A prolific movie bootlegger, dubbed "The Prince of Piracy," has been sentenced to seven years in federal prison for covertly taping and distributing movies. 36-year old Johnny Ray Gasca was the first person ever to face federal charges for using a camcorder to tape movies from inside of a theater. Gasca was found guilty of taping Anger Management, 8 Mile and The Core -- hasn't he been punished enough? -- and convicted on several other counts including possession of false IDs and fleeing custody. The government asked for ten years. Known for going all-out for his clients, Gasca would use sophisticated monitoring devices and remote zoom lenses to minimize the tell-tale signs that usually give away a shaky camcorder-bootleg. He was so high-tech, in fact, that the studio flack who spotted him taping at a screening of 8 Mile reported that he was surrounded by a "glowing green light."

Gasca reportedly made as much as $4,500 a week distributing the films he taped, and a representative from the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles has released a statement noting that "we take copyright infringement as a very serious crime." Apparently so. I personally think the sentence is a little harsh. When I go to the movies, I couldn't care less if there are bootleggers sitting to the left and right of me when the lights go out, as long as they keep quiet. When is someone going to arrest the guy who had a 20-minute cell-phone conversation during the Friday matinee of Casino Royale that I was at?

Beginning this weekend, Cinematical contributor Martha Fischer and myself will begin to bring you highlights from the long-anticipated Pre-Code festival at Manhattan's Film Forum. The festival, which runs from December 1 through December 21, will showcase a large sampling of films released prior to 1934, the year when Hollywood adopted the infamous Hays Code. The code was a strict set of industry guidelines on what could and could not be shown in an industry film, and was rigorously followed for the next 30-odd years. The code forbade such things as nudity, revenge killings, depiction of drug use, interracial coupling, crime methodology (you can't demonstrate to the audience how to crack a safe), child-birth scenes, and depiction of priests as criminals, among many other things.

While we don't yet have an exact list of what films we will be reviewing for you, a quick consultation with Martha earlier today has given me a good idea of which films are more likely than not to be written up. You can almost certainly count on us to cover 1932's Call Her Savage, staring Clara Bow as an incurable wild woman who brains her husband with a stool one day and heads down to the local gay bar. Hoopla, another Clara Bow sizzler in which she educates a dizzy farm boy about the ways of the world, is also on our list. 1933's Blood Money, a heist film condemned by the Legion of Decency for inciting "law abiding citizens to crime" will not be missed. Nor, in all likelihood, will the Joan Blondell vehicle Broadway Bad or the Spencer Tracy film Bottoms Up, about a scam involving the movie business.

Other films being screened that we hope to cover, time permitting, include The Bowery, Now I'll Tell, The Yellow Ticket, The Tria of Vivianne Ware and Sailor's Luck. Stay tuned to Cinematical for all the coverage, and if you're in the Manhattan area, check out more information about the festival on Film Forum's Web site.

In a lovely little film called The Hanging Garden, writer/director Thom Fitzgerald gave us a character at three stages of life, growing and changing and crashing into old conceptions of himself. The three Williams, at different ages, even appeared on screen simultaneously. Fitzgerald's latest triptych is more subtle in the way it sews together its three-paneled story, but no less successful. 3 Needles is a clever anthology, spaced across three continents, in which AIDS and money are aggressively juxtaposed against each other until the point -- the new possibility of bartering with the disease -- emerges. One third of the story takes place in a French-Canadian household, where Olive, played by Stockard Channing, purposefully contracts HIV as part of a bold insurance swindle. A world away, in Southern Africa, a cynical Afrikaans plantation owner called Hallyday (Ian Roberts) invests in AZT because 70 percent of his workers are positive, and the drug will keep them alive and working longer. In rural China, a blood smuggler called Jin (Lucy Liu) sells tainted blood to start-up hospitals that are not yet sophisticated enough to reject her.

