AFI Dallas: The Filmmakers Talk

Several of filmmakers in town for the AFI Dallas International Film Fest, which wraps this weekend, are doing on-camera interviews for the festival -- only, they're kind of difficult to find. The fest's Web site is only hosting daily montage wrap-ups, over which music's drowning out the chit and chat. So we direct your attention instead to Vimeo, where you'll find the likes of Mickey Rooney, Tom McCarthy and Richard Jenkins, Henry Bean (Noise), Amy Redford and myriad other moviemakers. Start here and work your way back one page. (Note: Vimeo's search filter suuuucks).

As for your daily highlights -- at least those with rush line tickets still available -- well, there's always Mark Birnbaum and former Dallas Morning News TV critic Manny Mendoza's Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril, which isn't as tragic as you'd expect; indeed, the movie's got kind of an uplifting ending, as the twosome discover, through thoughtful interviews with grizzled vets and gung-ho scrabblers and the occasional actor, that newspapers will get better only when they get bigger, smarter and stronger and stop treating the readers like babies and old people. (Which leaves Mendoza's old boss in the lurch, as it dumbs down the content whilst amping up the type size.)

Also tonight, if you need me for some reason try the AMC NorthPark, where John Ford's immortal The Searchers is playing the big room (psssst, I hear Ford's a real comer in this business of show), followed by Tamar van den Dop's The Snow Queen redo titled Blind. Because nothing says film festival like a "Victorian era fairy tale about the relationship of a fierce sightless youth and his equally strong willed albino companion." In Dutch. --Robert Wilonsky