I was impressed by this tiny collection of photographs taken by a cinephile tourist in Hong Kong visiting locations from the magnificent Chungking Express. I can only imagine the sense of awe and wonder I'd feel standing in front of the actual Midnight Express. (One day I want to have a cup of tea there, but drink it very slowly.)

Film & Video magazine moved its offices from Westchester County to, gulp, lower Manhattan this week, so I've started making the daily schlep into the city for the first time ever. When I'm feeling cranky -- which is, granted, most of the time -- I characterize this as a waste of the nearly four hours that it takes me, door to door, to make the round trip from my apartment in Sleepy Hollow. On the other hand, I'll now have much easier access to press screenings and arthouses, should I decide to indulge my cinephile jones. The lord giveth, and she taketh away.

Anyway, I've got this sexy new Sony Clié handheld, which I bought with tax-refund money to keep me company on the Metro-North. It has a built-in camera that makes taking crappy digital photos so easy that I just can't stop myself. Here's the to-go counter at Restaurant 92 on Fulton Street, suggested to me by the restaurant mavens at chowhound.com; the Cuban-style pulled-pork-on-garlic-bread sandwich is $5.50, and it's pretty delicious. If you're in the neighborhood and craving basic chow, Bryant sez check it out.

I have nothing but happy thoughts regarding Michael Moore's receipt of the Palme d'or over the weekend, although I have my doubts about the actual cinematic merits of the film (based solely on early chatter from those who've seen it) and I consider the award itself largely irrelevant in the real commercial world -- except perhaps as a quick zinger to the Disney Board of Directors, whom Moore is clearly out to embarrass. Good for him, say I. The golden palm will bounce off Michael Eisner's platinum-encrusted cummerbund like peanuts off Dumbo’s forehead. Still, viewers rarely consider the implications of corporate ownership of huge American media empires; because corporations are conservative by nature, the larger and more precariously structured the multinational conglomerates are, and the more seriously they take their presumed mandates to increase shareholder value, the less likely we are to see precocious, apple-cart-upsetting work get the green light. (Perhaps the lasting example set by Mel Gibson’s Passion won’t have anything to do with the Christ after all, but with the idea that the congloms don’t necessarily have to dictate what gets distributed in this country. Until both the money and the aesthetics shake out, it’s still an open question whether digital exhibition technology will eventually be a boon to cinema as art.) I'm not sure what there is to be done about it; Disney is as Disney does, and Moore is no more likely to find a huge audience for a new documentary bashing the Mouse House than the mommies of the world are likely to torch their DVDs of The Lion King in protest of the company’s failure to push Fahrenheit 911 (can I get a ruling on the proper spelling of this?) into shopping-mall multiplexes. And anyway, corporate America has treated Moore pretty well, with Warner Bros. distributing Roger & Me and HarperCollins (like Fox, a division of News Corp.) publishing Stupid White Men.

But maybe what Fahrenheit 911 — along with its much-lauded predecessor, the incisive but problematic Bowling For Columbine — really underscores is the general disinclination of American cinema to deal with politics and current events. With a few conspicuous recent exceptions like Three Kings and 25th Hour, which grappled in interesting ways with the first Gulf War and post-9/11 New York City, respectively, or even The Day After Tomorrow — which is being touted in the press, somewhat absurdly, as a shot across the bow of the Bush administration — I can’t imagine what wide-release American films will inspire anybody to look back, years from now, and say, “Yeah, that’s kinda how it felt at the time.” (Much as I loved Kill Bill Vol. 1, I do recognize that it’s not a film about anything significant other than how it feels to have a brain happily addled by a lifelong diet of Asian cinema, blaxploitation and spaghetti westerns.) Blame whatever factors you like; I suspect the ascendancy of studio marketing departments to positions of near-absolute power has been a factor in leeching individualistic expression out of the industry. (In Denver, DVD rental machines are being installed at more than 100 McDonald’s restaurants, a too-pithy indication of the direction we’re going: McMovies!) If the Cannes award represents nothing more than a handful of like-minded cinephiles stepping forward to honor the blatant ideological intentions of a filmmaker who’s decided that maybe he can help influence the course of history, y’know, I can live with that. It might not be art, but it feels pretty historic.

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