doyle in my own personal top 10 just for his lyrical work with Wong Kar-wai, but this is interesting stuff — suggests a whole new methodology for attacking the canon at your local well-stocked video emporium.

I don't see anything about this at the official ICG site, but I did find documentation of the guild's entertaining dust-up with The Los Angeles Times over some comments Robert Rodriguez recently made about the difference between photographic and digital cinematography ...