Tomorrow at 1o pm (check local listings; your date and time may differ) check out William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. Kunstler made his name as a radical civil-rights and first-amendment attorney in the 60s — most famously, he defended draft protesters, the prisoners who rebelled at Attica State Prison, and AIM at Wounded Knee — but by the late 70s he rarely represented clients with self-evidently noble causes, instead taking the cases of accused rapists, murderers, terrorists and mobsters. The documentary is about the man, but it’s also the story of his family: it was written and directed by Kunstler’s daughters, Emily and Sarah Kunstler, who remember their father with alternating tones of pride and shame. It’s a really fascinating doc.

Then next Tuesday, June 29th at 10pm, you’ll have a chance to see Agnès Varda’s very fine documentary from last year, the Beaches of Agnès. I probably don’t need to say much about this one — Varda remembers her life, with her characteristic blend of humor, pathos, and cinematic inventiveness — and it was one of the best docs I saw last year.

This may be a damning admission for any critic to make, let alone the editor of a film section, but I don’t really know how I feel about Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest film, Micmacs. I’ve been thinking about it for the past month, after two viewings with wildly different audiences – one a deathly silent, tiny press crowd, the other a giddy festival crowd, easily provoked into prolonged laughter – and perhaps because of this, I can’t quite settle on one judgment. Essentially a slapstick farce about one man’s revenge on a pair of rival arms dealers, Micmacs is a film I want to love, because it’s basically a fun movie that succeeds as a comedy, if you’re in the right mood; but the underlying subject matter is so serious, and Jeunet takes it on in such a confusingly oblique way, that I haven’t been able to rid myself of a queasy feeling about the whole thing.

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But my particular favorite is reason #1: It’s a Waste of a Dimension. “When you look at a 2-D movie, it’s already in 3-D as far as your mind is concerned,” Ebert writes. “When you see Lawrence of Arabia growing from a speck as he rides toward you across the desert, are you thinking, “Look how slowly he grows against the horizon” or “I wish this were 3D?” Our minds use the principle of perspective to provide the third dimension. Adding one artificially can make the illusion less convincing.”

Well said, Roger!

On June 13th, 1971, in the midst of the Vietnam War, the New York Times began to publish excerpts of an internal Pentagon document that detailed the top-secret history of US-Vietnam relations from 1945 to 1967. Soon known as the Pentagon Papers, its seven thousand pages added up to an unambiguous picture: four consecutive Presidents had misled the public into supporting and sustaining an unwinnable war, largely from a desire to avoid the national humiliation of a defeat.

The story immediately exploded into the wider media, though the revelations about Presidential duplicity were less discussed than the question of who had leaked this document and why. The FBI identified the probable source: Daniel Ellsberg, a highly respected military analyst, formerly employed by the Department of Defense and the Pentagon-funded RAND Corporation. Soon, he was the target of one of the largest manhunts in the history of the country.

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Of World War II films, he says: “They were fun and thrilling and exciting and, most amazingly, they had a lot of comedy in them, which really made an impact on me. I mean, for every movie with a sadistic Nazi, there’s one with a Nazi who’s more of a buffoon or a figure of ridicule.”

More details here, including how he prepared each of his actors with a special screening series.

“Shot after shot,” Horowitz writes, “you find yourself saying, ‘Where have I seen that before?’ and then realiz[e] you saw it after, in somebody else’s movie.”

Maybe what really makes Repo Man the ultimate indie film is that it launched the era of indie as an attitude, it created the template for what a hip, hit, indie film looks like. Take aimless Caucasian youth at low-wage jobs (Clerks), add smart, self-conscious dialogue and a mysterious glowing substance with mystical overtones (Pulp Fiction), throw in a quirky older character actor as mentor (Rushmore), film them driving around Los Angeles (Swingers) and top it off with a compilation album soundtrack of obscure bands with street cred and you’re on your way.

Salman Rushdie discusses the the adaptation of novels into films, why free adaptations are better than strict adaptations (“infidelity is better,” he says, and after getting a laugh cites There Will Be Blood), the influence of film on his writing (including how his viewing of 8 1/2 influenced his writing of Midnight’s Children), why novelizations of films tend to be so wretched, and so forth.

One of the videos is here and the rest can be found in the related videos; there doesn’t seem to be any playlist as yet.

It’s a 22-minute short, based on a 2005 story by Tom Drury, about a voice actor who almost gets hit by a flying bottle one day — and then sets out to track down the culprit, much like the private eye in the cheesy detective novels he performs for an audiobook company. All in all a charming twist on the LA noir, written, directed, and produced by one Zachary Sluser, who appears to be getting off to a good start in the movies.