Pixar

Doc Hudson, the "Cars" character voiced by Paul Newman.

Is that woman from Alaska still hanging around? I'm only sorry that cookie-and-pretzel impresario, sometime race-car driver and all-around masculine icon of our time Paul Newman won't be around to see her banished back to her split-level igloo, the one from which she can see Vladimir Putin's head rising, dirigible-like, over the distant Russian horizon. Well, I'm sorry about other things too, but I'm definitely sorry about that.

My unsupported and definitely unrequested political analysis, before we move on to the real news: If Barack Obama is indeed elected president, then Sarah Palin will indeed be the Republican nominee in 2012 -- and will go down in a Goldwater-esque coast-to-coast wipeout. Will she, like Goldwater, be the sparkplug who fires an entire new generation of American nutso crusaders? I'll get back to you on that one.

I don't think I had completely grasped that Newman was gone, at the level of emotional reality, until I was sitting around with my 4-year-old twins on Saturday morning, watching "Cars" for about the 15th time, and came face-to-face with the fact that crusty Doc Hudson of Radiator Springs (aka Fabulous Hudson Hornet, the three-time Piston Cup winner) was his final role. Other people have remarked on this, I know, but what occurred to me while watching was that it's a damn fine role to go out on. OK, so he's playing a talking cartoon car. But what a car it is -- a vintage Newman car-acter, you might say -- mistrustful, introspective and damaged, and beneath it all far more eager to give and receive love than he'd ever admit.

My kids only know Paul Newman as the guy on the knockoff Oreos package and the voice of Doc, and I haven't told them that he's dead. They've lost two grandfathers, a great-grandmother, a bunny and a dog in the last 16 months. It's just too damn much. They've never seen Newman act, in truth, but he comes attached to their favorite movie and their favorite snacks, so of course they love him. And I've seen how big their eyes get every time they sit through the awesome, growly hanging-judge speech Doc gives when he first meets Lightning McQueen, the feckless hero of "Cars" who's badly in need of a father figure and some life lessons: "All right, I wanna know who's responsible for wrecking my town, Sheriff. I want his hood on a platter! I'm gonna put him in jail till he rots. No, check that ... I'm gonna put him in jail till the jail rots on top of him, then I'm gonna move him to a new jail and let that jail rot."

In due course, if they're interested -- and my daughter definitely will be -- they can see "Hud" and "Cool Hand Luke" and "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "The Hustler" and whatever else you want to talk about. (My favorite semi-unsung Newman roles, for what it's worth, are as Ross Macdonald's detective hero Lew Harper in "The Drowning Pool" and his starring-directing role in the Ken Kesey adaptation "Sometimes a Great Notion.") But to Desmond and Nini and a whole generation of other kids around the world, Paul Newman will always be first and foremost a crusty old eight-cylinder Hudson Hornet with a secret passion and killer dirt-track skills. If Newman ever thought about that in his last days, I bet he was delighted.

I'm already on record as arguing that Steven Soderbergh's four-hour "Che" -- which just got its United States premiere at the New York Film Festival -- is a spectacular achievement, the best-executed and most intriguing work of his career. Still, there's no disputing that it's a dry and demanding work, one that steadfastly refuses most of the conventional satisfactions of narrative cinema. Here's the money quote, I suppose, from my Cannes review:

"What Soderbergh has sought to capture here is a grand process of birth and extinguishment, one that produced a complicated legacy in which John McCain, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro are still enmeshed. There will be plenty of time to argue about the film's (or films') political relevance or lack thereof, to call Soderbergh names for this or that historical omission, for this or that ideological error. He's made something that people will be eager to see and eager to talk about all over the world, something that feels strangely urgent, something messy and unfinished and amazing."

