You hate the bogus Thompson-channeling! You love the bogus Thompson-channeling, but hate the fact that I tried to head off the puritans at the pass! I tell ya.

I agree with the second criticism, personally, but I spent too long working as an editor. It might have been fun to read the letters from people horrified that Alex Gibney was passing out drugs to the Sundance press corps -- in 2008! What is this guy thinking -- and if I'd gotten really lucky Fox News might have cycled on it for a full day before double-checking it. Sadly, perhaps, I lack that courage. And I thought the Muskie story was amusing enough to get a second airing.

Is a review of "Gonzo" forthcoming? Yes and no. I'll supply further comments, probably when I wrap the festival, but I don't think it's actually useful customer service to write a full-length review of a film you guys can't see for many months. It's good! How's that? OK, it has some of the re-creations that are becoming Gibney's trademark, and I always feel half-queasy about those. But it's crazy-entertaining and chock-a-block with great history and some surprising talking heads. (Pat Buchanan! Who seems to have a grudging, crusty respect for Thompson.) And it definitely does not look away from the fact that HST rotted out his talent with booze and drugs long before his actual demise.

Notice how cleverly I am ducking your question about "Diary of the Dead." Haven't seen it, and unless I drive to SLC for the third time (on roads that have gotten a lot worse, and in an "economy" rental car that strongly resembles a go-kart) I probably won't. Word of mouth has been great, though.

You know, quite honestly, I'd love to have posted a text Q&A of my conversation with Mungiu. We often do that, and as a reader I prefer it too. This week, I'm just back from Sundance and trying to get this blog into some kind of rhythm. So I frankly don't have 2 or 3 hours to manually transcribe an audio recording.

At some larger publications, there are always munchkins available to do that kind of work, but our editorial assistants are often overloaded with higher-priority projects. This week, the choice was between posting the Mungiu interview as an mp3 or not posting it at all, and I opted for the former. I hesitate to state any general rule, but you'll certainly be seeing full-text interviews pretty often in this blog.

The Lachtman/Trachtman error was just sloppy copyediting on my part: I wrote this piece while traveling, without my notes, then fact-checked and made corrections late at night, from the couch of my mom's apartment. Quality control = not so excellent. (And no, blog posts generally are not edited before they appear; that's a distinguishing characteristic of blogs, no? An editor reads them after they're up, to make sure I haven't gone utterly off the deep end.)

No question, I needed to be educated on Reconstructionist Judaism, and I'm glad to know what I have learned. As I have now noted in the post, Trachtman doesn't do a terribly good job of explaining context for interested but ignorant viewers. Lior attends what appears to be a strict Orthodox day school, for instance, and while it's clear his dad's spirituality doesn't precisely fit in that camp, the distinction is never explained.

Of course I'm not well informed enough about the history of American Judaism to express a strong opinion of Stuart Klawans' analysis. But to suggest that any religious tradition in America is unaffected by this country's overwhelming Protestant Christian orientation strikes me as ludicrous. I can't remember which social scientist observed that all Americans are culturally Protestant, even if their actual religion is something else or none at all.

Hey all --

Thanks for the feedback. Magnolia Pictures has dual programs of the animated and live-action shorts showing in roughly 60 theaters around the country right now, with more to come. Follow the links at http://www.magpictures.com/ and you can probably find one near you.

As mentioned, you can stream or download some of these films for a modest fee, and a few are available on YouTube. I don't know whether the YT version of "Madame Tutli-Putli" is legit or not, but the National Film Board of Canada (its producer) seems to have done nothing to stop it.

Glad to hear that some of you enjoyed that wonderful Russian animated film, "My Love," as much as I did.

First of all, from dictionary.com:

for·fend /fɔrˈfɛnd/

–verb (used with object)

1. to defend, secure, or protect.

2. to fend off, avert, or prevent.

3. Archaic. forbid.

Also, forefend.

[Origin: 1350–1400; ME forfenden. See for-, fend]

So there. I had a friend who used to say "heaven forfend," and it stuck with me. He was on my high-school newspaper staff. In about 1979.

To the outraged reader complaining about my appraisal of Michael Moore at the Oscars: This pundit-out-of-touch-with-the-people is well aware that there were antiwar protests before the war began. Because I marched in one, on a freezing New York day in 2003.

There's no question, as one reader observed, that Oscar voters look for documentaries with uplifting social messages and/or strong points of view. My favorite documentaries this year were Julien Temple's Joe Strummer film, "The Future Is Unwritten," along with Heddy Honigmann's "Forever" and Jennifer Baichwal's "Manufactured Landscapes," and none of those were ever on the docu-Oscar screen, I'm pretty sure. When I interviewed Baichwal recently, she admitted that the possibility had crossed her mind. But as she put it, the Oscars are about content over form, and formal ambition or adventurousness not only don't register with Oscar voters, they're probably a negative.

Still, presuming that either No End, Taxi or Sicko wins the Oscar, there's absolutely no shame in that. And Operation Homecoming is surprisingly moving -- see it if you can.