DECEMBER 3 — ALLAN BÉRUBÉ Gay American historian, activist, independent scholar. “None of us can do our best work until we believe that the life of the mind really does belong to us.” DECEMBER 3, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS… China: FEAST OF LU-HSING, the Stellar God of Happiness. ALSO ON DECEMBER 3...

At 4pm Eastern time, new festival director John Cooper announced the competition lineup for the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.��� It’s a vibrant and varied collection of titles that will all have their world premiere in Park City at the end of January. Here is the Official Press Release with the full list of winners. Enjoy!

WIRED reports on a science journal article about the declining tonal frequencies in Blue Whale songs. The songs appear to have a steadily decreasing pitch over the last 40 years. Scientists have speculated on ocean traffic noise and warmer, more acidic seas, but no hypothesis seems to stick yet. The songs of [...]

Former Rich Kids members Glen Matlock and Midge Ure have joined forces to organise a celebratory benefit concert in London. This very special evening will reunite all four original Rich Kids: guitarist Steve New, drummer Rusty Egan, bassist Glen Matlock and singer Midge Ure. The event will take...

The Sundance Institute announced today the films that will be in competition for the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Sundance also announced that there will be no opening night film this year. "By moving away from one opening night to a ‘night of Competition,’ we bring the focus back to our core," says the director of the festival, John Cooper, in the announcemnt. Some of the familiar faces showing up to Park City for '10 include Alex Gibney wih his doc on Jack Abramoff, Jeffrey Blitz examines what happens when people hit the lottery, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman look at Allen Ginsberg and his landmark poem Howl, Amir Bar-Lev returns with a doc on Pat Tillman, and Mark Ruffalo makes his...

In the wake of District 9 and the effectiveness of its viral campaign, studios are looking for budget-conscious, effects-skilled directing talent. Reports the Heat Vision blog, Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez, who has been making shorts since 2001, posted a no-budget (reportedly less than $500) short depicting a robot attack on the town of Montevideo. The short went up in early November, the industry took notice, and the director signed with CAA and Anonymous Content just before the Thanksgiving holiday. He now has a deal with Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures to develop an original project. The short is cool and impressive for such a tiny budget, but it's not the story, as Matt Goldberg...

Reading the cinephiles' reflections on the past decade, it suddenly occurred to me that I completed my first film, and screened it in my first film program at Millennium Film Workshop in July, 2000. From that time on, I curated...

I began to sense the work going on beneath the seed-based cheeses and ‘zines. An undercurrent of excitement bearing no relationship to anything on the surface and which ran through the most trivial interactions. I recognized the feeling from my childhood, the excitement that was there when people...

Abel Gance's film J'Accuse summed up the horror and pointlessness of the first world war. During the filming, a French general asked Gance who or what he was accusing. Gance's reply: 'I am accusing War. I am accusing Man. I am accusing universal stupidity.' The final scene shows dead...