Each story has the low-energy pitch of a routine business meeting where everyone knows more or less how things will shake out. Nearly every scene is shot inside a blah-colored office or a workplace -- we even see some bored-looking porn workers greet a nurse who arrives to give them a routine HIV test. Ten years ago, a movie with AIDS as its central subject would have found it necessary to deal with the horror of lesions, hospital goodbyes and grief. This film seeks to rob AIDS of its plague-mystique and drag it into the realm of the workaday and the banal, where most other aspects of a managed life reside. It mostly succeeds, although a burdensome narration (can you name the last movie that was actually improved by a narration?) and a remarkably aimless ending hurt the project a great deal. The African story in particular seems to have been considered a weak link -- it shows many signs of editing-suite triage. Thankfully, the other two parts of the film are good enough to make up for it.

Knowing almost nothing about this filming of The Nativity Story before I went to see it, I imagined that I might enjoy it if, somehow, Joseph and Mary were shrunk down to human dimensions. The trials of two young adults on a 100-mile foot journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, attempting to make King Herod's April 15th tax deadline, could make a decent yarn. Unfortunately, director Catherine Hardwicke had something different in mind. She forgoes a reality-based rendering of the myth in favor of a heap of prophecy-babble and a weirdly off-topic astrology subplot, both of which plant the film on uneasy ground in the realm of signs and wonders. The couple's journey is prompted by a visit from a descending angel who looks, incredibly, like a Commodores-era Lionel Richie. He clues them that they are inside The Greatest Story Ever Told, and from then on, Mary (Keisha Castle-Hughes) and Joseph (Oscar Isaac) speak of the fetus Jesus as if he's already turned water into wine. If you've ever been around new parents, you know how annoying that can be.

As the power couple descend on Bethlehem, we are forced to endure a B-story involving the three 'wise men' of scripture, crazily interpreted here as a trio of sideshow occultists who live in a dusty lair filled with cheap-looking pieces of astrology equipment and maps that look like kiddie placemats from Denny's. When used together, they can apparently foretell the birth of celebrities. These wise men made me want to pull my hair out. They engage in endless, pointless bantering about which star-map will get them to the Messiah's birthplace, while tossing off one-liners that were old when Shecky Green was a boy, nevermind Jesus. If the film has a weakest link, it's these scenes. They're so self-parodic that they seem purposefully inserted to kill whatever religious buzz the true believers in the audience might build up. Shouldn't a story about the birth of God be told with a straight face? Is the source material really so thin that this kind of filler, not fit for Saturday morning cartoons, had to be included?

Travel advisory: if you ever find yourself walking aimlessly under the snake-dripping treetops of an uncharted Amazonian jungle with no food or water, and the only person who shows up to help you looks like the Brazilian Roy Scheider, fire your travel agent. Turistas, an expensive horror movie from the newly christened Fox Atomic logo, is notable for two things: some impressive natural scenery and for fetishizing something that is normally more of a given in the horror genre -- the white-woman-in-distress motif. The story concerns a ragtag group of 'gringos' -- the word is used about 100 times -- who stray off course during some South American holiday-making and end up in the clutches of a mad surgeon with a colonialism-chip on his shoulder. He intends to remove their vital organs and bundle them off to the black market. Once an unlucky gringo is strapped to the operating gurney, they are forced to simultaneously watch their own evisceration and listen to the doctor's quips, like: "I'd also take the skin from your lily-white ass, but it doesn't travel."

Needless to say, creepiness is the wavelength the film wants to travel on, as opposed to the usual buffet of boo-moments. Fair enough, but aside from those unfortunate transplant sessions, there are only a couple of moments that really deliver on that level. One occurs in the opening moments of the film, when the turistas, who clump together on foot after the tour bus they are all sharing crashes, encounter an unaccompanied Brazilian child in the street. A friendly attempt to snap a photo of the kid nearly sets off an international incident, with the angry parents rushing into the frame, spitting curses and threats in Portuguese. It's a good 'back away slowly' moment. A more serious culture clash comes when the group, led by an Australian beach bunny called Pru (Melissa George) and a sensitive jock called Alex (Josh Duhamel) unwittingly arrive at the jungle home of the evil surgeon. Because they don't speak the lingo, they stand idly by, checking their watches, as the doctor and his henchmen walk around them and between them like incurious sharks, all the while chatting in Portuguese about how they are going to slice and dice them.

