Nick Nolte had walked into a bar. Nolte was a constant in a screenwriting partner’s Malibu hinterlands, hair ever elevated, stalking across a parking lot to Coogie’s for the midafternoon breakfast, resplendent in striped Sulka pajamas and happy dudgeon. This time, it was dark and it was Toronto, across from the Sutton Hotel headquarters of the festival. The upstairs of now long-defunct Bistro 990 on this night in the late 1990s is rich with heightened voices but not shouting. I’m standing near Nolte with a cofounder of Indiewire, Mark Rabinowitz. Our eyes literally grow large just as our ears figuratively […]

Instant remembrances flower online when strangers die. Twitter turns into an instantaneous altar, as if the site where a hero fell. And some writers are very good at devising a rapid remembrance of a long friendship or acquaintance into a succinct, maybe even final summation. After years of aggregating news headlines at Movie City News, linking to keenly observed obituaries daily, my impulse runs the other direction when I knew the deceased. I’m not ready that soon to thread the nuance of all that time into a tidy dispatch; I want to grip the fragments of soon-fading memory. I didn’t […]

It’s the Greek moment. Again. Still. Thousands of years of civilization, and we’re still anxiously awaiting an epistle from Hellas! In the first hours after Sunday’s fraught second Parliamentary election of the year, few analysts are confident there won’t be a third election or that even the successful formation of a coalition government would last, or be able to withstand the growing force of the Euro-wide economic crisis. The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, also known as “Images of the 21st Century,” in its fourteenth year, took place in mid-March 2012, before the inconclusive May 6 elections had even been set. Here […]