Film Festivals

For years, filmmakers flocked to the Cannes Film Festival to sell their independently financed movies, confident they'd soon see their work exhibited in movie theaters. Like so many show business dreams, those visions have been vanishing quickly as numerous distributors of film-festival fare closed their doors after losing money or corporate support. But there's a potential savior on the horizon called video on demand -- and it may be hiding somewhere inside your cable television box.

Under a large shade umbrella in a Santa Monica courtyard, Lucie and Estella nibbled on cherry tomatoes and greeted moviegoers at a film festival screening Sunday morning. As film festival guests go, they were unusual -- they're chickens. Even for chickens, they are exotic -- Belgian bearded d'Uccles. Lucie is a deep orange hue speckled with black and white. Estella is black and white. And as befits a turn in the spotlight at a film festival, their feathered feet gave the appearance that they were shod in elaborate pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes.

Better late than never. Filipino director Brillante Mendoza was 45 when he made his first film, "The Masseur," four years ago. And since then, he's made up for lost time, having directed six more gritty features that hark back to the Italian Neorealist cinema of post-World War II.

AUSTIN, Texas -- You see them uplinking everywhere: bloggers, techies and assorted Internet enthusiasts (don't call them geeks) hunched over laptops, tapping away at iPhones and wielding digital video recorders with the kind of abandon more commonly associated with Japanese tourism than film festival revelry.

THERE'S A rich irony in the fact that James Caan is being feted this month with the CineVegas Film Festival's inaugural Vegas Icon Award: Caan hates almost all the acting he's ever done that has anything to do with the city. The four years he spent as fictional head of casino security Big Ed Deline on the defunct NBC show "Las Vegas"? He was lowered to doing the TV role by a film drought. "It's sort of the difference between wanting to work and having to work," Caan says.

Rodent lovers and rat rights activists, consider yourselves warned. In the surrealistically violent action blockbuster "Wanted" -- which premieres at the Los Angeles Film Festival on Thursday and arrives in theaters June 27 -- several thousand rats are turned into four-legged weapons of mass destruction.

Bill PULLMAN has learned a thing or two about acting in a career that's spanned intriguing indies (the just-released "Bottle Shock") and summer blockbusters ("Independence Day"), and at the 2008 Palm Springs International ShortFest, he'll impart some of that wisdom. At 3 p.m. on Aug. 23, Pullman will conduct an acting master class, open to fans and film stars alike. (For information on the class and the short-film festival, which runs Aug. 21-27, go to www.psfilmfest.org.) Homebody . . .

The fifth edition of National Geographic's All Roads Film Project rolls into the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theatre tonight with 26 films spotlighting more than 20 countries (including Lebanon and Myanmar) and cultures (such as the Maoris of New Zealand, the Chukchi of Russia, Alaskan natives, Hawaiian natives and the Canadian Cree). The four-day event begins this morning with a photography exhibit in the theater's courtyard.

Director Jonathan Demme's first fictional feature in nearly five years, "Rachel Getting Married" captures the anxieties of family dynamics and the difficulties of emotional closure. The film is shot in a loose, documentary-like way, and the rangy, exploratory visual style and therapy-infused dialogue caused it to be among the most talked-about films coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival, where it had its North American premiere earlier this month.