The debut film from Fox Atomic, Turistas, opening this Friday, is an action/horror melange about a group of clueless tourists from America, Sweden and Australia who travel off the beaten path during a trip to Brazil and end up in the crosshairs of a human organ smuggling operation. Melissa George stars as Pru, a bikini-clad Australian who speaks some rudimentary Portuguese and becomes the unofficial leader of the desperate band. You're probably familiar with George even if you don't yet know her name. She arrived on the scene in 1998, nearly walking away with Alex Proyas' Dark City in a tiny role as May, a gorgeous prostitute being targeted by a killer. Since then, the Aussie actress has bounced between stints on television shows like Alias and roles in low-expectation films like the Amityville Horror remake. In the past year, however, something has clicked for George and she's lined up several intriguing starring roles.

She's currently shooting 30 Days of Night, a big-budget horror film from producer Sam Raimi about a colony of vampires that tries to take over a small Alaskan town where the sun rarely shines. George co-stars alongside expressionless heartthrob Josh Hartnett as two local cops who try to fight back. Also lined up is the psychological thriller Waz, in which she'll co-star with Stellan Skarsgard, and the period drama Music Within about a disabled Vietnam veteran. Cinematical recently called up George in Los Angeles, hours before she was about to hop a plane back to New Zealand to continue filming 30 Days of Night.

I've heard a lot of people talking about this thriller, Waz, which is coming out sometime next year, but no one seems to know exactly what it's about.

MG: Waz is going to come out around May. It's about altruism in nature and about whether you'd kill someone you love in order to survive yourself. It's a very cool film. In nature, there are some animals who will put themselves on the front line to be killed in order to save their kingdom, because they are the same gene pool. They don't care. They just want to survive. One monkey will go out in front of another and get killed in order to save 300 of them behind him. You know what I mean? Whereas, humans, we're a separate gene pool. So we are exploring the idea that if someone said to you 'I will stop doing this to you if you kill your lover'...how much pain would you take, before you kill somebody that you love? It's very awesome. It's got a genius storyline.

Four teenagers in the Knightstown, Indiana school system have been tossed out of school permanently for making a horror-comedy entitled "The Teddy Bear Master," in which a villainous puppetmaster uses stuffed animals to try to kill a teacher. According to the Associated Press, which is running a story on the incident, the school superintendent is defending the expulsion partly on the grounds that the fictional teacher targeted in the film has the "same last name as a real teacher in the district." At first blush, that sounds like a very thin justification for the action, perhaps ginned up to protect the expelling principal against valid charges of overreach. The story also notes that the sophomores worked on the film from fall 2005 through this past summer, which if true, makes it seem much less likely that there were bad intentions. Two of the students, 15-year old Isaac Imel and 16-year old Cody Overbay, have sued in U.S. District court to have their expulsion overturned.

If the AP story is a fair representation of the facts in the case, it would seem that the school district doesn't have a leg to stand on. The story notes that a local prosecutor's office screened the film and declined to press any kind of charges, and the attorney for the school district has been reduced to filing court papers citing "vulgar and offensive language" in the film in addition to the (apparently) vague charge of teacher intimidation. The ACLU is representing one of the students.

Had Sean Connery taken the lucrative deal that was presented to him in 1999 by New Line Cinema to play Gandalf the Grey in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, he could have cleared up to as much as $434 million. Connery's squandered opportunity is the subject of a story in today's edition of The Scotsman, which gleaned the information from a passage in Brian Sibley's recent biography of Jackson. According to the piece, New Line was so worried about staking the Rings threesome without a single major, international star attached that they crafted for Connery a lavish backend deal similar to the one that lured Nicholson to play The Joker in 1989's Batman. Peter Jackson is quoted as saying that Rings executive producer Mark Ordesky told him "New Line was prepared to give him [Connery] between 10 percent and 15 percent of the films' income." Had that happened, Connery would have cashed more scratch for a single project than any actor in history.

The famously prickly Connery has gone on record saying that he wouldn't have taken the role of the big-hatted wizard because "I never understood it. I read the book, I read the script, I saw the movie, and I still don't understand it." The book also implies that Jackson wasn't keen on casting Connery, either. "I couldn't imagine him wanting to spend eighteen months in New Zealand," Jackson says, which sounds like polite movie-talk for "Please don't come and spend eighteen months in New Zealand." I personally could see Connery as a quiet, reflective Obi-Wan type, but anyone who remembers The Rock knows how silly he looks with long hair, so his interpretation of Gandalf might not have gone over well.

