2. Celebrity story involving airlines and urine of the day: When Gerard Depardieu wasn't allowed to use the toilet during takeoff, he peed all over fellow passengers on an Air France flight. Says Air France spokesperson: "I confirm the fact that he [Depardieu] did indeed urinate in the plane." That is all.

3. "Gwyneth Paltrow saved my life on 9/11" story of the day: Wait, really? I could almost forgive Paltrow for her multitude of sins if she acted heroically on Sept. 11. So let's check it out:

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Better than Tony Robbins or a self-help book, Michael Bay's movies are an advanced class on dealing with life when it hands you lemons. Lemons that are actually grenades and you have two minutes to deactivate before the whole country goes ka-BLAM!

Welcome to Michael Bay's stress management guide. Now take a deep breath, and go to your calm place...

Lesson 1: Keep your mantras simple

Everybody's had those days when life seems determined to weigh you down. While you might be inclined to give up and throw a pity party complete with a "Teen Moms" marathon and a bucket of ice cream, it's good to remember those wise words of Yoda: "Do or do not. There is no try." Though if you don't like taking advice from a short green guy, how about Sean Connery, who paraphrases the famous "Star Wars" line to a whiny Nicholas Cage in "The Rock."

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Since Park Chan-wook's South Korean revenge flick "Oldboy" won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004, producers have been trying to find a way to bastardize the project into a more American-friendly version. Steven Spielberg and Will Smith have both been attached to the title since 2008 (after director Justin Lin and Nic Cage dropped out of the running), though rumors have been swirling that the project has been dead in the water for at least a year.

There are basically two camps of thought on an "Oldboy" remake: the people who think that adapting the story of Oh Dae-Su -- a man locked in a hotel room for 15 years and then mysteriously freed in order to find his captors -- from either its original Japanese manga or its cinematic counterpart is a terrible idea ... and those who aren't familiar with the story.

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The answer to this theoretical film query has been answered by none other than Michael Bay, whose auteur work can be boiled down to "big things blowing up or hitting other big things." But even with that not-too-original concept, Bay has gotten sloppy: allegedly taking direct shots from his 2005 flop "The Island" and putting them in "Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon."

Last week, a viral-video pirate named Jermain Odreman spent a considerable amount of time watching Bay's movies in slow-motion in order to catch almost identical sequences from both films. The footage is unquestionably similar, down to the type of car that flips over, the angle of the smoke from the explosion, and the damage done by flying shrapnel.

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That being said: At no point in "Pollock" did the artist grow wings after eating famous Renaissance paintings he stole from a museum before regurgitating his own still lifes into speckled visual jazz riffs. Léo Verrier's animated eight-minute short "Dripped" is a whimsical interpretation of Jackson's love of all art, and his eventual realization that he doesn't have to "bite" off other talent in order to create his own masterpieces.

OK, so it's not quite a literal biography, but it's stylistically entrancing nonetheless; like something from an early Chuck Jones cartoon on acid.

Dripped from ChezEddy on Vimeo.

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It does however, have an hodgepodge cast seemingly picked from names out of a European bowler/and or ironic trucker hat, with stars like Kirsten Dunst, Alexander Skarsgard ("True Blood") and his father Stellan ("Good Will Hunting"), Kiefer Sutherland, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling ("The Night Porter), and John Hurt.

As for the plot, the Dogma 95 creator seems to have abandoned his realistic style halfway through the movie for a more Richard Kelly aesthetic. Kirsten Dunst is getting married to Skarsgard, and their wedding is being held at the house of his sister (Gainsbourg) and husband (Sutherland). There is some family melodrama, and then there is a lot of hailing and odd weather. Maybe Gainsbourg hates Dunst because of an incestuous love of her brother? Whoops, no time to find out, the world is ending.

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Or is it? I recently got into an online argument about the movie with the New York-based journalist Ian Grey, who admires some of Scorsese's movies but considers "Goodfellas" overrated, shallow and in many ways indefensible, even by the morally provocative standards of the gangster film. Rather than commemorate the anniversary with yet another piece about how great and influential it is (and I personally think it's both), I thought it would be more interesting to debate the film's merits in a public forum against principled opposition. Grey does not think the world of "Goodfellas," and is happy to tell you why. 

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All these questions have been tabled for now until another one can be answered: Where is Godard?

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The phrase "definitive cut" made me laugh. I like Mann's films a lot, but definitive he ain't. He's a serial recutter, and this is his third go-round with "Mohicans." The first was the 1992 theatrical cut, which remained unchanged until 1999, when Mann released a second version on DVD that removed four minutes but added eight (mostly small moments of character development). I have no idea what this new version will contain, and frankly I'm in no hurry to find out, or buy the disc, for that matter. Why? Because I don't want to encourage Mann to continue tinkering with his movies -- and because the entire phenomenon of director's cuts and definitive director's cuts and restored cuts and expanded cuts and alternate cuts has gotten out of hand and needs to stop.

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Is Soderbergh a great director making movies in order to explore life, art and his own tangled self, or a man who struggles to find things to say in order to justify making movies? Is Soderbergh's work united by strong thematic and conceptual threads or by sheer enthusiasm? How is it possible that Soderbergh could be so prolific without turning into a hack? Can any man this fearsomely productive have anything resembling an actual life? Or is the distinction between an actual life and a filmed life more or less moot in an age of surveillance, media and society-wide navel-gazing, an age in which every corner of reality has an aspect of the virtual? And if Soderbergh were ordered by some higher power to go 12 months without picking up a camera, would he emerge a stronger, deeper and more emotionally accessible filmmaker, or be found dead of liver failure in a skid row motel, the room's TV screen endlessly replaying the DVD menu for Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt"?

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Joe Berlinger is such a tireless talker -- a spinner of anecdotes and theories, and alternately an ardent defender and harsh critic of his own work -- that I should let him explain "Crude" in his own words. Briefly, though, this new documentary from the co-director of "Paradise Lost," "Brother's Keeper" and "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" explores the epic-scale, endlessly complicated story of one of the largest lawsuits in history. It's the suit in which the indigenous inhabitants of Ecuador's Amazonian jungle are on the verge of winning a massive judgment from Chevron -- a court-appointed expert has suggested $27 billion -- for the poisoning of their homeland, previously among the most pristine and biodiverse rain forest regions on the planet.

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I was probably destined to swoon over "Julie & Julia," given my love for Paris, in which it is set; for food, on which it runs; for Julia Child, whose story it tells; for Meryl Streep, who embodies her with galumphing surety; and for Ephron, who binds it all together (and, with whom, in the interest of disclosure, I have become friendly in the years since I profiled her for Salon).

So take my enthusiasms knowing full well my prejudices, but watching "Julie & Julia" was like having fizzing joy injected directly into my veins. And it wasn't just about the sizzle of the sole meunière and the glisten of the oysters slurped down at Parisian market stalls.

The deeper pleasures of the movie come not from the gloss and satisfying chomp of it all, but from the empty spots, the hungers and the imperfections.

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REUTERS/Gary Hershorn/Files

Director Anthony Minghella after winning the Oscar for best director for his movie "The English Patient" in March 24, 1997. Minghella died in London at the Charing Cross Hospital after suffering a fatal hemorrhage.

English writer and director Anthony Minghella has died at age 54, according to various news reports. It's a sad and early departure for one of the best-loved figures in the British film industry. Minghella was chairman of the British Film Institute, where he had vowed to stem the outflow of British talent to the United States. He won the 1997 best-director Oscar for "The English Patient," an international hit that launched a new wave of high-gloss, star-studded literary adaptations. His other films as a director included "Truly Madly Deeply" in 1990, "The Talented Mr. Ripley" in 1999 and "Cold Mountain" in 2003. Minghella apparently underwent surgery for a growth in his neck last week at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He had seemed to be recovering normally, but suffered a fatal hemorrhage early on Tuesday morning.

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I'm an artist -- it's the thing I've had since childhood, the thing I took for granted.

So I took it for granted and followed other paths -- writing fiction and filmmaking.

I went to grad school, I published some books and many articles (nonfiction). I wrote (and sold) some screenplays. I directed some films and produced some TV shows.

So I'm sorta successful, but I still feel that "artist" is my life's calling. It's what I'm best at and what I love. And yes, I go through all the crap too -- the stress, the inaction, the procrastination and so on, but I really feel it's what I was born to do. People like it -- smart people, the people I'd hoped would like it, and they like it for the right reasons. I sell enough out of my studio to counter my expenses (not huge but significant nonetheless). I've been selected for juried shows by curators of major museums and been waitlisted on grants and residencies that are awarded to emerging contemporary artists -- exactly where I'd hope my artwork would fall within the giant spectrum of the art world.

But it has yet to pay off with true success: representation by a gallery, which is the equivalent of getting an agent and all that that would hopefully bring.

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Even if some critics hailed early flicks like "The Last Picture Show" and "Paper Moon," by the early '80s most seemed to agree with John Simon's acerbic assessment that Bogdanovich's "entire filmmaking prowess is not much more than a mnemonic feat." Whatever; in person, the 62-year-old is thoroughly charming, and lacks the pretense so often ascribed to him by caricaturists. Can a guy who schleps his own water around with him in a tote bag be all bad?

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Wiseman, whose works include "High School," "Hospital" and "Public Housing," began making films while working as a law school professor in 1967. "Titicut Follies," his searing exposé of Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Massachusetts, earned him much acclaim, as well as several lawsuits. Ever since, Wiseman has trained his camera, and his critical gaze, on the workings and practices of American institutions. PBS has a long-standing agreement to broadcast each of his films as they come out.

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Forget Oscars and Golden Globes, thumbs up and four stars: The greatest accolade for any filmmaker is immortality through the common adjective. There is no finer tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, for example, than the acceptance of "Hitchcockian" as a term denoting unease, suspense and intrigue. Likewise, "Felliniesque" elicits visions of chaotic, colorful, circuslike surroundings, and "Bergmanesque" can only mean oppressive melancholy and the absence of God.

But the list essentially stops there, save for the one contemporary filmmaker to conceive an entire world so unquestionably his own that you can only call it by name. "Lynchian" has seeped into our consciousness as a bizarre intersection of the macabre and the mundane, once described by novelist David Foster Wallace this way:

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Like his hit musical "The Producers," Mel Brooks is an unlikely combination of innocent optimism, bawdy irreverence and unbridled chutzpah. And if, at age 75, Brooks is the bright new darling of the American theater, it's because he has spent a lifetime brazenly getting in our faces and shamelessly prodding us to laugh, and because, for all the alleged comedy in our must-see TV and Tom Green world, we're starved for real humor. We need Mel Brooks to make us laugh as much as he needs to make us laugh.

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"Faithless" was written by Bergman and is based on actual events from his life. It tells the story of Maryanne, who engineers an adulterous affair with her husband's best friend. What starts out as a simple plan ends in tragedy. But the film is full of ambiguity, and offers no swelling strings to guide the viewer toward the proper conclusion. There are fantastical Bergman-esque elements, too: In the opening frames, an elderly writer named Bergman conjures up the character Maryanne from his memory, and Maryanne begins to recount her painful tale. Or perhaps she never existed, and the whole event is a fiction.

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