I hadn’t realized until recently how many outstanding movies are released every year that go completely unnoticed.

It’s usually the ones that are self-produced by the star or director and are only shown at film festivals or limited releases in New York and Los Angeles that we never get to experiance.

It’s become my new mission to seek out these movies that I would normally miss and enjoy them just as they were meant to be. This time around it’s A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints

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After a five year stuggle to make her most recent film, Water, Deepa Mehta is preparing to direct a new film. Exclusion will be about a boatload of Indians refused entry into Canada in 1914.

The true story is about would-be immigrants on a Japanese ship who were turned away in Vancouver due to racist laws that targetted Asians. Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan has been signed to portray the Sikh nationalist who hires the ship and sails with hundreds of Indians with similar dreams of a better life.

Mehta is no stranger to controversy. Two days after she began Water in 2000, the sets were burned down by members of a Hindu right-wing group. The film was secretly filmed in Sri Lanka, with Mehta now nominated for Best Foreign Language Film. Mehta’s film, Fire upset many Indians for its depiction of a lesbian relationship.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/035NQn39Z4w" width="425" height="350"/]As the Inland Empire wagon makes its trail around select cinemas in the U.S., here’s a little more to entice the majority of you who will miss out. Twice the length of the previous trailer, this French trailer offers a little more in terms of, well, images, but nothing in terms of insight. Then again, neither does the film itself.

What we do see does offer a little glimpse at the themes Inland Empire circles around. Much like Mulholland Dr (his best, in my opinion), it seems to play on the disintegration of the Hollywood model, and as always the collapse of fantasy into reality “Damn, this sounds like dialogue from our script!”. READ ON »

One of the most accurate indicators of the Academy Awards are the Producers Guild of America nominees for Best Film. Two of the films are big studio productions, Dreamgirls and The Departed. The three other nominees are Babel, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen, the first two from studio art house divisions, and the last from Miramax, something of a return to the more modest productions that distinguished that company. It has also been noted in articles from Reuters and AP that the Producers Guild and the Academy do not always agree on the Best Film winner. Last years the Producers Guild named Brokeback Mountain as the Best Film, while the Academy honored Crash.

Animated feature nominees are Cars, Happy Feet, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Monster House and Flushed Away.

The Producers Guild Awards will be handed out on January 20 in Los Angeles.

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It’s official. David Lynch’s Inland Empire has a trailer, and it looks weird.

From that scary opening wide angle shot of the old woman onwards, Laura Dern looks confused and – understandably – scared. That family of people wearing deer (or rabbit) costumes has me scratching a hole in my head, and that mangled face looking down the lens will give me nightmares from now until Lynch retires.

Can’t say we didn’t warn you though…