Without any prior knowledge of the film, a savvy moviegoer might guess that Deja Vu is about time travel from the opening sequence, which provides one of those attention-grabbing visuals that can serve as a tether-pole around which to swing lots of different time lines. The visual is a New Orleans river ferry filled to capacity with uniformed sailors and their families. They are either returning from duty or having a celebratory twirl around the river before heading out -- I can't remember which. But in the midst of their revelry, no one notices a creepy Tim McVeigh clone, played adequately by Jim Caviezel, who parks a Range Rover laden with explosives on the boat and then splits. The cosmic ripple in this otherwise terrestrial act of terrorism comes when the investigator assigned to the case, Denzel Washington, finds after arriving on scene that one of the victims attempted to contact him by phone hours earlier. It's a nice setup, but unfortunately director Tony Scott has no rabbits to pull out of his famous red ballcap this time.

If you pair up Scott with a good screenplay, watch out. Through his collaborations with Shane Black, Quentin Tarantino, and Jim Harrison, we know that he has no interest in ruining a good thing once it lands in his lap. But without the grounding a good script provides, Scott invariably goes off on an aimless visual tear, as with films like Domino and Man on Fire, or pours gallons of energy into badly conceived tech-fantasy films like Enemy of the State. He also grabs at opportunities to nurse his own strange compulsions, like the need to emasculate sophisticated machinery -- to bust it down to size. In Top Gun, a jet fighter is juxtaposed against a motorcycle, to show that both are just something you throw a leg over and kickstart. Days of Thunder has a scene where the dueling drivers abandon their fancy stock cars and hop into civilian cars to go race down the highway. In Deja Vu, Denzel does everything short of give a wedgie to a nerd who tries to explain to him the mechanics of a time machine.

Gary Graver, an ambitious young cinematographer who cold-called Orson Welles one day in 1970 and began a long working collaboration between the two, has passed away from cancer at age 68, according to the LA Times. Graver worked on many of Welles' vanity projects from his frozen peas era, including the documentaries F for Fake, Filming Othello and It's All True, as well as the unfinished project The Other Side of the Wind, which to my knowledge is nothing more than a lot of incoherent rambling between John Huston, Peter Bogdanovich and Orson's Yoko, Oja Kodar. In between conspiring with Welles on these experimental films, Graver briefly made some headway towards a mainstream career as a Hollywood cinematographer. He became the lenser on a number of down and dirty films like Deathsport, Grand Theft Auto, The Attic, and a remake of Stagecoach with country stars Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings.

Graver also amassed a portfolio of directorial credits so long that the law of probability suggests some of them are actually good films. In the lean years, he also helmed titles like Oral Majority 9 and Double Penetration 5 under the nom de guerre Robert McCallum. By all accounts, Graver seems to have known his way around a camera and demonstrated enough natural talent to catch the eye of many cinema veterans. And through it all, his devotion to Welles never wavered. In his later years, Graver reportedly kept with him a portfolio of film clips he called "The Unseen Welles" and was negotiating with Showtime to prepare The Other Side of the Wind for a screening on that network.

You can read more about Graver's life and work on his personal website, which is today carrying news of his death.

Her hands were lifeless in his. "My darling," he said. "Won't you tell me? Do you know, that first morning I was coming back to ask you to marry me. Can't we go back to the beginning again? What is this dreadful nightmare that is killing us?" At first she said nothing, then a tear slowly rolled down her cheek. "You mean you would have married me?" Bond nodded. "Oh my God,' she said. -- Ian Fleming's Casino Royale

There are two serious love stories in the James Bond canon, nine books apart. The first, Casino Royale, is the inaugural Bond story. Thanks in part to an ill-conceived and boring parody film in 1967, Casino went 55 years before a serious effort was mounted to film it. The other, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, is story number ten, and pairs Bond with a brash young heiress and scion of a pan-European crime syndicate named Contessa Teresa di Vicenzo. Both stories have down endings, and fans of the film series often feel a sense of robbery with regards to the second, since Albert Broccoli waited until after Connery left to make a faithful adaptation of a superior Bond story. George Lazenby, despite being adored by some contrarian critics, was fairly assessed at the time as a failure. He was reportedly a terror to work with and his interpretation is so different from Connery's that the film almost stands outside the series. And now that Fleming's stories will no longer be used for forthcoming films, there's seemingly no chance for a re-do of On Her Majesty's.

That means the current film version of Casino Royale may have to stand as one of the only serious attempts to transmute Ian Fleming's idea of 'Bond drama' to the big screen. Not that it's a PBS piece or anything. The film is neatly cut in two, with one half faithfully adapting a present-day version of Fleming's novel (only 213 pages) and the other half devoted to big, wordless action set-pieces. You can't really expect anything more tame than that, with so much money at stake, I guess. But the interesting thing to note is that the drama in Casino Royale actually works, despite its sparsity. The origin of Bond's asshole-persona is resurrected as an epic origin tale of romantic treason, with the supremely gorgeous and worldly Vesper Lynd eating the young, naive spy for breakfast. The book ends on an abrupt quote, resurrected word-for-word in the film, that almost suggests (to me, anyway) that Bond may have been set up with Vesper as a final stage of his training. A necessary freezing process.

Two weeks ago, Cinematical received an invitation to a two-day press bonanza for Casino Royale. Events would kick off with a Sunday evening cocktail party and screening, followed by a day of round-robin interviews at a swank Park Avenue hotel, with catered breakfast and lunch. We want our readers to know that in order to safeguard our journalistic integrity, we politely declined all the free food and booze, except for a comp hotdog at the screening. Almost every notable from the film, with the exception of Judi Dench, turned up for the question/answer roundtables. Daniel Craig, the controversial choice to re-launch the Bond character, was there. So was the unnervingly beautiful French actress Eva Green, who plays Ian Fleming's first Bond girl, Vesper Lynd. Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, who was plucked from obscurity to play the film's snake-like villain, Le Chiffre, was also on hand. So was Italian beauty Caterina Murino, who plays a more traditional Bond girl in the film.

Director Martin Campbell, returning for his second Bond film after Goldeneye, and the series' longtime producer Barbara Broccoli, were also in attendance. The following is a sampling of the endless questions and answers bandied about on that day. Please note that it contains every possible spoiler about Casino Royale -- who lives, who dies, the ending, what will happen in the next film, etc ... if you want to be surprised, stop reading now.

Daniel Craig

Cinematical: Barbara Broccoli has implied that she felt Die Another Day was over-the-top. Is that something you personally want to avoid as you go forward with these films? "All I'm concerned about is that we cast the right people in the roles. As for being over the top, I mean for Christ's sakes, Mads weeps blood. That's quite over the top. But it's great because it's a beautiful Bond moment. It's done with a dab. I want it to be as stylish as it possibly can. You can do anything. If it's in the plot, you can do anything. If it's right and it feels good and it's not there because it's self-consciously there. We're in a fantasy world. This isn't real life."

Bobby is a Palm Sunday story, about a group of strangers congregating in a place where a Christ-figure is expected to pass through and bless those lucky enough to lay eyes on him. The Christ-figure is Robert Kennedy, former attorney general of the United States and presidential candidate until he was felled by assassin Sirhan Sirhan in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles during a primary stop. As the time of his arrival draws near, the gathered begin to whisper about miracles Bobby will perform if elected, but no one ever delves into specifics about the man. Instead, it's generally accepted that if you are one of the travelers who has made your way to the Ambassador on this night of nights, then you know what he stands for, and no instruction is necessary. In that regard, Bobby is 'Ben & Jerry's presents Grand Hotel'. It's aimed at only two conceivable audiences: over-50, true-believer, 'it ain't fair, John Sinclair' liberals and 80s-movie buffs who will thrill at seeing Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore reunited on screen.

