Horror movies: You know the drill. Oversexed, nubile, blond teenage girls cavort shamelessly with horny teenage boys until the bad guy murders them -- often with with a phallic weapon and abundant fake blood. Although the boys are in pretty much equal danger of being dead before the final credits, it's almost always the girls who are portrayed as most vulnerable and in need of protection. Why? Well, because girls have vaginas, which puts them at danger of being attacked by the male half of the population. Therefore, we must costume them in the most revealing ways possible, make them aware of their own sexuality, and then punish them for it with death. That way, when we kill the girls off, it'll kind of be their own fault for being such sluts. It's not just horror films, of course; from thrillers to romantic comedies, women are endlessly at the mercy of their vaginas. And therein lies the appeal of Teeth, a different kind of horror film, which just played the Sundance Film Festival.

For all the plights of North American filmmakers, there's always someone, somewhere who has it worse, and it's usually directors in China. Chinese laws are quite strict, which often leads filmmakers to be incredibly creative in showing certain themes -- especially sex, as I briefly discussed in November. Director Li Yu is the latest casualty of strict Chinese censors. Her film, Lost in Beijing, was to compete at the Berlin International Film Festival this month, but her country has banned her from bringing the film to the fest. The film involves a relationship between the boss of a Beijing massage parlor (Tony Leung) and his female worker (Fan Bingbing).

According to Producer Fang Li, the ban states: "According to current regulations, your film needs further modifications and therefore is not allowed to go for the 57th Berlinale." This is, obviously, a huge blow to the film, as the festival begins in a week. He's also quoted as saying that Li Yu "is not in a mood to do anything." I'm not surprised! While the censors are open to further editing by the filmmaker, Fang has asserted that to do so would destroy the film. They plan to lobby the Film Bureau as long as they can, before deciding whether they want to ignore the ruling and attend the festival anyway. Fang also produced Lou Ye's Summer Palace last year, which was brought to Cannes without China's approval -- and ultimately led to the director being banned from filmmaking in China for the next 5 years. Hopefully Li Yu won't have the same fate.

For the Bible Tells Me So, a documentary showing at the Sundance Film Festival, explores the issue of religion and homosexuality through personal interviews with five families whose spiritual lives collided with their real lives when they learned a loved one was gay. Director Daniel Karslake and Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay man to be elected Bishop of the Episcopalian Church, were on-hand for the fest, and sat down with Cinematical for a chat about the film.

It's never really fair to add to the million woes of the indie filmmaker by mentioning the troubles stirring around them pre-release. After all, it's what's on screen that counts. But there comes a time when the fuss is irresistible to watch, especially after a look at Cinematical's Kevin Polowy and Kim Voynar's reviews of Hounddog, as well as Monika Bartyzel's earlier anticipation of the trouble to come, from that now notorious Sundance film best known as the "Dakota Fanning rape movie."

The LA Times's Robin Abcarian did the pro-Hounddog piece on Jan. 20 , taking the high road as she described the 21 credited producers, the usual horror stories of money dropping out and director Deborah Kampmeier hocking her car. S.T. VanAirsdale of The Reeler took a significantly lower road, reproducing, in all of its misspelled glory, the ad Kampmeier wrote for the Sundance newsletter which describes trying to avoid the unions while she made Hounddog. As a reward for this small act of union-avoidance, Volkswagen presented her with a VW Touareg. It's interesting to note in Neil Gabler's book on Walt Disney, by the way, that unionized newspaper critics refused to attend the screening of Pinocchio because of Disney's well-known labor troubles. Other times, other morals. Warmly heralding the director's "exploitative, racist piece of s--t," VanAirsdale links to Manhola Darghis' by now famous Sundance screed calling Hounddog "overinflated rubbish ... as sincere as it is stupid."

While waiting for someone to find the tongs with which to handle this movie, you can sign (sight unseen) either the "block Hounddog petition" or the "support the movie Hounddog" petition.

The two or three things that German director Malte Ludin knows about his father -- that he was a career Nazi who was executed following the war -- are disturbing enough. These facts are not the entire story, though. Two Or Three Things I Know About Him follows the 60-something documentarian as he sets out to re-trace his father's upward path through the Nazi ranks, while all the while sitting down for tearful, confrontational interviews with his family members, some of whom still hold to the belief that their father, Hanns Ludin, did nothing that any other soldier wouldn't have done for his country, and deserves no special castigation. One of Hanns Ludin's daughters is particularly defiant. After a long and bitter argument with her filmmaker-brother that runs in snippets throughout the film, in which she tries to justify her father's various crimes, she finally lays her cards on the table and reveals her true position: "I see myself as the child of a victim. I think he was better than me, and maybe better than you."

