Last week's 48-hour press blitz for Marie Antoinette was covered tag-team style by Netscape at the Movies and Cinematical, with the former covering the film's NYFF press conference and the latter covering junket roundtables at Sony headquarters. At both events, the Converse questions came fast and furious. For those who haven't yet seen the film, there's a scene where an impossible-to-miss pair of Chuck Taylor All Star Converse show up at 18th century Versailles. One journalist at the roundtables was so irked by this that she decided to interrogate Sofia Coppola on that and other other points of historical inaccuracy, down to and including Antoinette's panties. Coppola wasn't easily rattled, however. She displayed a relaxed-but-unshakable manner and patiently addressed the charges one by one. The next day at the press conference, however, Coppola was again asked why she decided to include the sneakers. This time she immediately spit back "Because I could." I think that's a pretty great answer.

In addition to Sofia Coppola, stars Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman, who play the blundering King Louis and Queen Antoinette of France, were also on hand to participate in the roundtables and offer their views on the making of the film. Cinematical's official digital tape recorder was strategically placed to capture all of the best and worst questions from the event. Here's a sampling of what went on:

Starting on December 1, Manhattan's Film Forum will begin one of its most anticipated retro-festivals to date: a three-week sleaze-a-thon of Hollywood films released just prior to the introduction of the Hays Code. The code, a detailed compendium of industry guidelines on what should and should not be seen in a Hollywood film, was laid down in 1934 and ruled the roost in tinsel town for the next thirty years. Among other things, the code expressly forbade nudity, interracial coupling, desecration of the U.S. flag, revenge killings, use of illegal drugs, crime methodology (you can't show the audience how to crack a safe), scenes of child-birth, depiction of priests as criminals, illicit bedroom decor, casual liquor use and "white slavery"!

Cinematical will hopefully be on hand to cover some of the classics being screened, including 1932's Call Her Savage, starring Clara Bow as a whip-wielding wild woman named Nasa Dynamite who brains her husband with a stool one day and then heads off to the local gay bar. (Her incurable wildness is later explained by the revelation that she is half-Indian) There's also Born to be Bad, with Loretta Young as a woman who thinks she's won the lotto when her young son is run over by a millionaire. Raoul Walsh's Yellow Ticket, with Elissa Landi trying to escape Czarist Russia by posing as a prostitute, will also be screened. Joan Blondell vehicle Broadway Bad, which ran once in 1933 before being slapped with an outright veto by the Hays office, is also on the bill.

The festival opens on Friday, December 1, with a new print of the Spencer Tracy screwball comedy Me and My Gal and runs through December 21. For more information, contact Film Forum.

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It was gone for a while -- but now, it's back -- Coming Distractions, Cinematical's weekly podcast! This week's special guest is Time Out New York Film Critic David Fear, and David and myself talk about Jesus Camp, The Last King of Scotland, Shortbus and many others -- as well as the New York Film Festival, the difference between cretins and Spartans and much, much more. You can listen to the entire podcast by just downloading it here -- and let us know what you'd most like to hear in the Podcast in the future!

(Music credits: "Overdose," Dumb.)

Not many directors could take a film built around the theme of death and make it as funny, thoughtful, and deeply meaningful as Pedro Almodóvar has with Volver, now officially Spain's nominee for the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. The film revolves around three generations of women: Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and her daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo) live with Raimunda's husband, an unemployed laborer who spends his spare time checking out his daughter's blossoming body. Raimunda's sister, Sole (Lola Dueñas) supports herself by running an unlicensed beauty shop out of her apartment. As we meet Raimunda, Sole and Paula, they are at the cemetery cleaning the graves of Raimunda and Sole's parents, who died in a fire.

In La Mancha, where Raimunda's parents lived, the east wind blows incessantly, driving people to the brink of insanity. This is a superstitious culture, where the dead are respected, graves are kept clean and tombstones well-polished, and the dead occasionally walk among the living -- especially if they have unfinished business. When Raimunda and Sole go to visit their elderly aunt, they are surprised to find that she refers to their dead mother, Irene, as though she has just seen her. It doesn't take long for Abuela Irene (Carmen Maura) to appear to Sole and Paula, though she conceals her presence from Raimunda. It is with Raimunda, and with Raimunda and Sole's friend Agustina (Blanca Portillo) that Abuela Irene has unfinished business to resolve.

