Last month I sat in the emergency waiting room of a thriving hospital, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cup of my pee in the other. Both were steaming. The pain in my lower back had gotten severe enough for me to go there at midnight. "This guy's already on antibiotics" exclaimed the doctor upon examining my computerized file, a more trusted source than my own testimony. The computer was correct, I had been on antibiotics for 10 days with no improvement; in fact, my kidney infection had gotten worse.

It's never too early for promotion and never the wrong time to hear someone say, "What a knock-out performance."

Chattanooga-based filmmaker Jarrod Whaley interviews Carla Pauli at his site Oak Street Films, noting that he saw a working copy of Canary. His eagerness to talk it over with Carla speaks volumes, and I think she's a well-chosen representative of the forty-odd jaw-droppingly-good performances we managed to pack into this little epic.

Go, read, leave a comment. Please.

I saw Baghead yesterday, so I'll start with that.

Baghead is nearly perfect. It aspires to do little, but it manages to do more than most of the films in this era of no-budget films which conspicuously aspire to do little.

I hardly ever read any industry news (superstition? laziness? self-righteousness?), but this story about the director of a much-lauded Sundance hit withdrawing from a distribution deal with IFC really captures this climate of despair from the other angle--sure, there's been pervasive flap over the indie distributor crisis (excuse the unbecoming journalistic argot), but almost exclusively from a news-critic-blogger-fan angle. Now we're going to start seeing what it's like for those filmmakers who are being offered deals in this new era. "Never mind."

The first assembly of Around the Bay was three hours and forty-five minutes. The first assembly of Canary, finished last weekend, was 93 minutes.

It's an odd pleasure listening to the commentary track on the Criterion laserdisc edition of Taxi Driver. Recorded when Goodfellas was Scorsese's "new film," the commentary is neatly organized, with Scorsese and Schrader introduced and re-introduced by the stoic moderator, who summarizes their careers intermittently.

As Yvonne mentioned, we recently shot some additional scenes (four months after wrapping). One of the scenes required Eli and Dave to have a conversation in a small office bathroom. We did several takes, and eventually I settled on a shot which covered both actors satisfactorily--it was inventive without being ostentatious.

I found myself laughing out loud the other day while reading Michael Umansky's description of the nine ingredients to Alex's "Secret Sauce." Then while listening to an NPR interview today with actor Chiwetel Ejiofor for the new David Mamet film, Red Belt, Terri Gross introduces him as playing a character in a plot "where things are not what they appear to be, because after all, this is a film written and directed by David Mamet." Suddenly Umansky's tongue-in-cheek "secret sauce" came to mind. Lo & behold, substitute the name Mamet with "Alejandro Adams" and they are one in the same!! :-)

Galen Howard will never know that Eli, Dave and I stared at his frozen image on a TV screen for almost 2 hours last Saturday. That was Galen, right Alex?? We were running a scene to patch a plot hole. Call us "The Cleaners" (remember La Femme Nikita? French version only please.) Like the canary in the coal mine, I play the early warning system who knows the potential extent of the damage. How very glad I was to have Marya's plentiful research at my fingertips, Alex's calm and methodical approach, and Eli and Dave's improv ease. A great shooting day. But ya know........canaries never escaped the coal mines.

"Right from the beginning, his understanding of cinema was apparent...He already understood and integrated the plasticity of cinema with the plasticity of narrative. Every shot is the narrative and the narrative is every shot...Many films are delicately subservient to an idea or theme and consequently the images are never allowed to exist as themselves. They illustrate a scripted, written reality or concept...This subtle distortion of the vision-language hierarchy violates the primordial strength of what cinema has to offer. It flattens out reality and it flattens out cinema." -- Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema