Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Diane Arbus opens today in limited release, and I have to wonder how many people have even heard of it. I hadn't really planned on seeing Fur at Telluride; at least, it wasn't on my radar as a "must see" film. Then I heard so many people buzzing about it, I decided to add it to my schedule at the last minute. It was one of those polarizing films with very little middle ground: People were either very Pro-Fur or very Anti-Fur -- so I had to see it. About a third of the way into the film, I was thinking to myself, "This film is not going to play well to mainstream movie audiences, but I love it." Then again, I'm the sort of filmgoer who actually likes weird. I enjoy having my expectations turned on their ear, and Fur definitely does that.

Another upcoming artsy film that leans sharply toward the bizarre is Perfume: Story of a Murderer. I caught a screening of Perfume, helmed by Run, Lola, Run director Tom Tykwer, the other night. Perfume opens in limited release at the end of December, with a wider release slated for January. Like Fur, Perfume is a dark, almost hallucinatory film with the air of a fable about it. I thought when I saw Fur that I'd seen the most curious film I was likely to see all year; Perfume managed to surpass it -- in a really good way.

Perhaps it seems a bit premature to speculate about the cinematic future of The Looking Glass Wars. After all, the book was only released two weeks ago in the United States, in spite of being a huge hit over in the UK for nearly two years. But the book's author, Frank Beddor, is a film producer (There's Something About Mary), and the book is so clearly written with a film version in mind that it's impossible, while reading it, not to imagine it on the screen.

After all, how many books do you know that have a trailer? And a card game? And a successful comic spin-off? And a soundtrack? And given the enormous success of Harry Potter,and that books like The Golden Compass, Eragon, Inkheart and The Spiderwick Chronicles are being made into films, it doesn't seem much of a reach to think that it's only a matter of time before someone snatches up The Looking Glass Wars.

The book is another in the trend of re-imaginings of classic tales ala Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West). Where Wicked (in the book version, at least) turned The Wizard of Oz stories on their ear, though, giving us full-fledged, conflicting political and philosophical systems, characters with hidden motivations and complex alliances, and a plot with some unpredictable twists and turns, The Looking Glass Wars is more of a one-dimensional tale. The premise is that Beddor, after years of painstaking research, has uncovered the truth about Alice Liddell, to whom Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass were dedicated. Alice, the book posits, was really Alyss Heart, princess of Wonderland. Her mother, Queen Genevieve, was violently overthrown by Redd, her psychotic older sister, in a bloody coup staged on the princess' seventh birthday.

I have a lot of admiration for screenwriters. They are the unsung heroes of the film business; without their stories, no film would ever be made. Being a writer is hard, anxious and often lonely work. You stare at the blank screen. It waits to be filled, it must be filled, and so you start to write, praying that the end result is worth the effort you give to it. I've started and not finished countless screenplays whose stories just wouldn't go anywhere, written and completed eight full drafts of an absolutely dreadful romantic comedy and, through various writing groups I've belonged to over the years, read a lot of developing screenplays that will, thankfully, never see the light of day. I'm such a geek, in fact, that I often read the scripts for films I love, over and over again, just to feel rhythm of the words on the page, and to get a sense for how those words translated into the finished film on the screen.

As so often happens, Anne Thompson at The Hollywood Reporter has written an astute piece on screenwriting that is so obvious it seems it should be carved into granite above the entrance to every studio in Hollywood: Great writing makes for great movies. The film with which Thompson explores this hypothesis is Stranger Than Fiction, which debuted at Toronto (sadly, I missed it there), and she makes her point about great writing by enumerating how many big stars wanted to be in the film based on the script alone. Some truly great films have come out of a script that speaks its truth to actors so purely and loudly that they simply must see the film get made. They'll work for scale, drop other projects, shuffle their schedules around, all for the sake of that golden opportunity to be in a film so good that it demands to be made, whatever the sacrifice. When critics and cinephiles bemoan the dismal quality of so many films sludging their way out of Hollywood, very often what we are really bemoaning is the lack of originality in storytelling, the lack of passion in penning that story, and mostly, the lack of truth that seems to permeate so many films.

I had two highly anticipated screenings tonight. The first was Fido, better known around TIFF as "you know, that Canadian zombie flick that's kinda like Shaun of the Dead." The film, which stars Carrie-Anne Moss and Billy Connolly, is a fable about a tiny town permastuck in the 1950s. Space dust fell onto earth years back, causing all the dead to rise, becoming hungry, flesh-eating zombies, until Zomcom came along and invented a zombie collar that makes the zombies placid and obedient. The zombies have become a slave-worker class, doing all the crap work no one else wants to do. Full review to come on this one, but it was sure a crowd pleaser at its premiere. The audience was laughing so hard around me I almost missed some lines a few times, and at the end there was much whooping and hollering.

The hottest ticket in town tonight, though, was for the midnight screening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. This show was one of the first to sell out at the fest, a people were offering to pay up to $400 a ticket. The pic above shows the line behind me -- and I got there late due to the Fido screening.

Okay, I swore up and down that I was not going to write another word about those everloving snakes, but I'd be truly remiss if I let this one slip by. I let it simmer for a couple days, thinking I'd be able to avoid it, but it's just stuck in my head like an annoying Britney Spears song, and it won't leave until I write it out, so here you go. Chuck Klosterman wrote a piece on Snakes on a Plane, and how its "create your own adventure" marketing might just, if the film proves financially successful, spell the End of Film as We Know It. Klosterman goes into a lengthy dissertation on the term "populism", presumably to prove his point that Snakes on a Plane is not a populist film, in spite of the best efforts of its handlers to make it so.

