Matt Damon

The 24th annual American Cinematheque Award presentation to Matt Damon on Saturday night was far more Friars Club Roast than earnest tribute to the 39-year-old actor-humanitarian. The only thing missing onstage at the Beverly Hilton International Ballroom was Dean Martin, who used to host those old celebrity roasts on NBC way back when. Instead of Dino dishing out the zingers, there was talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel, who opened the breezy, bawdy ceremony by ticking off the films of another actor named Matt.

I believe! Any GP in the same predicament would tell you the same thing. I took a few days this week to visit the grandkids in Arizona, finding the daughter upset when I arrived. She had just taken the 7-Eleven Kid and the twins to see the movie "We Bought a Zoo. " I remember as a parent how upset I was when I had to sit through dumb kid movies just because I was a father. But she was angry because Matt Damon , the father in the movie, was saying he had a 7-year-old daughter who still thinks the Easter Bunny exists.

Cries of adulation -- and hunger -- followed Haitian-born singer Wyclef Jean and actor Matt Damon as they toured flood-ravaged Gonaives to call attention to suffering there. Tropical Storm Hanna and Hurricane Ike submerged the Haitian city and cut off roads. Damon and Jean encouraged help for the United Nations to raise more than $100 million for 800,000 Haitians in need. Jean's Yele Haiti charity is helping to distribute food.

In the furry and feathery world of "We Bought a Zoo," starring Matt Damon and Scarlett Johansson, basically everything in sight is in need of saving. Thankfully, it has filmmaker Cameron Crowe heading the rescue mission. In lesser hands, a film so unashamed of its sentiment, so affectionate about its characters, so uplifting in its message would have landed in the maw of mushy that so often devours films like these. Instead we have an intelligent family film, a rarity, and while not quite Crowe at his absolute best, it carries his humanistic imprint and benefits from a strong acting ensemble that keep emotions in check.

Matt Damon should have received his B.A. in English from Harvard this past June. But he's 12 credits shy of graduating because he took time off to appear in Paramount's "School Ties," opening next Friday. In the drama set in the 1950s, Damon plays Dillon, a struggling senior at a fancy New England prep school who resorts to cheating so he can follow into his family's footsteps and attend Harvard. Damon said his Harvard experience really helped to play Dillon.

AND he's quiet. Imagine, as an actor, reading that line, over and over. ... and he's quiet. Think, for a moment, of Hollywood's most legendary cinematic performances. ... and he's quiet.

It seems hard to believe in this era of comic-book film heroes and video-game spinoffs, but back in the 1930s and '40s Hollywood would cast its biggest stars in adaptations of classic and popular novels. In fact, Hollywood and the literary world were so intertwined that writers would even create characters in their novels based on popular actors.

You have to hand it to "Green Zone." Made with daring and passion, it attempts the impossible and comes remarkably close to pulling it off. So close, in fact, that the skill and audacity used, the shock and awe of this highly entertaining attempt, are more significant than the imperfect results. As created by director Paul Greengrass, screenwriter Brian Helgeland and star Matt Damon, this risk-taking endeavor uses the narrative skills and drive Greengrass honed beautifully on "The Bourne Ultimatum" and "The Bourne Supremacy" and marries them to reality-based political concerns.

Among new pictures in limited release this weekend, moviegoers preferred a tale of the afterlife over one about a man saved from it. The Clint Eastwood-directed drama "Hereafter," in which Matt Damon leads an ensemble cast exploring life after death, opened to a solid $231,000 at six theaters in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto. A strong start in a small number of theaters is no guarantee that a movie will be a hit with broad audiences. However, it could generate positive buzz ahead of "Hereafter's" nationwide release Friday.

Mark Whitacre is, according to one biographer, the highest-ranking corporate whistleblower ever. The former Archer Daniels Midland divisional president helped expose his company's involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy that, as actor Matt Damon puts it, "robbed everyone in America and around the world, jacking up the price of everything in their kitchen cupboard." So when Damon and director Steven Soderbergh finally got to make "The Informant!" -- based on Kurt Eichenwald's chronicle of the case -- they naturally went for, well, laughs.