I have to admit, the reunion scene is a doozy and sure to warm the heart cockles of those who are patiently awaiting a two-disc director's cut of Wisdom. Moore and Estevez play a fringe-showbiz couple, he a manager type, she an over-40 singer who is now reduced to playing hotels like the one that is hosting the Kennedy campaign stopover on the night in question. In their one legitimate scene together, Moore staggers from booze and juts her neck out at the pint-sized Estevez like a dominant hen, while he does that move where his small, round-as-nickels eyes seem to come together another inch or two when he's considering how he's going to get the bottle away from her. Other revelers wandering the hotel during the film include Sharon Stone as a hair-dresser in unkind period make-up, Elijah Wood and Lindsay Lohan as a draft dodger and his hot girlfriend, and Christian Slater as a kitchen manager who openly despises the illegal Mexican workers in his kitchen.

Pierce Brosnan's last memorable line as James Bond comes early in Die Another Day, during a routine walking tour with gadget guru and perpetual shut-in Q. After passing by some vintage toys from his twenty prior adventures -- they don't seem to spark much recognition -- Bond is led to a vehicle track, where an empty platform comes rolling by. "The ultimate in British engineering," Q announces, proudly. "You must be joking," comes the reply. Apparently, someone was joking. In addition to the invisible Aston Martin, the last and least of the Brosnan quartet also featured a mansion chiseled out of ice, a medical procedure for changing a person's race, and an orbiting magnifying glass used by the villain to cook enemies on the ground like ants. The whole enterprise smelled of Viagra. Enter producer Barbara Broccoli, who like a Templar Knight, has devoted her life to fulfilling a task handed down by her father -- protecting the Bond franchise from harm. Brosnan was tossed, and a series re-boot commissioned. How severely the foundations would be rocked no one knew.

What's been delivered is a movie not only exciting and sharp-eyed, but also weirdly respectful of the character Ian Fleming first dreamed up at his Goldeneye resort in Jamaica. Casino Royale, the origin tale, is unfortunately saddled with one of the series' least evocative titles. A better one might have been Ballbreaker, which would not only reference the story's signature scene -- when the villain Le Chiffre captures Bond and attacks his balls with a carpet beater -- it would also get at the creation moment, when the Bond we know is punished into existence by a velvet heartbreaker called Vesper Lynd. Luminous French actress Eva Green melts the screen as the Eve-figure in Bond mythology, who rides shotgun for 007's first globe trot, beginning in the toy soldier kingdom of Montenegro and going all the way to an oceanside Bahamas vista, and further. Green makes this Vesper's film, with her actions half-explaining, half-justifying everything that will follow her -- a thousand misogynist sneers, a catalog of cold remarks, and the hero's often-suspicious inability to save the girl.

Come Early Morning is the best student film I've seen this year. The camera set-ups are managed well and never draw attention to themselves. The music cues that begin each scene lay it on a little thick, but that's no big deal. The main character is set up quickly and efficiently -- we meet her as she comes storming out of a room at a roadside motel, pushing past a perplexed-looking gentleman standing in the doorway. This cues us that our heroine is the town sperm jar, coming off her latest one-night stand. She will have to be put on a path to mending her slutty ways if the movie is to end on a moderately upbeat note. The small town in which she lives is peopled with appropriately colorful eccentrics, including a church congregation that seems to practice Monkee-worship -- the choir uses tambourines to make a joyful noise and the minister sports a Peter Tork haircut. All of this is good knockabout stuff, but the question arises -- what is Ashley Judd doing in this film?

For a talented actress, Judd has demonstrated great oddity in her choices over the years. She's produced a small library of one-off thrillers like Double Jeopardy and Twisted, often turned up in Southern-fried weepies like Where the Heart Is, and here and there delivered a real knockout performance, such as in 2004's De-Lovely, where she played the long-suffering wife of the insufferable Cole Porter. It's possible that Judd is a victim of Tom Cruise Syndrome -- if you can consistently open a movie, starring roles will be consistently offered to you, which are probably hard to turn down no matter how much you long to unleash the inner thespian. Still, Judd would be well-advised to take on the more challenging projects she's shown herself capable of handling. In Come Early Morning, she's not exactly sleep-walking, but seems perpetually on the verge of boredom. Her character, Lucy, has little to do in the film except pick up strangers in honky tonk bars, sleep with them off-camera, and then regret everything the next day.