Mondo Hollywood is a PJM blog for all matters related to the contemporary entertainment industry. Special Pajamas Media coverage as follows:

Live-blogging of the Academy Awards 2006
Exclusive video of the American Film Renaissance festival in Hollywood, January 2006, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3
Video interview with Gary Sinise; video interview with Patricia Heaton

Paradise Now

68 days left till the elections...

But that's not what I'm writing about.

Hey, if the mainstream press is obsessed with entertainment and show biz, why can't I be sometimes, too?

First of all, there's the Golden Globe win for "Paradise Now," which as Sarah Jessica Parker told us, is a film from "Palestine."

Yesterday, I read Sever Plotzker's insightful take on the win in Hebrew in "Yediot Aharonot" and considered posting on it, but lazy me, I decided to wait till Ynet published it in English instead of laboriously translating it myself.

He makes some good points about the film, which, in case you don't know, had Israeli producers. I haven't seen it, but apparently it tells the story of two Palestinian youths who set out to commit a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Plotzker leaves aside the subject and content of the film, and focuses on the award and the ceremony...

From day 3 of the AFR festival, audience members talk about their reactions to some of the films:

Roger L. Simon was at the festival, and has some more thoughts on Submission and Islam: What the West Needs to Know: Movies on the Edge.

UPDATE: If you can't see the QuickTime version of the film, here's a Windows Media Player version.

Here's an interview with actress-producer Patricia Heaton ("Everybody Loves Raymond") and director David Hunt, about their new documentary "The Bituminous Coal Queens of Pennsylvania," a look at the 50th anniversary of the Annual Bituminous Coal Queen Pageant in Southwestern PA as seen through through the eyes of its 1972 winner.

UPDATE: For the record, AFR is not the only "non-traditional" festival brave enough to have stormed the bastions of liberal Hollywood. The Liberty Film Festival ran for several days in October 2005. It was their second visit to Tinseltown

MORE on the current festival (AFR) from Vik Rubenfeld

In an exclusive interview at the festival, Gary Sinise (Forrest Gump, Truman, George Wallace) talks about his program for Iraqi children and what it's like to be pigeon-holed in Hollywood.

When I was a kid one of my favorite movies was The Poseidon Adventure. So much did I enjoy the flick that whenever my school took us to concerts at Cincinnati’s Music Hall, I used to imagine what would happen if the hall would flip over as did the S.S. Poseidon in that 1970s film. Where would I end up? How would an escape?

Would a nice Jewish grandmother risk her life to save me as Shelley Winters‘ Belle Rosen swam to help save the passengers who were trying to escape with her? Winters’ Rosen suffered a heart attack and died for her efforts. The boy who accompanied her survived. And Winters earned her fourth Oscar nod.

Twenty-four years after Belle Rosen died, the world has lost the great actress who put so much panache into that character’s dying words. With great sadness, I report that Ms. Winters‘ died yesterday. She was 85.

Clay Champlin interviews filmmaker Jonathan Flora about that "other" film festival Sundance. Flora is the director of the short A Distant Thunder, "a thought-provoking courtroom thriller with a shocking twist."

Clay Champlin interviews Ellen and Jim Hubbard, founders of the American Film Renaissance, at Mann's Chinese Theater:

Growing up in the Kenyan middle class, I watched as the standard of living in my household and that of my friends drastically declined in the span of 20 years even though my mother (the bread winner in the family) invested in two houses, was promoted at work and got raises in her salary.

I watched my younger siblings being moved from one school to another as their former school got too expensive, we quit eating breakfast as bread, butter and milk became too expensive and we quit doing monthly household shopping since we could not afford it anymore.

My friends and I theorized about the creation of wealth and the formula behind it… if there was any. I wondered (often aloud to my mother) if the creation of wealth was by chance, both for countries and for individuals since I also watched many of my well educated relatives move to wealthier countries to work unskilled jobs for better pay and higher standards of living...

The Devil's Footpath, a documentary about law student June Arunga's travels throughout Africa to discover why the best and brightest minds in Africa decide to migrate elsewhere, screens at the Amercian Renaissance Film Festival on Sunday, January 15 at 10:00 a.m.

IT'S ANOTHER PODCAST: We were going to run this later, but with the American Film Renaissance happening this weekend, we decided to go ahead and post this new podcast interview with independent documentarians Evan Coyne Maloney and Stuart Browning of On The Fence Films, talking about looking for the Men's Center on campus, how technology is changing the documentary-film business (and maybe reducing its leftward tilt), and the difference between Canadian hopitals and Canadian veterinarians. They've got two films coming out soon: Indoctrinate U., about politics on campus, and Dead Meat, about the Canadian healthcare system, both of which you can read about by following the link.

You can listen to the interview by clicking here... And check out Evan's blog, too.

more on InstaPundit...

Ed Driscoll's Hollywood archives here. More Driscolliana on the film biz here.

The flyleaf tells me I bought my copy of [Steven Bach's] Final Cut in May 1987. This was the third time I'd read it, and the story and the sleek prose seemed every bit as fresh as the first. Has anyone written a better book about the film industry?

This is a story worth reading. It is truly an "LA" story. It'll make you sick. It's lengthy, but worth the read.

From Paul Cullum at the LAWeekly: Horror filmmaker Eric Red crashed his Jeep, killing two. Then he slit his own throat. That was only the beginning.