January 12, 2010. The year we made contact: wasn't that the tagline for the movie "2010"? But in this case, contact has been the horrendous news of the earthquake in Haiti. Haiti has been a country of such contrasts, and now there has been this catastrophe. Watching the news now and feeling a sense of helplessness.

George Robinson has filed his reviews on this year's Jewish Film Festival, of which i went to some of the press screenings. His reviews can be found from links on his blog: http://www.cine-journal.blogspot.com/ though the reviews can be found directly at Jewish Week.

Joe Baltake takes on some more "lost" films: the pair of films made from Peter Schaffer's pair of one-act plays, "The Public Eye/The Private Ear", which became two feature films, "The Private Ear" becoming Brian Hutton's "The Pad, and How To Use It" (one of the few films to star that redoubtable actor Brian Bedford, along with James Farentino and Julie Sommars) and "The Public Eye" becoming the Carol Reed film (retitled "Follow Me" in Great Britain) starring Mia Farrow and Topol. And he also writes about John Frankenheimer's adaptation of Bernard Malamud's "The Fixer", a prestige number with a high-profile cast including Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde, Georgia Brown, Elizabeth Hartman, and Hugh Griffith. That movie really is among the missing: it hasn't surfaced in decades (as far as i know). But Joe Baltake always finds the time to talk about these lost treasures (or not-so-treasures, as the case may be): http://www.thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.com/.

The talk in the art world right now (and the talk has become the shout) is the appointment of Jeffrey Deitch to the position of Director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. There's a lot of debate about the incursion of "commerce" into the sacrosant environs of the musem world. Oh, please! But this seems to have destabilized the class structure of the art world, and it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

And i'm interested in how this plays out. Or how anything plays out.