Two Or Three Things, arriving on the scene in the wake of the revelation that Gunter Grass, literary giant and self-styled conscience of the post-war German nation, was actually a member of the Waffen SS. seeks to deliberately open the old wounds of a nation and confront hypocrisy with a steely eye. The journey that director Ludin goes on, beginning in a cold, antiseptic-looking records room, will eventually lead him to the conclusion that the man who left behind romantic doggerel like "You will not break a heart that beats so warm" was also a monster. The uncovered documents reveal that Hanns Ludin, as ambassador to Slovakia, a vassal state of the Third Reich, was an instrumental and a very willing middle-man in project to deport huge numbers of Jews from their Slovak homes to the concentration camps. This is the kind of film where Ludin present us with facts like these and then follows it with "I would never have dared to make this film while my mother was alive."

"The Bible is the word of God through the word of human beings, speaking in the idiom of their time,and the richness of the Bible comes from the fact that we don't take it as literally so that it was dictated by God." -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

The last few years have brought some important documentaries: Alex Gibney's Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room, Amy Berg's Deliver Us from Evil; and Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth, just to name a few. 2007 is young, but Sundance is always a great opportunity to sample the documentary waters, and my favorite doc at Sundance this year was For the Bible Tells Me So, an exploration of the religious right's use of the Bible to justify shutting homosexuals out of the faiths in which they've grown up.

Nanking, a documentary about the 1937 invasion of the then-capital of China by the Japanese army, competed at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival in the documentary competition. Nanking producer Ted Leonsis sat down with Cinematical at Sundance to talk about the film (full disclosure: Leonsis is an executive with AOL, Cinematical's parent company).

Cinematical: The first question I have is about how you came to be involved with this film – it's my understanding that your involvement in this film was much more personal than a producer's role often is.

Ted Leonsis: I was on vacation with my family and went to a bookstore and everything was in French. And the owner had 45 days of the NYT and so I bought them all and read them all. And one of the things in there was an obituary that said, noted author Iris Chang had committed suicide, and as I read it I saw that she was married with two children; I'm married with two children, and I so I was drawn by that. And then I later threw the newspapers in the garbage and that obituary landed on top and as I was going in and out I kept seeing it. As we left I ran back in and grabbed it and stuck it in my briefcase. Then when I got home I did some research on her in Amazon, and bought all her books and was drawn to the story about Nanking.

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Laura Dunn's film about the dangers of overdevelopment, and the effects it can have on the environment, is the type of documentary that manages to knock the wind out of you as you watch it. This is because she manages to hit the nail on the head of the "how can you not see this?" correlation between cause and effect. Dunn interviews key people involved in the political overdevelopment in Austin, Texas that was bitterly fought between developers like Gary Bradley and environmentalists in the Save our Springs alliance. While people talking about the dangers of overdevelopment are not new, Austin serves as a perfect window into the debate, because of Barton Springs, a natural spring-fed pool near downtown Austin that has served as a public swimming hole and park since the early 1900s.

One of the most powerful -- if not the most powerful -- documentary films at Sundance 2007 is The Devil Came on Horseback. We had the chance to speak with the film's subject, Brian Steidle, and co-director Annie Sundberg. If, after viewing this interview, you're interested in the Web sites Mr. Steidle mentions, please go to any of the following: www.savedafur.org ; www.sudandivestment.org or www.globalgrassroots.org.

The movie writers for The Guardian have been on a racial kick lately, dropping an unexpected bomb of a review on Rocky Balboa, accusing it of being loaded down with subliminal messages intended for white audiences -- like, for example, that it's remotely possible for a 60-year old white fighter to go the distance with a black champion in his prime. Now, in a piece entitled Heal The World, writer Steve Rose is casting a satirical eye on Hollywood's supposed discovery of the world outside our borders, as evidenced by the slew of recent films like Blood Diamond, Babel, The Constant Gardener and Syriana.

Rose's "guide to the best issue-drama cliches," includes such subsections as "White Man's Justice," which mocks aggressive PR campaigns like the one waged by Blood Diamond. According to Rose, campagins like that one exist primarily so that "Blood Diamond's website can brandish links to respectable institutions like Amnesty International." Another section of the guide, called "The Caucasian Angel," jabs at the notion that wherever there is "dark-skinned human suffering," a "smokin' hot white woman" must be dropped into the situation so that she can commence with "carrying the conscience of the Western world on her shoulders." This section of the piece closes by taking a swipe at Angelina Jolie for being "browned up" in her forthcoming film, A Mighty Heart.

Tuesday morning I attended the panel for No End in Sight, the documentary about the mess in Iraq, how we got there, and what it will take to get out. The panel was moderated by film journalist David D'Arcy, and included filmmaker Charles Ferguson, exec producer Alex Gibney (Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room), former ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was coordinator for central Iraq in charge of Baghdad, US Marine Lieutenant Seth Moulton, Omar Fekeiki, former manager of the Washington Post office in Baghdad, and, via satellite, General Jay Garner and Lawrence Wilkerson (US Army, retired), former chief-of-staff to then US Secretary of State Colin Powell. You can see Part One of the panel above.

