I'm late to the party on both Werner Herzog's documentary "Encounters at the End of the World" and Guy Maddin's hilarious pseudo-documentary "My Winnipeg," which opened last weekend. Both are absolutely, definitely worth seeing and I'll have fuller reports shortly. My posts may lack their customary verbosity this week (stop that cheering!) because I'm short on time -- I'll be spending 10 hours taking in press screenings of Masaki Kobayashi's 1961 antiwar epic "The Human Condition" (starring the great Japanese star Tatsuya Nakadai, subject of a retrospective at New York's Film Forum), which will soon be rereleased after a 20-year absence from the screen. I'll inflict a report about that experience in due course.

Just a few Monday click-throughs: Variety blogger Anne Thompson has a nice item on the peculiar dust-up between the Associated Press and the blogosphere, which former Salon managing editor Scott Rosenberg has also been covering with his customary wondrous clarity. (AP seems disgruntled that the liberal political site Drudge Retort has been quoting from its stories, although with appropriate links and credit. It's as if they just heard about this practice.) Thompson quotes a New York Times story about the dispute and asks acridly, "Am I quoting more than I should here? Is this fair use? Or am I infringing on the NYT's livelihood? Is this OK because I am commenting on the story, as opposed to just posting it?"

Back on the movie beat, "Incredible Hulk" director Louis Leterrier tells the Guardian there are too many superhero movies, adding, "at one point they're probably going to get boring." Really, Louis? You don't say! And what would be the solution for that? Would it be to stop making the damn things, for the love of Jesus Christ? Apparently not. Leterrier thinks it will be less boring to make projects like "World War Hulk," which pits Big Green against X-Men and Iron Man, or Neil Gaiman's "1602," in which characters from the Marvel Comics universe are transported to Elizabethan England. OK, for three-quarters of a second I thought that sounded pretty cool. Until I reflected what it would actually look like, i.e., many kinds of Hollywood hokum in the same package.