Jonathan Rosenbaum was on a local San Francisco call-in show this week talking about the year's movies. Although this kind of show never allows one topic to stick around very long, he did have some interesting comments.

Showing why he's my favorite contrarian, he listed among the movies he liked this year Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, Stone Reader, Gatekeeper, Masked & Anonymous, Pistol Opera, Demonlover, School of Rock, and Down With Love.

About Down With Love (if you missed this like I did, you might want to know that it's already on DVD), he said that the people who made it weren't old enough to remember the 50s and 60s and as a result they kind of combined the 50s and 60s, which he thought was "actually kind of exciting."

About School of Rock: "If Jean Renoir had decided to make a movie about rock and roll musicians in the 6th grade, it would have been something like this. [laughing]" He called Richard Linklater, who directed School of Rock, "one of the very best independent filmmakers in the country," although he did School of Rock for hire.

About Elephant:

What I think is really interesting about it is— I think it got kind of misjudged by Americans who saw it at Cannes because they seemed to think it was a movie that was trying and failing to explain why Columbine happened. Whereas I don't think Gus Van Sant knows any more about this or has any more interest in it than the rest of us. I think what he's really more interested in is why we weren't able to predict something like Columbine. And it's really a film about following the lives of high school students just before something like this happened.

I happen to agree.

A few other choice tidbits:

The best films that I tend to see are things most people haven't heard of because they don't have multi-million dollar ad campaigns.

And about the term "independent":

It's Sundance and distributors like Miramax that have wound up confusing everyone. This is the way I make a distinction: an independent film is a film in which the filmmaker is independent of distrubution. If a filmmaker has final cut, then it's independent. And that means that Jim Jarmusch is an independent filmmaker because he owns the negatives of all of his films. On the other hand Quentin Tarantino is not an independent filmmaker because he doesn't have final cut. I mean what confuses everybody is that Sundance is supposed to be this big promoter of independent film but if a filmmaker succeeds at Sundance it means he or she loses independence because the studio buys it and is able to recut it.

If you'd like to hear more about these or other topics — vengeance as a theme in movies, the virtues of multi-region DVD players, In the Cut, Shattered Glass, Mystic River, marketing The Cat in the Hat at the U.S. Post Office ("We've lost the cold war. We're living in a Stalinist world"), and the much-discussed lack of video "screeners" for critics to compile their year-end lists — you can listen to the program online.

Anyone who heard Terry Gross's interviews with Gene Simmons and Bill O'Reilly should enjoy today's interview with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (and then his creator, Robert Smigel).

Ohh kay, here we go. Gene Simmons warned me about you. He warned me about you. We were [bleep]ing a border collie one day and he was like, "I can't [bleep], I'm still thinking about that interview."

And when Terry asked him about his sexist attitudes:

Holy Christ, listen to this. Let me ask you something. I feel like I'm being bombarded here. I know what's happening here. I know what's happening here. Did you ask the same questions to Kermit the Frog? .... How about when Beethoven did your show, did you challenge him the way you are challenging me? ....

Oh is that right, it's a satire what Beethoven does? Yes I'm just— You know I can't believe the government is paying for this, is what I can't believe.
...

You think it's fair, Terry, you need to get into another business! That's right, no, good, this is all going to be fodder for Harper's Magazine, for Dog Fancy Magazine, which I know... there are liberal publishers of Dog Fancy....

Yes, it's a banner day for NPR, and my stomach hurts from laughing.

Last month when I saw Dog Days, Ulrich Seidl's disgusting but, on some level, accomplished feature (and winner of the grand jury prize in Venice), I immediately flashed back to Stanley Kubrick and Todd Haynes. But Seidl's suburban compositions — those rows of houses and splashes of color on the arid outskirts of a city — are also reminiscent of some of Yasujiro Ozu's later color features, particularly Good Morning. Ozu's housewives trot across the lane to peek in on their neighbors, a forced intimacy that prompts one couple to move and another to consider it. But, someone counters, "You'll have neighbors everywhere, except the mountains."

