When Stephen Frears' The Queen came out in 2006, all the buzz emphasized Helen Mirren's icy performance as London's reclusive royal highness. The ubiquitous praise lead to her Oscar win, but it overwhelmed recognition of the movie's secret weapon: Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, quietly pressuring his Majesty to face the public in the wake of Princess Diana's untimely demise. There's a reason why Sheen conveyed the nuances of Blair's role in the event, which transpired a mere three months after the Prime Minister rose to power -- he had practice. The Deal, a fantastic made-for-TV movie Frears directed in 2003, tracked Blair's cunning (and morally questionable) instincts in the years leading up to his position at the top of the Labor Party.

Sheen played Blair in The Deal first, and it's both a superior performance and a superior film. Whereas The Queen had a tabloid hook and only tangentially explored the deeper political ramifications of a reclusive national leader, The Deal delves into precisely how Blair managed to emerge at the top of British politics with a series of calculated maneuvers. Political drama at its finest, The Deal hit DVD in the United States last month, where it has been touted as "the prequel to The Queen." That's not quite fair; The Queen is the sequel to The Deal, and the two movies ought to be seen as a single, wholly fascinating package depicting British politics in the 1990s.

It wasn't that long ago that documentaries carried the stigma of being educational first and entertaining second. As with foreign-language fare, an audience for them lingered on the fringe, and an industry was willing to offer them their very own awards, but they really weren't terribly high-profile box-office prospects... that is, until the '04-'05 summer successes of Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the Penguins made it seem perfectly okay for audiences to see, and for studios to market, a film without so much as one measly explosion in it.

But then along comes American Teen: a film openly marketed as - and arugably assembled to be - anything but a documentary that finds itself underperforming in its current limited runs (it goes wide this Friday). Last May, I witnessed a group of young women leaving whatever indie they caught at Washington D.C's Landmark E Street Cinema as they approached the film's poster and wondered aloud if someone was remaking The Breakfast Club, with a tone that suggested neither horror nor concern, nor any great interest in the big, fat what-if scenario placed before them.

What I wonder now is, at what point did we begin to craft documentary filmmaking specifically to the masses, and then what happens when the masses simply don't show?

I never expected to get angry in response to something David Bordwell wrote, but his latest blog post infuriated me. As the kind of cinephile who tries his darnedest not to be a pretentious movie jerk, I'm always upset when people expect me to have seen every movie ever made -- or at least every movie presently out in theaters -- and treat me like a fool if I haven't seen this or that supposedly magnificent piece of cinema. Just to clarify, though, I'm not mad at Bordwell. I'm upset with the kind of know-it-all movie geeks who have to show off their cinephilia at every turn.

In the piece, Bordwell attempts to define cinephilia, and I found this part of the post interesting. His qualifications seem to indicate that I am technically a cinephile, despite the fact that I don't see nearly as many films as the people in the documentary Cinemania (those people, he notes, are not cinephiles; they're cinemaniacs). Then he proceeds to lay out conversational scenarios between cinephiles. And it's here that I became annoyed. I'm apparently the guy who has either just seen (random movie title) or has never seen the works of (random filmmaker) or didn't pay enough attention to (random shot) or (random dialogue). I'm slow, I have a bad memory and I do actually take part in other activities besides watching and studying films. So sue me.

My general rule is: I don't walk out of movies. The last time I did so was in 2006 during the fairly wretched bar mitzvah comedy Keeping Up with the Steins -- but only because I was with a friend who wasn't into it; we were bored and I was embarrassed because I had suggested the film. I'm occasionally tempted to leave in the middle of a movie that's giving me no earthly reason to hope it will get any better, but something always keeps me in my chair. Often I'm at a press screening, where it's poor form to walk out. Even if I'm seeing a movie on my own dime, I'm usually driven by a sense of duty and completism. I like talking about movies, as you've probably guessed, and it doesn't seem legitimate to do so not having given the whole thing a chance. "Oh man, I despised Movie X." "Really? What did you think of the ending?" "I left halfway through." "Oh."

I've been doing some traveling, and am spending this weekend in San Francisco. Friday was a gorgeous day, but for various reasons I'm a bit behind in my movie-watching duties, so after exploring the city for a while in the morning, I decided to head to the theater for a double feature. The first thing I went to see was Swing Vote, which I found irritating and politically gutless but certainly watchable. My next choice: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

The dust has barely settled in San Diego (they're probably still trying to clean up that convention center as we speak), and already, the bitching begins. The Hollywood Reporter has written a delightful piece of snark in which the big studios whine that they're spending too much time and money on us geeks. Apparently, it just doesn't pay to court us because the movies cheered in Hall H (Grindhouse, Snakes on a Plane, and Speed Racer to name a few) just don't do all that well. What a waste of free t-shirts and pins!

I'm not going to sit here and insist that ComicCon can make or break a movie. I think we all know there are movies that have benefited from the buzz that begins in San Diego -- people wouldn't be whispering ominously about Star Trek skipping it otherwise. Look at X-Men Origins: Wolverine -- a film that people had been pretty skeptical about is now being raved about from one corner of the Internet to the other. Look at The Spirit. The bad buzz that began at con will stick to the film until its Christmas release. But I also know that those of us who live and work on the Internet can become deluded as to what the offline world is buzzing about. I will fully expect people to comment on my "Who watches the Watchmen?" shirt when I wear it around Colorado, and no one will, because it's so far off the radar for most people.

An editorialist named Eric P. Lucas says in Friday's Los Angeles Times that since Heath Ledger's death was the result of his own recklessness, he therefore should not win an Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight.