An interesting critical debate has broken out over "Che," as summarized on GreenCine, and it isn't exactly on ideological grounds, although we may get that later. (None of the conservatives complaining about the picture as a work of commie-pinko asskissology have yet seen it, to my knowledge.) I'm in near-total agreement with Glenn Kenny, for example, that those who complain about the film's lack of audience-relatable characters or conventional biopic structure are missing the point -- or, more fairly, that Soderbergh has fulfilled his vision and they simply don't get it or don't like it. (Kenny may or may not be directly dissing Karina Longworth at SpoutBlog, whose tireless film coverage I frequently enjoy. How's that for Kissinger-style neutrality?)

Even after all this time and all these movies, nothing is less forgivable than a movie that aspires to reach a relatively large audience but declines to be "entertaining," in the normative sense of that word. Furthermore, we're still so paralyzed by the politics of the Cold War era that we can't abide to see them presented as ambiguous drama (which is redundant, because all drama worthy of the name is morally, ethically and politically ambiguous). Soderbergh offers no good-vs.-evil Manichaean shadowplay in "Che," and that of course will frustrate partisans and ideologues of a ll kinds. In the fullness of time it will be recognized as a great achievement.

A few weeks ago I interviewed writer-director Azazel Jacobs about "Momma's Man," an eccentric fictional film mostly set in the cluttered, living-museum apartment where his parents, old-line New York artists Ken and Flo Jacobs, have lived for 40 years. If you want to check out what Ken Jacobs -- pretty close to a legend in the small and insular world of experimental film -- has been up to all that time, TankTV is hosting an online film festival devoted to his work. Jacobs' movies have been compared to dreams, hallucinations or fugue states; once you get past your initial resistance to watching something so different from ordinary cinema, you may find yourself mesmerized.

Speaking of hopeless little films I have defended, it's never OK to snark about other critics, is it? So I shouldn't point out that the Paper of Record ought to be thoroughly embarrassed for publishing this slipshod, superficial review that utterly failed to engage with the formal elements or themes of Josh Safdie's "The Pleasure of Being Robbed," which I covered last week? Right, that's what I thought.

Courtesy Red Bucket Films

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It's possible and even likely that "The Pleasure of Being Robbed," the debut feature from 24-year-old director Josh Safdie and his pals in the New York-based film collective called Red Bucket, has already had its big moment in the public eye. You've never even heard of it, you say? Welcome to the 21st century movie business, people.

You see, after premiering last spring at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas -- where I and a lot of other people missed it -- Safdie's ultra-low-budget yarn about the adventures of a 20-something female sociopath leapt to sudden prominence as the closing-night film, and only American selection, in the Directors' Fortnight festival at Cannes. This is the festival formed by the French directors' society in 1969 in open rebellion against the Cannes main event; the festival that has helped launch the international careers of Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Haneke, Sofia Coppola, the Dardenne brothers and many more.

It's a huge honor for any film to get that slot, not least a 71-minute overgrown short from an unknown American director who describes his budget as "way under $100,000," a picture shot on 16 mm film, guerrilla-style, in New York public spaces, without any of the required permits or clearances. (Perhaps Safdie paid for this karmically, since he says $30,000 worth of fancy Russian-made lenses, not covered by insurance, were stolen out of his car during filming.) It's notoriously difficult and expensive to shoot at the Central Park Zoo, for example, and I'm still not sure how Safdie managed an illegal scene there that featured two actors in cop uniforms and his star and co-writer, Eléonore Hendricks, in handcuffs. (Wait till you see the "special effect" in that scene. I'm saying nothing more.)

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Photo courtesy of Lionsgate

Bill Maher outside the Vatican City in "Religulous."

What if there was a religion, asks comedian Bill Maher, in which an all-powerful god from outer space decided to send his unborn son on a suicide mission to planet Earth? So this space-god impregnates a human female in some mystical, not-quite-physical fashion, and she gives birth to a baby who is both a human being and a divine incarnation, simultaneously the space-god's spawn and the space-god himself. (Oh, space-god also has a third manifestation, one that's totally invisible.) So space-god junior is born on earth destined to be killed, even though he's a space-god and therefore immortal.