Although I'm largely ignorant of Ozu's life, I've been intrigued to hear that he may have been influenced by American movies. Circles, circles.

Think of Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars. It's widely known that Leone borrowed heavily from Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo for his tale of a lone gunslinger/samurai who plays a local town's powers against each other. But Dave Kehr has pointed out that Kurosawa seems to have lifted the character and plot from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, an American novel about a nameless detective, referred to as the Continental Op, who pits a corrupt town's bigwigs against each other. And Hammett may have been inspired by a real labor dispute in Butte, Montana.

And so it goes.

Film is truly an international medium, but the industry heavyweights have it in their best interests to erect borders, with their DVD region codes and xenophobic multiplexes. How else would Hollywood be able to repackage Ringu as The Ring and Open Your Eyes as Vanilla Sky? In other circles it's called protectionism.

But, you know, you've got neighbors wherever you go, except the mountains. Enjoy the view.

Evaluating a movie requires some context. Who made it, when, under what circumstances, based on what pile of possible influences? But I try to disregard a director's stated intentions. The director's chance to communicate with us is in his movie, not in the PR campaign that accompanies it.

Besides, the people who made the movie may not know about everything they've done. As Stanley Kubrick has said, half the fun of watching a movie is finding things that the filmmaker may not even know about.

But every once in a while, a tidbit comes your way that's hard to get out of your head. And sometimes, I admit, these little factoids can be fun.

I thought about this recently after watching Ozu's Late Spring. A bit of this movie, the part where Noriko and Mr. Hattori ride bicycles to the beach, appears on a TV in Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Good Men, Good Women (one of my favorite movies, and a movie I have threatened to write about for this site).

Why does this shot appear on that TV? Well, I suppose it's a gentle nod at the audience, many of whom have compared Hou to Ozu. But the two movies also share some abstract concepts: parents losing children, a woman's duty to her spouse, people clinging to past comforts instead of moving on with their lives. And there's a mysterious shot late in Hou's movie of the back wheel of a bicycle riding along a road. It's one of the movie's rare travelling shots, and one of its briefest. It appears when the lead character is finally making peace, perhaps, with her dead lover, and we hear her voice singing tearfully to him as the bicycle weaves. It's not a pair of bicycles as in Ozu's movie, but one alone, riding through the dark. The shot is never fully explained, although we can infer that the bike is ridden by someone bearing bad news in the movie's historical timeline, which itself interlocks with the present.

Hou's explanation for the inclusion of the Ozu clip is simple: the character in his movie is an actress and she has been told to study films from the 1950s, which is when her movie takes place. That's all. He said this in an interview in Cineaste. Late Spring is her homework.

In another personal favorite, Robert Altman's movie Nashville, Geraldine Chaplin plays a star-struck reporter from the BBC. She pesters people for their thoughts and shoves a tape recorder into their faces. In a recent interview (I wish I remembered the source), Chaplin said that, to her, the character was American, not British at all. In the movie she deliberately says "British Broadcasting Company" instead of "Corporation," a slip that a British person would be less likely to make.

Learning Chaplin's intentions has changed my impression of every scene she's in. She now seems like someone going to great lengths to look sophisticated. She's "Opal from the BBC," faking her accent. "Un deux trois quatre," she says into her microphone, first thing in the morning, before crawling out of bed.

Hou's detail doesn't change much about what we know of the character in Good Men, Good Women. Even without it, we don't sense that she's an Ozu fan necessarily; she's asleep in front of the TV. Chaplin's detail does change things somewhat, but not dramatically. We already knew that Opal is eager to meet and sleep with stars, eager to throw around her credentials with people who don't seem to care about the BBC. She's wearing a mask, we already knew. But the size of that mask is considerably larger and the character therefore more pathetic that we might have thought. She speaks with her accent even when she's alone, wandering through a field of yellow school buses.

Whether Altman was aware of what was in his actress's head — and whether Hou intended us to link the bicycles of Late Spring with other parts of his movie — is largely irrelevant. The cat is out of the bag the moment the film is released. And even if I'd like to disregard these irresistable extra-filmic morsels, it seems pretty hard to do so at this point. The body of context has just grown a little fatter.