"It's time to stop the canonization of Heath Ledger," Lucas begins. "He's just a pretty good actor who did away with himself and broke the hearts of his family and friends, and he shouldn't get an Academy Award to memorialize his death. ... Each year more than 100,000 Americans die of alcohol or drug abuse. It would be madness to commemorate one such death with the greatest honor in cinema. Please give the Academy Award to someone who's had the courage to stick around."

Lucas asserts that Ledger's performance isn't all that great anyway -- "a can-can dance of snuffling pseudo-psychopathia," he calls it -- but that's irrelevant to his larger point. It would seem that even if Ledger's Joker truly did represent the finest acting of the year, his personal behavior should disqualify him from Oscar consideration.

To Lucas I say this: Wanna watch me make this pencil disappear?

I actually agree with a lot of what he writes about how certain people's drug- or alcohol-fueled deaths make them more iconic than they would have been otherwise. Did Kurt Cobain's suicide rob my generation of its greatest poet? Nah. I think the only group that really suffered a major loss when Cobain died was the heroin industry. And I think it's silly when people talk about getting emotional when they see Ledger in The Dark Knight, as if the death of someone they never met still makes them misty-eyed all these months later. So let it not be said that I am not a heartless bastard.

When the brilliant French horror flick Inside went straight to DVD, I thought "Well, yeah. It's hardcore horror and it's in French. It probably scared the arthouses and it would never play multiplexes. Bring on the DVD already." When I heard that the very awesome [REC] was going directly to home video, I thought "Yeah, Sony did an English-language remake, so no big shock there." But when I heard that Gregg Bishop's Dance of the Dead was not only going straight to video -- but it was also being released alongside seven other horror titles on the same damn day -- I got just a little bit irritated.

I mean no disrespect to the fine folks at Lionsgate, because they spend a lot more money on horror movies than I do (and I spend a lot), but Dance of the Dead is a whole lot better than just another "DVD drop" flick -- and it sure as hell doesn't deserve to be released buried next to seven other titles. The flick's all but guaranteed to earn a cult following in only a few years time (trust me, it will) -- so why shouldn't Lionsgate get the ball rolling now and give it some sort of miniature theatrical push? You market this movie to the teenagers well enough, and I'd bet it turns a tidy profit. You can thank me later.

This summer has been a big one for the fanboy (and girl) nation. Geeks have rejoiced as their favorite icons have come to grace the silver screen either once again or for the first time -- Tony Stark, Indiana Jones, Bruce Wayne, Bruce Banner, Kit Kittredge -- with each film accompanied by its own modest fan frenzy (yes, a $155 million opening weekend equals modest 'round these parts).

But naturally, as if so often the case with the potent combo of radical fanaticism and internet anonymity, the nastier trolls have not seen fit to shirk their responsibility of maintaining the sacred Tomatometer with a crudely constructed death threat or two (or two hundred). For them, this is personal. They can't possibly enjoy their long-awaited flick should some goateed snob decide to feel any degree of lukewarm or otherwise before the public gets their peek.

This is blood for blood, and by the comment. These are the new days, the bad days, the all-or-nothing days. They're back.

At risk of sounding like a lame comedian circa 1985, I will now offer some very basic rules of moviegoing that I hope we can all agree with. Because really -- if we ALL agree on them, then every one of my complaints should be remedied by this time tomorrow. And that would be great.

A. Young children in movie theaters. OK, for G or PG-rated flicks we non-breeders simply have to deal with it. That's cool. (Forget that I still can't see WALL*E in peace, but OK.) For PG-13 movies, you're kind of pushing it. I seriously doubt that your four-year-old will be disappointed if he has to wait for Return of the King on DVD. So please just drop the extra $15 on a babysitter. For R-rated movies? Nothing personal, but if your child is too young to understand the phrase "Please be silent for the next 103 minutes, except if you have to pee or you rrrreally want a soda," then that child must be left at home. I've seen three-year-olds at 300, rugrats roaming The Ruins, toddlers' troubles with 28 Days Later, daughters dazed by Doomsday, sons stunned by Sunshine, minors mucking through The Mist and babies babbling In Bruges. Seriously, cut it out.

B. When dealing with "talkage" during a screening, we should of course give the talker a brief grace period. He / she could be saying something that's actually important (like the house is on fire) or maybe they just need a quick catch-up on why Spy Assassin B just turned stoolie on Government Agent C. That person gets a handful of seconds (depending on the mood of the offended party), but once a brief exchange of words becomes anything close to an actual conversation, then SHUSHING simply must occur.

Let's take a moment to talk about the internet and the people who use it.

As someone who writes for a fairly prominent blog and who, from time to time, gets a fact wrong or overlooks something (when you do several posts a day, it's hard to be perfect), I am familiar with the wrath that internet commenters can unleash. But I am quickly coming to realize that you, gentle readers, have indeed been gentle. If you have a moment, take a look at the Rotten Tomatoes page for The Dark Knight, and click through some of the comments that users have left for the critics who have dared give the film a negative review. Or, to save time, take a look at this piece by Hollywood Bitchslap's Rob Gonsalves, which discusses some of the worst (best?) examples. If you're not inclined to click, suffice it to say that the likes of The New Yorker's David Denby have been told that they "do not deserve to live," that they should "contract AIDS," that they "rode the short bus to school," that "I should go over to your house and beat the living ***** out of you low life son of a b!tch," and so forth.

It's funny: there's been a long, ongoing discussion about RT user comments in the internal forums of the RT-hosted Online Film Critics Society. Some of the critics, outraged by the insulting, often racist missives that appear on the review pages (a Brazilian critic writing in Portuguese is often informed that he should go back to Mexico, etc.), have called for comments to be deleted and for users to be disciplined or banned. I've resisted and discouraged that impulse: it's always preferable to laugh at people like this than to censor them.