1. "Greenaway announces the death of cinema - and blames the remote-control zapper": Prospero vs. the tempest? (Hattip to Geoff Beran.)

[""If you shoot a dinosaur in the brain on Monday, it's tail is still waggling on Friday. Cinema is brain dead," said Greenaway, who has shocked and delighted audiences, often simultaneously, with movies such as The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Prospero's Books. "Cinema's death date was 31 September 1983, when the remote-control zapper was introduced to the living room, because now cinema has to be interactive, multi-media art," he told a director's masterclass. It should be noted that September has 30 days."]

["Presented in five movements—a symphonic structure picked up by the German composer Edmund Meisel, whose score for the Berlin premiere is used here—"Potemkin" builds to and recedes from the impeccably designed sequence on the steps, in which a crowd of protesters is fired upon by goose-stepping Cossacks dressed in their white tunics. Eisenstein picks out a face here and there—a bereaved mother, an outraged older woman, a handsome male student—but for the most part what we are responding to are pure lines of force, slashed across the screen and conveyed by editing that scrupulously preserves the spatial integrity of the scene. (There is an interesting contrast here to the digitally driven neomontage that directors like Michael Mann of "Miami Vice" or Terrence Malick of "The New World" favor. For these and others montage seems to mean a jumble of impressionistic images bearing no relation to one another.)"]

["Raging wildfires in southern California have destroyed an estimated 1,300 homes and businesses and have forced as many as a half-million people to evacuate their homes, state and local officials said today. More than 400 square miles of brushland and suburbs have been blackened by more than a dozen separate fires."]

["Singer and actor Robert Goulet is heavily sedated and breathing through a respirator in a Los Angeles hospital while he awaits a lung transplant, his wife told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "He can hear me but he can't respond," Vera Goulet said of the 73-year-old crooner."]

["After a show Saturday night in Atlanta, Kid Rock did what any good southern boy would do: He got involved in a brawl at the local Waffle House."]

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