Plot outline for a Philip K. Dick story: Hollywood buys film rights to obscure short story by famous author. Makes movie. Movie makes money. Producers then claim they never needed to buy rights in the first place. Demand their money back. Emblematic Philip K. Dick story elements: Attempt to turn back time and murkiness of reality. Extra mind-bending plot twist: Author of original story is named Philip K. Dick. As Laura Dick Coelho, one of the late author's daughters, told me: "Everything in the Philip K. Dick world is complicated.

It's titled "American Teacher," but this unsettling look at what's wrong with our culture's attitudes toward that beleaguered profession could just as well have been called "The Vanishing Americans. " That's because our education system is shedding teachers at an alarming rate. As narrated by Matt Damon, this documentary tells us that 20% of teachers in urban area schools leave every year, with 46% of teachers nationwide quitting before their fifth year. With more than half of our teachers eligible for retirement within the next 10 years, we are looking at serious trouble.

Once neglected, now lionized, the legendary science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick speaks more to our time than he ever did to his own. Starting with 1982's "Blade Runner" and including "Total Recall" and "Minority Report," close to a dozen features based on Dick's work have generated more than $1 billion in revenue. Now "The Adjustment Bureau" is poised to add to that total. What makes Dick so appealing to our wary, distrustful state of mind is, in novelist Jonathan Lethem's words, his "remarkably personal vision of paranoia and dislocation.

On a clear New Mexico morning this year, Matt Damon sat and watched the Coen brothers and the crew of "True Grit" as they prepared horses, six-shooters and the camera for the next scene. With more than three dozen feature films under his belt, it could have been just another mundane moment between close-ups, but instead Damon holds on to the snapshot memory with scrapbook affection. "We were halfway through the movie and I was sitting on the set, we were doing this corn dodger scene ?

Matt Damon has been in Chicago working on "Contagion," the pandemic thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh, and the actor said he's consciously tried to enjoy the experience because he doubts that he will have many more chances to work with the filmmaker. "He's retiring, he's been talking about it for years and it's getting closer," Damon said of Soderbergh, whose credits include "Erin Brockovich," "Ocean's Eleven," "The Informant" and "Sex, Lies, and Videotape. " Soderbergh turns 48 next month.

If you caught Renée Zellweger and Bradley Cooper in their new supernatural horror movie "Case 39," you may have observed that the stars look younger than you might have expected. Although "Case 39" was released in the U.S just three weeks ago, Cooper and Zellweger began shooting the film in the fall of 2006 ? so long ago a young senator named Barack Obama was still nearly six months from announcing his run for the presidency and Facebook was just opening to the general public.

What it boiled down to was Ben Affleck and Matt Damon wanted to write a movie that they could act in. Best buddies since their boyhood in Boston--they met when Matt was 10 and Ben was 8, united in part by the fact that they both had mothers who were teachers--they decided to take the industry by storm or, at least, put together a little movie that demonstrated their considerable acting prowess.

In Steven Soderbergh's new offbeat film "The Informant!", a rather incongruously sappy and dramatic piece of music plays during the opening credits while images of tape recorders, notebooks and assorted surveillance equipment appear on screen. The jaunty tune seems to promise romance, mystery and intrigue and brings to mind the vintage film scores of composer Marvin Hamlisch. That's because it is Hamlisch. Composing a feature film score for the first time since working on Barbra Streisand's 1996 film, "The Mirror Has Two Faces," Hamlisch has created a piece of work that practically becomes a character in the movie, his music constantly shifting moods and working to either underline or contradict what is happening on screen.

Among new pictures in limited release this weekend, moviegoers preferred a tale of the afterlife over one about a man saved from it. The Clint Eastwood-directed drama "Hereafter," in which Matt Damon leads an ensemble cast exploring life after death, opened to a solid $231,000 at six theaters in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto. A strong start in a small number of theaters is no guarantee that a movie will be a hit with broad audiences. However, it could generate positive buzz ahead of "Hereafter's" nationwide release Friday.

Death is the barrier we can't get around, an eternal void burdening those among the living who yearn for those who are gone. What would it mean if we could communicate with the other side, or even just be sure it existed? That is the theme of the haunting "Hereafter," the latest work from Clint Eastwood, which presents a trio of stories having to do with what might be on that far side and how it relates to the world we know. Over the years, Eastwood has very much become a director we expect to deliver the unexpected, and he's done that here.