If you've been paying attention to the news over the past several years, you've heard the term "outsourced" -- the phenomena of companies taking jobs in the United States and transitioning entire divisions to countries like India, where they can pay a fraction of the payroll and overhead to get the same job done. In Outsourced, directed by John Jeffcoat, Todd (Josh Hamilton), a customer service manager, finds himself in the odd position of being sent to India to train his replacement, after the order fulfillment division of his company is outsourced there. It's nothing personal, says his manager, Dave (Matt Smith, who perfectly deadpans the role of the ruthless boss). The added irony is that the company Todd works for sells kitschy bits of Americana -- plaster of paris bald eagles to farmers in the heartland, "cheesehead" hats to folks in Wisconsin -- and that their customers will now be purchasing their American pride collectibles through workers sitting at desks half a world away.

Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a litle girl caught up in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, seeks escape from the fear and dreariness of her life -- and is drawn into in a fantasy world as dangerous as the real one she wants to leave behind. Ofelia's father is dead, and her mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil) has married Captain Vidal (Sergei López), a tyrannical man who rules his remote outpost and his new family with a brutal iron fist. Carmen is pregnant with Vidal's child, and his sole concern is that the baby be delivered safely. Ofelia and Carmen are, to him, mere inconveniences to put up with along the path to him having a son.

Canadian actress Lisa Ray has had a very busy couple of years. After starring in 2002's Bollywood/Hollywood, directed by Deepa Mehta, Ray filmed Ball & Chain in 2004, Water (Canada's entry for Best Foreign Film, also directed by Mehta) and Seeking Fear in 2005, and Quarter Life Crisis and A Stone's Throw in 2006. A Stone's Throw, the directorial debut of producer Camelia Frieberg, played at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Ray graciously sat down with Cinematical to talk about the film and what's up next for her. Ray had just flown in the night before, to catch the end of the fest and spend some downtime visiting her parents in Toronto.

This Friday marks the triumphant opening of the 44th Annual New York Film Festival, which yours truly has been placed in charge of covering for Cinematical. Though the fest is not open to the public until September 29, I've spent the past week and a half attending press screenings for the many films included within its fantastic lineup. Yes, very fun stuff indeed.

As I repeatedly drag my lazy ass onto a train and commute into the city from my new apartment in Queens, I try to remind myself that, while most of the people around me are probably heading towards some boring corporate job, I'm going to see a movie. However, that thought usually lasts for about five minutes, and then I'm once again the grumpiest person in the world -- the guy you don't want to ask for directions -- until I'm eventually able to inject some much-needed caffeine directly into my brain. (Which reminds me: isn't it about time we start up a "Just Say No to Starbucks" campaign? After a few more screenings, I'll be officially giving them more money per month than I pay to my landlord. Scary, ain't it?)

Due to everyone's wild and crazy film festival schedule, our final video roundtable from Toronto was shot at 8AM near the end of the fest, as we were getting close to seeing a cumulative total of over 50 films. An 8AM shoot was fine for former East Coast Editor Martha Fischer, who is an early riser anyhow, but James Rocchi and I could barely prop our eyelids open. So while I can't promise that we're exactly coherent, we did manage to talk about some films we were each wrapping the fest with. Maybe next festival we'll shoot a roundtable at the hotel bar after a day full of screenings followed by a few rounds of drinks. For now, though, you can download the final roundtable from TIFF here (79.2MB, 12:16 minutes ) or watch it over on Netscape.

He (Morgan Freeman) is an actor --- who hasn't acted in a while. He's been ... taking some time? Off the radar? Avoiding gigs that seemed to be beneath him while the floor of other's expectations lowered bit by bit and day by day without him even knowing it? It's not clear to us; it may not be clear to him. He's headed to a grocery store to research a part -- talk to the manager, get a sense of life at an L.A. food mart -- but he's not exactly committed to the project yet. Then again, as he's being driven by a production assistant (Jonah Hill) who isn't sure of the route to the store, it's pretty clear the production isn't necessarily committed to him. ...