Klosterman is concerned that if the film makes a lot of money (which it likely will) despite being ridiculous (which it probably is, even if it stars Samuel L. Jackson), its success will make studios sit up and take notice, and then churn out more of the same. Well, duh. Studios churn out crap all the time based on the success of other crap. How else can one possibly explain the fact that people like Uwe Boll and the Wayans brothers continue to make films?

I'm guessing the box office success of the Harry Potter flicks has made studio greenlighters take another look at the tween/teen demographic, because there are quite a few film adaptations of books targeted at that age group in the works. And I'm glad to see this, because my nine-year-old is getting to the stage where films for younger kids -- the Over the Hedges and the Ant Bullies -- are more of a cinematic snack than a satisfying movie meal. She's waiting with bated breath for the next Harry Potter film and the last book in the series, but is also aware that the series is coming to an end and thus has been hunting out more tween books to satiate her literary needs. Much as she likes to read, though, she also loves to see films made out of her favorite books. Here's a short list of movies on the horizon that will hopefully meet her expectations, and mine as well:

Over at her Risky Biz Blog, the ever-on-top-of-things Anne Thompson has a great write-up on the indulgent spending of Hollywood studios on films like Superman Returns, X Men: 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. Thompson loves the FX, but hates the over-spending on cool effects extravaganzas at the expense of solid execution. If you're really into reading lots of detail on the FX, stuff, though, Thompson also has a really good piece on all the digital effects that went into making Bryan Singer's vision of Superman come to life. Bottom line, though: Thompson bemoans the huge box office returns on these flicks, because they just encourage studios to keep cranking out more of the same-old, same-old.

When I'm in the mood to get good and depressed, I just take a look at the weekend box office numbers. There are few things more guaranteed to send me into the depths of despair than seeing how many people lined up to see the latest Tyler Perry flick or Adam Sandler comedy (and I use that term very loosely when applied to Sandler, who ranks just marginally below David Spade on my list of people I wish would never, ever make another movie). I swear, every time I see Sandler on the screen, I just want to hurt him -- and I'm a peace-loving, non-violent person under ordinary circumstances. I'm sure he's a perfectly nice person in real life, and he's probably a blast at parties, but I'd rather get my gums scraped without numbing medication than sit through his films. Perplexingly, though, his tend to do okay at the box office, so apparently a lot of people actually like him.

Sandler's latest effort, Click, about a man who buys a remote with the power to affect reality, dominated the top weekend box office slot, with an estimated take of $40 million. The film is going to need some good word-of-mouth to get past its budget of $70 million and into the black, but I expect it will make it over the hump. Jack Black vehicle Nacho Libre, in theaters for 10 days now, has raked in $52.7 million off a relatively small $35 million budget, already putting the flick in the black for Paramount and pretty much guaranteeing we'll be seeing more of Black in the future. For some reason, Black doesn't tend to irritate me nearly so much as Sandler, but neither do I find him particularly appealing. I think what it comes down to for me is that Sandler's roles often have this streak of meanness running through the surface comedy, which I really dislike. Black, on the other hand, tends to have this innocence and naivete about him that's just charming, even when he's running around in tights.

As I was perusing my fave film sites this afternoon in an all-too-brief moment of quiet downtime, I came across a bit on Roger Ebert's site about Silent Hill director Christophe Gans lashing out in this month's Electronic Gaming Monthly about Ebert's opinion that video games are not art. Now, I am not a video game person (honestly, I just don't have the spatial ability to play them well, as my six-year-old son can well tell you), but what drew me to Ebert's reply was the end of it, where he notes, "the older I get, the more prudent I become in how I spend my time." Ebert concludes his response to Gans with an homage to his friend, the late Gene Siskel, who once said that nobody on their deathbed ever thinks, "I'm glad I always flew tourist."

Trailers are notoriously tricky things; they can show you an extremely skewed version of the movie at hand, or they can give the whole movie away. The Weinstein Co. is trying another tack to get you to watch movies -- by giving you an extended teaser: they're showing free samples of select films online at video-sharing sites like YouTube. They've shown the first eight minutes of Lucky Number Slevin on the amateur site (after the movie has already opened in theaters) to get you to see the remaining 102 minutes. First Look Studios has given an extended clip of their period drama The Proposition, starring Guy Pearce and Emily Watson, to iFilm.com. The film opens in theaters on May 5.

Last week, our Monday Morning Poll topic was on the upcoming 9/11 films -- United 93, which comes out this month, and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, starring Nicolas Cage, which opens August 11. At the same time we asked that poll question (and we're certainly not the only film site asking ourselves and our readers if it's too soon for a film about 9/11) -- the Seattle Arab and Iranian Film Festival (SAIFF) was running here in Seattle. It's a small festival, without the furious deal-making and hot "scene" of Sundance or the red carpets and brouhaha surrounding Cannes, or even the mild fervor that will be generated in Seattle at the end of May with the opening of the Seattle International Film Festival.

Yet now, perhaps more than ever before, smaller film fests -- especially the culture-centric fests like SAIFF, the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, which ran here recently, and lots of other smaller fests around the country -- matter. They matter because it is at these smaller fests that hundreds of seeds of social conscience and cultural understanding are sown. Hopefully some of those seeds will get picked up and scattered around at the larger fests where they'll get more press and attention, but even for those that don't score large play on the festival circuit, much less the Holy Grail of indie film, distribution, small film festivals give their voices a chance to be heard.