Djimon Hounsou and Katie Holmes made a pass at coming (for In America and Pieces of April, respectively) before taking a pass, while a late visit by legend Francis Ford Coppola accompanying a new print of his One from the Heart garnered me an invitation to lunch with the director and a warning to limit small talk to his line of dried pasta, bottled marinara sauce, and nee-Inglenook wine. Ever the pocket revolutionary, I asked Coppola about his plans for the rights to Jack Kerouac's On the Road that he's held since forever: "The story of doing drugs and hanging out in jazz clubs...I'm afraid that it's not contemporary enough. I'm looking for a way to make it current and once we can do that, I'm definitely going to do it." So I got that, the implication that the Russell Banks screenplay was in permanent midnight, and I got a redux of an Apocalypse Now on-set tale--which, in hindsight, is actually enough.

Invited as the only Internet press representative to speak on a panel comprised of critics (Robert Denerstein: THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS, Howie Movshovitz: NPR, Bill Gallo: WESTWORD, Lisa Kennedy: THE DENVER POST) and independent filmmakers (Elliot Greenebaum, Toni Kalem, Alexandre Phillippe), we found ourselves at the mercy of a hopelessly outmatched moderator--a former critic for the Boulder Daily Camera who didn't appear to have prepared any strategy for handling us, and introduced me as a filmmaker with a movie called "Film Freak Center." A few exchanges were all right, but the assemblage of so many disparate, smart, occasionally antagonistic personalities is an opportunity that, in these wrong hands, was left fallow and dispiritingly limp--when the strategy of the moderator is to read the program's description of the event and ask each panellist to comment on it...the secret word is "bathos."

The nights are reserved for receptions at various eateries in the lower downtown area, a location restriction mandated by artistic director Ron Henderson and one that allows for the hermetic film critic to find his way to lovely restaurants otherwise undiscovered. Free food and cash bars, and people trying to figure out if the purple on my pass labels me filmmaker or vermin (and the look on filmmakers' faces when I tell them that I'm a critic is really sort of priceless, I must say, especially after a few drinks), while my very pregnant wife bravely sits at a table, poking at finger foods of various quality while representing my better half. I've spent a lot of time at these things with filmmaker and author Paul Cronin, lamenting the cinematic travesties we've witnessed, celebrating the treasures unearthed, and arguing about the relative merits of Herzog, Errol Morris, that new Bergman DVD box set, and Roman Polanski. (SEE CAPSULE REVIEWS)

Above: Carla Gugino in The Singing Detective Below: The Mayor of Sunset Strip

And yet for all the strangeness, the late starts, the burned-out agitator bulbs, a few missing prints--the 26^th DIFF is marked by Colorado's beautiful autumn weather, by sell-out crowds of folks who seem to only leave the house for this event, and by a selection of films that has surprised me with its depth and courage. Every one of the Kieslowski Awards finalists (Noi Albinoi, I'm Not Scared, La Petite Lili, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, and Feathers in My Head) are excellent (with Noi Albinoi winning this year's honour), the selection of documentaries is surprisingly excellent, and the momentum to and through key guests Lili Taylor, Wes Studi, Campbell Scott, and William H. Macywas quiet but undeniable. So as my introduction and discussion to Keith Gordon's The Singing Detective sold out in two theatres (and as I'm reminded again that the Film Society's publicist, Britta Erickson, is possibly the best at what she does in the country), I look back on a trio of films that seem at least in part to represent a microcosm of the relative success and inevitable limitations of the event.

The Mayor of Sunset Strip (**/****) is entertaining in a rock documentary sort of way, with invigorating clips of performances from a wide selection of rock greats: Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie, vintage Rolling Stones, and a little X and Sex Pistols to stir the pot. What's missing from the piece is the concision that brevity lends. The appeal of the piece is in the meta-read that the story of legendary KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer's addiction to the lunar attraction of hanging around famous people has echoes in filmmaker George Hickenlooper and in an audience that frankly thrills to Rodney's thrills. Zelig-like footage of the man shaking a tambourine for The Monkees and The Mamas and the Papas is funny and a running gag of a constantly surfacing Kato Kaelin lends another parallel element of the pathetic to the proceedings, but at the end of the day there's not much to learn about sad sack Rodney and his rock star pals beyond the obvious. It's sad, but the world is full of sad stories, and without more in the way of purpose to the picture, the result is something as amorphous and anonymous as its subject.

A high-profile documentary that really wowed 'em out west, The Mayor of Sunset Strip played to almost, but not completely, full crowds in Denver, pointing to the idea that the story of Bingenheimer is reliant at least to some extent on a regional familiarity with the man's accomplishments and personality. More, it may be an L.A. phenomenon, this mania with, and opportunity to, stargaze--folks in Denver may just not be to the point where a post-modern look at starfucking is relevant. Still, the programming of the picture is something of a coup for the festival, the sort of high-profile niche picture trailing buzz that "pays" for smaller pictures and maintains the festival as something viable in the national conversation. Digging deeper, though, past the Pieces of Aprils and Station Agents, reveals the "other" side of the festival.

Bradley Rust Gray's brilliant hyphenate debut Salt (***1/2/****) is an example of the sort of picture that might slip through the cracks in Landmark's schedule. Challenging and austere, the film is as bleak and blighted as its Iceland setting. Focused entirely on communication and the difficulties therein, it reminds most of Stranger than Paradise, remembering that an early DIFF Cassavetes award-winner (William H. Macy is this year's recipient) is Jim Jarmusch.

Less trailblazing but as beautiful is Claude Miller's sun-kissed adaptation of Chekhov's dour "The Seagull", La Petite Lili (***/****), a conversation about the cost of the creative impulse transplanted to the south of France and peopled by the impossibly beautiful people, including Ludivine Sagnier (last seen in all her glory in Swimming Pool), the picture is slow-moving and, ultimately, drenched in a golden sadness. These are the kinds of film that DIFF should be showing to the exclusion of garbage like The Human Stain, but the new realities of the festival environment dictate too many of the high-profile choices. I know the DFS tried, but for whatever reason people in Denver were denied the opportunity to see Lars Von Trier's Dogville and Beat Takeshi's Zatoichi (and Dolls)--better choices, each, for opening, closing, and centerpiece.

The question of real value in this conversation, however, is to wonder where the audience has gone for dangerous, anti-narrative films--groundbreaking experiments in cinema art meant to expand the medium. Ennui has seeped into the festival crowd as it has in nearly every aspect of the American rap session: our culture reduced to the maddening hum of a television turned to white noise. It is Eliot's blanket of forgetful snow made manifest in the homogeneity of our entertainments--terrifying because we seem to be ten miles deep into the Wasteland and getting deeper. The best pictures at this festival--Elephant and Bright Future, Noi the Albino and Resist and Off the Map--are fragments to shore against Hollywood's Oscar-baiting ruins. It's not much, but it has to be.

So as the 26^th DIFF winds down for me, for the work and Bill, my preternaturally patient editor at FILM FREAK CENTRAL, I look back on it as a milestone festival for me--the third DIFF I've covered and one that has afforded me unprecedented opportunities and access. Prefaced by the loss of my father and book-ended, any day now, by the birth of my first kid, the festival offered me the opportunity to explore a different perspective into film and my relationship to it, and it holds for me, as it does every year, the symbolic quality of an annual progress report. We're doing fine, but critics are only ever as healthy as the films that we cover, so while the atmosphere at the DIFF is one of the few places left to consistently recharge the batteries, there's room for more: more innovative year-round programming, more cinematheque and educational opportunities, and more of a chance for film to be a dialogue that's important to have again.