Writing in the latest issue of The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann has a contrarian view of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, calling it "a braggart piece of empty exhibitionism."

The New York Times received a lot of attention a few years ago when its longtime movie critic Janet Maslin announced her departure. Who would fill this influential spot? Surprising everyone, the paper announced that two people would replace her, Elvis Mitchell, already a known film critic, and A. O. Scott, a book critic.

Roger Ebert had this huffy response in Salon:

Scott doesn't at this point have the qualifications of a Dave Kehr, but the Times editors apparently didn't want someone like that.... Has he seen six films by Bresson? Ozu? That's not the sort of question they would think to ask. Would they hire a book critic to be their music critic? Architecture critic? No, but that goes without saying. They probably believe, like many other editors, that anyone can be the film critic. It is the only job on the newspaper that everyone, including the editors, believe they can do better than the person on the beat.

Lucky for all of us, the 100th anniversary of Ozu's birth is this year, increasing the opportunities to see Ozu's quiet movies about everyday Japanese life.

First up, a nearly complete set of prints is currently showing in the San Francisco Bay Area, some of them at the Castro Theater starting today, and a more complete set, including silents, at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley starting November 23. These prints are expected to travel to other cities, if there are no complications caused by Cowboy Pictures, who is providing the prints, going out of business. Watch the Ozu site for late-breaking news.

Just think of all the film critics who will be earning their stripes at these showings.

If the prints don't come near you, you should take a look at the brand new Criterion DVD of Tokyo Story. Doug Cummings recently wrote a great review of the movie and DVD on filmjourney.org. Also, check the afformentioned Ozu site for other available DVDs.

Finally, you'll be glad to know that Ebert has since apologized to Scott, in Slate:

...full disclosure compels me to say that at the time I was extremely disappointed that Dave Kehr did not get the job (reportedly because of ageism, although who knows), and so I got smart-ass about you with Salon. The fact is, your movie reviews have been as good as your book reviews, and I am ashamed to have spoken so recklessly.

Me, I've only seen three Ozu movies, so you see I'm only halfway there. But I'm within walking distance of the Castro theater, so check back soon. This sums up my status as a movie critic. A neophyte, but an eager one.

Let's talk about Bresson another day.

It's ripped-from-the-headlines week at your local theater. Playing in many cities this week:

• Elephant, Gus Van Sant's fictionalized account of the Columbine school shootings;
• Shattered Glass, a movie based on the period at The New Republic during which reporter Stephen Glass fabricated entire stories;
• The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a documentary made inside the presidential palace during the coup that temporarily ousted Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez;
• and Bus 174, a documentary about a bus hijacking in Rio De Janeiro.

All four of these movies are riveting. All four are important. Each one essentially tells the story behind the news and, in many ways, the story of the news: where it comes from, what influences it, and how it breaks down. Bus 174 and The Revolution show how the news media itself becomes a part of the story. The bus-jacking in Rio happened in broad daylight with a hundred local news reporters swarming the bus and capturing the hours-long standoff on tape. The documentary is exceptionally well organized and explores the story from several angles, in depth.

Like me, you may have read about the coup in Venezuela quickly in the newspaper and then forgotten it, but it comes alive in The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, a documentary that's both a success and a failure. It succeeds at being in the right place at the right time and showing how the opposition to Chavez used the media to sway public opinion, but it's as biased a piece of journalism as what it criticizes.

Shattered Glass is fascinating, as tales of deception often are, and is again valuable for showing what the opinion shapers of the world look like: driven, competitive, and so darn young. And look at how much trust we put in them. Stephen Glass wrote fiction for the New Republic, inventing characters, companies, and events. Problem is, he sold it to everyone, including his bosses, as fact. Unfortunately, the movie offers very little analysis of the situtation, content in blaming one guy (yes, he deserves it) and a simple flaw in fact-checking standards. But this has happened to such high-profile news outlets that maybe more depth would be useful. Still, it's a completely absorbing tale.

