The News: All-Positive Friday!

"What about Sleeper? Bananas?" Tom Wilkinson, Ewan MacGregor and Colin Farrell in Cassandra's Dream (Photo: The Weinstein Company)

By S.T. VanAirsdale

As per tradition, some of today's more upbeat movie news of note from around New York:

--Manohla Dargis, who so memorably lamented Woody Allen's golden era here a little over a year ago ("I guess I'm like one of those fans in Stardust Memories who prefers his early, funny films. ... That said, I am very grateful that he is no longer sticking his tongue down the throats of his dewy young female co-stars"), today writes in The Times that Allen's new Cassandra's Dream is "good enough that you may wonder why he doesn’t just stop making comedies once and for all." Blurb it, Harvey! Is there still room on the poster?

--Big ups to the Museum of the Moving Image, which assembled a tribute to the late St. Clair Bourne scheduled for Feb. 10. Chief Curator David Schwartz and filmmaker Warrington Hudlin will showcase film clips and moderate a panel that includes Armond White, George Alexander, Esther Iverem and Clyde Taylor.

--We can read all these ponderous professional reviews of Cloverfield until our eyes roll back in our heads, or we can turn to the trusty "Edith's Movie Korner" at The L Magazine Blog. "I'm going to see Cloverfield today, the movie about a monster destroying Manhattan," writes Miss Z. "Spoiler alert: it's only 84 minutes long. And I spent $11.25 on a ticket, so that's slightly more than $0.13 a minute. The last scary movie I saw was I Am Legend, which was 100 minutes long. Not coincidentally, the scariest movie I've ever seen, The Exorcist, was 122 minutes long."

--The gang at Rooftop Films launched a blog to sketch all their roof-toppy impressions of Sundance '08. First up: Mark Elijah Rosenberg on "Airport Coffee": "I'll write more about indie film soon, but all I know about Sundance this year is that it's hard to get to." You're telling me.

Posted at January 18, 2008 11:20 AM