Brad Silberling's had one of those perverse, up-and-down careers that Hollywood seems to throw at people occasionally: Not up and down in terms of quality, but rather in terms of resources. Silberling came from TV to direct the big-screen version of Casper; then, he got the hot potato of remaking Wings of Desire for America with City of Angels. From that, it was the personal-and-overlooked drama Moonlight Mile, and then back up to money-maker territory with Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. After that film's miss at the box office (and the challenge of big expectations, off-set turmoil and Jim Carrey), you could pardon Silberling for wanting to take some time and make a slightly smaller-scale film. The good news is that there's no need to; 10 Items or Less may be light, and slight, but it's an unexpectedly winning delight.

Ever since the Dixie Chicks went off on George W. Bush at a concert in the UK back in 2003, the musical trio have been almost as well known for their politics as for their music. Country music fans, who tend as a group to lean to the right side of the political aisle, took great umbrage to the Chicks making their opinion on the president -- is is from their home state of Texas -- be known to the world. In Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, directors Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck take a look at the fallout of the Chicks refusal to shut up: The radio stations refusing to play their music, the right-wing bloggers urging fans to boycott them, the letters from fans, one of which inspired both a Dixie Chicks song and the title of this documentary, by telling the women to just "shut up and sing." Barbara Kopple and Cecilia Peck sat down with Cinematical's James Rocchi and Netscape's Alexia Prichard to discuss their controversial film. You can download the video here (60.9MB, 9: or watch it over on Netscape.

Jindabyne, starring Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne, is about what happens when four men on a fishing trip find the body of a murdered young woman, and decide to leave her in the water, tethered to a tree, until their fishing weekend is over. Their decision has wrenching ramifications both within their personal relationships, and in their relationship with their entire community. Laura Linney very graciously sat down with Cinematical at the Toronto International Film Festival to talk about Jindabyne and her character, Claire. You can download the interview here (31.1MB, five minutes) or watch it over on Netscape. For more on Jindabyne, you can read our review of the film from the Telluride Film Festival.

Fay Grim, director Hal Hartley's follow-up to his 1997 cult favorite, Henry Fool, is just about as sharp, dark and funny as a Hartley fan could wish for. Henry Fool, in case you've missed seeing it, is a little gem of a film about a socially repressed young man, Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) who works as a garbage man to support his depressed mother and nymphomaniac sister, Fay (Parker Posey, in one of her best roles).

When Henry Fool, a vulgar, chain-smoking, self-styled intellectual takes up residence in the family basement to finish writing his "Confession" -- which he claims is so astounding it will turn the literary world upon its ear -- Simon befriends him, and Henry becomes his mentor. Simon eventually writes a book-length poem, which gets published and critically acclaimed, while Henry's confession is found to be inept and practically unreadable. When Henry accidentally kills their disgusting neighbor, Simon trades identities with Henry to help him escape.

When environmental activism crosses the line into eco-terrorism, has the activist become as bad as the corporations he's fighting against? In A Stone's Throw, investigative photojournalist Jack Walker (Kris Holden-Reid) shows up unexpectedly at his sister's house in a rural town in Nova Scotia after a seven-year absence. What his sister Olivia (Kathryn MacLellan) and her ex-husband Jean-Marc (Hugh Thompson) most want to know is this: Is Jack really there just to see the family he hasn't seen in so long and to renew old ties? Or is he there working on the story about the mining company that's reopened a long-closed mine to do cyanide leaching, offering the community over 100 much-needed jobs? Or perhaps to investigate the chemical plant where Jean-Marc himself works?

What makes Jack's situation even more difficult is that he's been diagnosed with a genetic, progressive and incurable retinal disease that will ultimately render him completely blind. Even now, this man who has spent a lifetime's work capturing the effects of pollution by corporations through his camera lens is seeing the world through an increasingly small aperture. Adding to the tension is Jean-Marc and Olivia's son teenage son Thomas (Aaron Webber), who idolizes Jack and is, himself, a budding environmentalist and investigative journalist. When the police come looking for Jack at Olivia's house, Thomas learns that his uncle is wanted by the FBI for eco-terrorism, and everyone begins to question Jack's intentions -- especially Jack himself.