Of course, if analysis is what I want, am I being inconsistent when I think that Elephant is one of the most thought-provoking movies of the year despite the fact that it avoids any attempt to analyze its subject, school shootings? While Elephant isn't directly about the media as the other three movies are, what lurks beneath every second is our collective desire to understand simply and definitively why such shootings happen. This movie's rigid sampling of details implies that the whole thing is far too complex for television to analyze.

I hated the idea of this movie from the moment I heard about it. Gus Van Sant has flipped his lid again, I thought. This movie does not need to be made, I thought. Nothing good can come of this. But I was wrong. This movie did need to be made, and you need to see it. More importantly, you need to talk about it afterward. Give me a call or something.

The Human Stain feels like a novel that's been reduced to what are thought to be its essentials but somehow loses something in the process. I haven't read Roth's novel, so I'm partially guessing, here, but the movie seems unable to tell us what we need to know about its characters, and I blame the filmmaker's reductive method of selection from what I imagine to be in the book. Maybe book editors should be filmmakers.

When I see a movie like this, I think of Francis Ford Coppola, for several reasons:

• He made The Godfather, certainly one of the great American movies. It's based on a novel, spans decades, and has no shortage of plot and character. But Coppola used cinematic techniques to find new themes buried in the story, themes of America, the land of immigrants and opportunity, politics and corruption, attempts at legitimacy and deals with the devil. Think of the scene in which Don Vito Corleone dies in the garden while playing with his grandson, observed from a distance through vines by a nervous camera. Life, death, rebirth. What we thought was an arc is a cycle that continues now with Michael.
• But Coppola also made The Conversation, certainly one of the great unsung American movies. Written by Coppola for the screen, it has a thin plot that covers a short period of time and observes a single character who interacts from time to time with others but seems solitary in the middle of a crowd. Gene Hackman has very little dialog but speaks silent volumes hiding inside his translucent raincoat, behind his horn-rimmed glasses. Inside this sparse structure, the story pulses with life and rhythm, advancing when you don't expect it to. The movie is intensely quiet, using sound effects and voices like an accompaniment to its circular piano melody, and Coppola's camera knows when to look away from its characters who remain just offscreen, when to follow them like a hawk, and when to pan left-and-right in disbelief. We're left in the end with just Hackman and his saxophone, saying what need not be said.
• And I think of the comment that Coppola wrote in his introduction to the Zoetrope All-Story collection, describing his desire for movies to be based on strong stories and for studios to cultivate literary work:

  I thought the best place to begin was with the short story, because it most approximates the dimensions of the average film. Novels tend to have too much material, but short stories contain all the basic elements that a film needs in one package: character, plot, and setting. Like movies, stories are to be consumed in one sitting. The good ones transport you, the great ones change you, and the bad ones — well, at least they are short.

  The Conversation is a short story. Although it devotes nearly all of its time to one character, that character remains something of a mystery, not because the movie fails, but because it succeeds. People are more complicated than some movies would have us believe.

Novels can't be re-coded into movies. They're something other. Novels and movies are almost a complete mismatch, and I think they are only paired because they're both consumer units. People buy individual books and individual movies, but they buy short stories only in collections. Commerce has joined art forms for its own purposes.

Now what's happened to the short film?

Nathaniel Kahn's documentary My Architect about his late father, architect Louis Kahn, opens wider in November. Like Stone Reader, it's a very personal search, documented by a first-time filmmaker, a search in which the real reward is the journey itself.

Both movies explore the intersections of a person's daily life and his art and revolve around the filmmaker's own feelings about the work. Kahn's movie is more successful, to me, even though it would seem he's aiming at a stationary target. Both movies suffer at times from borrowing too heavily from TV, but Kahn is more serious about the details and has assembled a more nuanced travelogue. He's less certain about where he wants his search to end up, which makes him a more credible and more likable guide.

You can listen to Terry Gross's interview with Kahn on yesterday's Fresh Air, but also be on the lookout for the movie in your area.