Scott Reiniger, that crazy sumbitch from Romero's Dawn of the Dead, is an Afghan prince.

(Picture swiped from DOTD Appreciation Page.)

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.

According to Fangoria, a two-DVD special-edition of David Cronenberg's phenomenal Videodrome is due in August. Yow!

He refrained from going public because he didn't want to undermine the still-popular girl-to-gorilla trick.

This guy claims to have made the gorilla suit worn in the infamous Bigfoot film shot by Roger Patterson.

Also: Tech writer Dan Labriola on DVD rot and the care and feeding of your DVD collection.

Another riveting Mark Romanek video. Yawn. (Before the year of our Lord 2004, what were the odds of Vincent Gallo and Rick freaking Rubin appearing on-screen together?) No, really, it's pretty great. As usual, the song comes to life in the video's editing, with drop-dead gorgeous imagery appearing on screen for a split-second as a matter of course. I know that Romanek gravitates toward Kubrickian character thrillers like One Hour Photo, but right now I'm wishing someone would give him about $120 million to make the ultimate hip-hop gangster musical. Or anything, really. Just make sure he has the money for all those camera set-ups.

Here's the thing: I caught "99 Problems" on MTV a few nights ago, where many of the song's expletives and epithets — notably including the repeated bitch — were dropped out of the vocals and the chorus sounded something like this: "I got 99 problems/But a b____ ain't one." OK, fine. But then a little later on the same channel, there was the new Jet video, "Cold Hard Bitch," resplendent in full B-word glory.

So what's the deal? My guess is that MTV has some policy whereby you can't use bitch as a generic term to refer to women. But it's OK if you use it as a specific term to detail your gripes about one particular woman. (Complaining about a group of bitches at your high school, or the bitches who run the office where you work, woud apparently fall into some kind of grey zone.) I suppose splitting hairs makes ideological sense, although it puts MTV in the notable position of censoring the one (black) artist while handing a pass to the other (white) one.

Never mind that it's just one shade this side of meaningless to blank out a single word as long as the song's or artist's allegedly misogynist sentiment remains. And never mind that the term is only offensive in the generic sense because it's offensive in the specific sense; in other words, the borderline sexual hostility of the Jet song is no less troublesome than the offhand street talk that characterizes the Jay-Z rap. I'm not really in favor of anyone's song being edited for airplay — the simple fact of Jay-Z's multiplatinum album sales should be enough to short-circuit any argument that he really violates "community standards" (whose community are we talking about, anyway?) — but I like the message that's being sent here even less than I like the edits. What a mess.

The script is out to Marilyn [Manson] for the role of Jesus Christ. Any comments?

Movie City News hipped me to an elaborate site dedicated to sharing what looks like an unprecedented amount of information about the pre-production process for George A. Romero's new film, Diamond Dead. We're talking complete screenplay drafts, copies of notes from producer to the writer, "limited-edition" pre-production wallpapers that will be taken offline once shooting starts, etc.

Two things are remarkable about this. First, the crew behind this film has obviously made the decision to market the film in an unusual way, trying to get horror fans to take a rooting interest in it before shooting even begins. What's cool is that it flies in the face of current corporate ideas about the currency of intellectual property — I can't think of another case in which filmmakers effectively short-circuited the bootleggers by deliberately promoting and distributing copies of a work-in-progress screenplay.

Second, the filmmakers deliberately tapping the collective consciousness that is fandom, polling readers for possible casting ideas. (Marilyn Manson as Jesus? Bring 'er on.) Whether or not this is a good idea, well, only time will tell. (I haven't actually read the screenplay yet, nor am I sure it would even indicate how worthwhile the project might or might not end up being.) Maybe the fans really can help prevent some egregious bit of miscasting on the part of the not-quite-a-hipster Romero (somewhere on the site, I saw him fretting about whether he was spelling Pink's name correctly). Or maybe they'll end up having zilch impact on the final decisions — at least it's a goodwill gesture to solicit input in the first place.

The only thing that's missing is a way for fans to use PayPal to pony up a little cash toward the film's actual financing. I'd follow the CLICK HERE link to put some money in a bank account for Romero's final ... of the Dead picture.

I'm not generally a fan of complicated, Flash-oriented Web sites, but the evocative page that's up for Donnie Darko is pretty nifty -- not least because some of the junk that it throws up on-screen actually resembles what you might see if your computer's video card was freaking out.

God bless Richard Kelly. I interviewed him a few years ago for a story about the original DVD release of his film (he hated the cover of the DVD, by the way) and he was already talking about what he'd like to see on an eventual Criterion Collection director's-cut release of it. That seemed unlikely -- and I wasn't a huge fan of his film -- but I admired his confidence and initiative. And now he may not be getting a Criterion spine number to call his own, but he is apparently getting a director's cut with new footage and FX. It premieres at the Seattle International Film Festival later this month and could, apparently, get a second-chacne theatrical release through Newmarket.

The theatrical release of Darko made only about $500,000 -- though it seemed to play in New York City for months and months -- but it's reportedly made $10 million on DVD. That pays for a lot of bunny suits.

According to Fangoria, Kelly is now working on The Box, a screenplay that he's co-writing with Eli Roth (Cabin Fever), who is set to direct. (It's based on a Richard Matheson short story.) Good move -- Kelly's introspection and SF ennui plus Roth's forthright genre histrionics sounds like a good time to me.

From the what-are-they-thinking department comes a newly minted trailer for Catwoman. I don't understand. Halle's go-go outfit is a pretty strong indicator that nobody's seriously milking the superhero angle, and the discotheque lighting makes this look more like The Apple than a more resolute exercise in style like Burton's Batman movies or Spider-Man.

Director Pitof is an ex-VFX supervisor whose credits include a trio of Jeunet/Caro films as well as Besson's The Messenger and that live-action Asterix and Obelix movie that almost nobody who doesn't speak French saw. Good luck to him, but as near as I can figure from the footage and stills that have been released, the only way this thing makes sense as a commercial proposition is if it's an elaborate, expensive promotional vehicle for selling Berry's hot, half-naked bod to young audiences who crave surface flash. (The folks who promoted Swordfish had some success with this strategy when word of Berry's gratuitous boobie flash hit the papers just before the film's release.) Don't get me wrong; I'd love to see the full-on sexploitation version of Halle Berry is Catwoman, but there's no way the inevitable PG-13 can do it justice.