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There's an infamous essay about David Cronenberg's first film, Shivers, which was financed in part by Canadian tax dollars: "You Should Know How Bad This Film Is; After All, You Helped Pay For It." A paraphrase of that title rang in my mind as I watched the Sundance documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib: We should know how bad this situation is; after all, we've all helped pay for it. Director Rory Kennedy combines interviews, photos and on-site footage from Iraq's infamous prison -- which went from being Saddam Hussein's execution factory to being the site of an American scandal -- to make a potent piece of documentary filmmaking that demonstrates a clear chain of lawless, inhuman cruelty and corruption that went from the gleaming conference tables of the Oval Office and Pentagon to the blood-spattered, shit-smeared halls of a prison in Iraq.

Kennedy's methodology is meticulous and human -- many of the ex-service people who served time for the documented prisoner abuses captured in the infamous photographs speak on-camera about what they did, and why; several Iraqis are interviewed as well. Soldiers talk about how superior officers gave them minimal or conflicting guidance on how much pressure was too much pressure to induce captives to talk; ex-captives of Abu Ghraib talk about how, for example, they watched as their father was beaten so severely it lead to respiratory illness, which led to death -- with medical attention denied every time it was begged for by a weeping son.

Brad Pitt was snubbed for his performance in Babel, and now he may be snubbed as one of the producers of the Best Picture-nominated The Departed. According to a recent AP story, both the producers of The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine face ugly battles to decide who gets to walk up on stage and collect the Best Picture Oscar. In 2000, the Academy adopted a rule stating that a maximum of three producers qualify, and so, in the announcements this morning, the film titles were followed by "nominees to be determined."

When Little Miss Sunshine won the Producers Guild Award recently, five producers called themselves winners. Now two of them have to bow out of the Oscar race. It gets even more complicated around The Departed. The Producers Guild ruled that only one of the three producers properly qualified for their award, and the Academy sticks by those rules, leaving out Brad Pitt and Brad Grey (though they both will have the chance to appeal to the Academy).

The Academy's 2000 rule was established to battle so-called "credit creep," in which filmmakers doled out unnecessary and undeserved producer credits just to massage a few egos. In recent years, producer lists have routinely grown to upwards of a dozen or more names. In the old days, it was one guy -- usually with a cigar -- that produced a movie. David O. Selznick or Daryl F. Zanuck or even Robert Evans were in charge, and what they said, went. It just goes to show: too many cooks spoil the soup.

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
(It is sweet and decorous to die for one's country.)

-- Horace

Sure, but try explaining that to someone who's lost a loved one in war; it may be sweet and decorous to die for one's country, but how is that consolation to the people left behind? How do you explain that kind of loss to yourself? How do you explain that kind of loss to children? And moving from the abstract to the concrete, as Stanley Phillips (John Cusack) has to ask himself, how can he explain to his daughters Heidi (Shélan O'Keefe) and Dawn (Gracie Bednarczyk) that their mom -- wife, mother, friend, U.S. Army staff sergeant -- isn't coming back to them because she's died in Iraq?

Well, for Stanley, the answer to that is simple: You don't. At least not right away. You stall for a few minutes. And then you stall for an hour. And then you stall a little more and ask the kids what they'd like to do while driving around Minnesota's chain restaurants and strip malls, trying desperately to think of how to tell them. And when Dawn says she wants to go to Enchanted Gardens -- a Florida fun park -- Stanley puts the family on the highway and heads South, because doing something stupid is invariably easier than doing something right.

The Devil Came on Horseback explains how Brian Steidle left the marines to look for a job and found a calling. As an observer for the African Union in the Sudan, Steilde spent six months watching as a nation consumed itself -- as the Sudanese Arab-controlled government enacted systematic genocide against its black African citizens in Dafur. It's not that the government simply stood by as local militias, the Janjaweed, enacted murder, torture and rape against the local black villages and tribes -- the government was actively engaged in aiding and abetting the Janjaweed atrocities as a tool of policy. Steidle was used to action, to being part of forces working for the common good, but all he could do was watch and take pictures and document what happened after murder and mutilation cut across the land like a bitter burning wind, leaving ashes and ruined lives in their wake.

Journalists couldn't get access to the parts of the Sudan where Steidle was posted, but eventually -- driven by equal parts heartfelt outrage and horrified impotence -- he leaked his own pictures to the press in the hopes that the American people and government might be moved to action. Directed by Annie Sunderberg and Ricki Stern, The Devil Came on Horseback tells audiences what has happened in the Sudan through Steidle's own journey; it also shows us Steidle's journey from being just an observer to being an activist. The film incorporates Steidle's own photos and video footage, as well as follows him after his posting is over and he is testifiying before Congress. He briefs Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on the Sudan. He watches. He waits. Nothing happens.