As you've picked up by now, the religion Maher is describing is not imaginary, and in various forms and guises is professed by most people in the United States, including every president we've ever had or are likely to have in the foreseeable future. (I'm sorry, that's right -- one of this year's candidates is a Muslim.) In the acerbic late-night talk-show host's new movie "Religulous," made with "Borat" director Larry Charles, Maher keeps bludgeoning you with stories like these to make the point that the central story behind mainstream Christianity, when considered at face value and taken literally, sounds every bit as loony as the oft-derided tenets of Mormonism or Scientology.

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Lance Hammer's film "Ballast," a critical favorite earlier this year at Sundance, begins with a remarkable shot, one of those shots that stick with you long after the rest of the movie has become a jumbled memory. A boy or young man in a down coat, seen from the rear, walks through the weeds into a flat, horizontal field, probably one where corn or cotton or soybeans are grown. From the coat and the light and the empty field, it appears to be winter, although part of the seductive power of "Ballast" is that elemental questions like where and when go unanswered. As the boy advances, a flock of scavenging birds -- likely a murder of crows -- explodes out of the field, and this almost painterly composition abruptly becomes a chaotic whirlwind.

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Fox Searchlight/Jessica Miglio

Sam Rockwell in "Choke."

Maybe the secret to adapting Chuck Palahniuk's novels into movies is not to take them so damn seriously. If David Fincher's "Fight Club" became a problematic monument in American film history by outdoing its source material in paranoid portentousness -- and by overwhelming it with cinematic technique -- then actor-turned-director Clark Gregg's adaptation of Palahniuk's "Choke" (which I covered briefly from Sundance last January) takes an entirely different approach. Pretty much dumping any effort at high-minded social satire, Gregg's "Choke" is a fantastical sex farce, and a highly amusing one at that, without being the least bit momentous or memorable.

Speaking as a reader who's barely able to tolerate Palahniuk's prose even at the Barnes & Noble page-browsing level, I think this is a terrific idea; the writer's loyal fans may feel differently. One thing all parties can probably agree about: As Victor Mancini, the thoroughly unredeemed sex addict and con artist who is the roguish hero of "Choke," Gregg has the perfect leading man in Sam Rockwell. There's no American actor who does queasily-weaselly-lovable the way Rockwell does, and making this beyond-implausible script work demands a careful balancing act between Victor's odious behavior and his evident charm.

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Courtesy New York Film Festival

Top row, from left: images from "Happy-Go-Lucky," "Che," and "Four Nights with Anna." Bottom row, from left: images from "Changeling," "Wendy and Lucy," and "The Wrestler."

Like any institution closely identified with New York City -- the Yankees, the Times, the Metropolitan Museum, the scum-sucking financial establishment that has ruined all of our lives and our children's as well -- the New York Film Festival makes a pretty easy target for crusading anti-elitists of all stripes. A young freelancer for the New York Press just enlisted in this venerable tradition, expending thousands of words on an earnest, rambling article whose point seems to be that Lincoln Center's annual September festival caters to a graying, affluent, high-culture audience that's not relevant to younger filmgoers. In other breaking news, the sun turns out to be an enormous ball of flaming gases, 93 million miles away! And Francisco Franco is still dead!

Maybe it's not fair to beat up an article in a struggling alt-weekly that bears no signs of having been edited or even read before publication ("The Film Society [of Lincoln Center] was founded in 1969 and nearly 20 years later, it continues to offer ..."), but this rises well above spouting hoary cliché and reaches the realm of laboriously restating a universally accepted truth. Complaining about the NYFF's hoity-toity atmosphere and superannuated customer base is a journalistic genre unto itself, and one to which I've made my own contribution.

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A scene from Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" -- high on the list of embarrassing holes in my movie-watching résumé.

I'm back from vacation, I know you're excited. I went tidepooling with my kids and pretty much had the computer turned off -- was there some big news in the business pages or something? Maybe I shouldn't have sold all those millions of Morgan and Lehman shares the day I left. What a big uproar!

I'm crazy-busy this next couple of weeks with the 46th edition of the New York Film Festival, that creakily lovable high-cultcha institution that kicks off the fall movie season in thoroughly anachronistic style. Full preview and loads of updates to come.

Just a few tidbits before I dash over to Lincoln Center: I have yet to weigh in on the new HD-ready "Coppola restoration" of the "Godfather" trilogy -- possibly the most-anticipated DVD in the medium's brief history -- but blogger/critic Glenn Kenny has been busy studying it, and has multiple reports.

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Wayne Wang emerged on the film scene 25 years ago with "Chan Is Missing," a glorious and mysterious black-and-white indie made on 16mm film and almost no budget in San Francisco's Chinatown that opened the doors on a world few non-Asian Americans had ever seen. In some ways it was a classic story about an immigrant community wrestling with issues of assimilation and cultural difference; the film's shaggy-dog plot exposed various political, linguistic and generational tensions among Chinese-Americans. But "Chan Is Missing" also recalled both the French New Wave and San Francisco's long tradition as a location for atmospheric mysteries and noir films.

Along with Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise," Alex Cox's "Repo Man" and Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It," Wang's "Chan Is Missing" was a touchstone of the early-'80s independent-film explosion and announced the arrival of an intriguing new talent. All four of those filmmakers, one could argue, have had erratic subsequent careers, and Wang's may be the most peripatetic of all. I was friendly with Wang in the late '80s in San Francisco and even worked with him briefly, writing publicity material for "Life Is Cheap ... But Toilet Paper Is Expensive," a confrontational picture shot in Hong Kong that I still, perhaps perversely, consider his best work.

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Here's the right word to describe Joel and Ethan Coen's star-studded, pack-of-maroons spy comedy "Burn After Reading": It's patchy. Of course that sounds like I'm dismissing it, but I don't exactly mean it that way. The film is hilarious in patches, shocking in patches, utterly convincing in patches and close to brilliant in patches. As with the much-laureled "No Country for Old Men," the Coens seem to be Mixmastering themes and elements of their earlier films; there are traces of "Fargo," "The Big Lebowski" and "Blood Simple" in the DNA of "Burn After Reading." But those comparisons aren't likely to benefit this work of lightweight inside-the-Beltway misanthropy, which possesses neither the morbid, cinematic gravity of their better crime films nor the absurd delirium of their best comedies.

One could sit here and intone, film-critic style, that the Coens don't know anything about the world of Washington espionage professionals (most of the movie was actually shot in New York, with Brooklyn brownstones doubling for Georgetown) and that the movie's devoid of any likable or sympathetic characters. But since when have either of those factors been relevant to these guys and their peculiar and hermetic career? As we heard earlier this year at the Oscar ceremony, the brothers once made a Super-8 film at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport called "Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go." And I for one would love to see it.

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Warner Independent Pictures

Peter Macdissi and Summer Bishil in "Towelhead."

I first wrote about "Towelhead," the film-directing debut of "Six Feet Under" impresario Alan Ball, last January at Sundance, before it became clear that Ball's energies were focused on a new prime-time HBO series featuring hot young vampires. Now that "True Blood" has reached Ball's core upper-middle HD-cable audience, "Towelhead" looks even more like a noble but ultimately minor detour -- the agreeable but overly formulaic young-adult novel tossed off by an author of epic-scale melodramas.

"Towelhead" is of course adapted from a novel, a quasi-autobiographical coming-of-age narrative by Alicia Erian, who, like her heroine Jasira Maroun (played in the film by the appealing Summer Bishil), was once a biracial Arab-American teen in suburban Texas, circa 1991. It's a fascinating social setting, no question, and one in which I think Ball sees our current polycultural society -- the Palin vs. Obama society, you could say -- in embryo. With President George H.W. Bush about to launch the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, Jasira and her father Rifat (Peter Macdissi, in the film's standout performance) face an atmosphere of intense anti-Arab bigotry. But Rifat hardly fits the stereotype; he's an aristocratic Lebanese Christian who never seems to go anywhere without a suit, and is certainly more politically conservative and morally puritanical than Travis (Aaron Eckhart), the xenophobic Army reservist next door.

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