…The World According to Bush, which aired last week on CBC, is now viewable online.

…with a little time on his or her hands has concocted a little motivational video for John & John fans, Visualize Winning.

…the pro-Kerry doc Going Upriver online in its entirety.

…the PBS doc The Choice 2004 in its entirety online.

And on Friday, for our readers in the north, CBC’s Newsworld cable channel (alas, not the main, viewable-on-Seattle-cable CBC channel) is rerunning the French doc The World According to Bush, depicting the prez and his family as “one of inconceivable family secrets, painstakingly concealed.”

Long before he played Superman, I’d seen Reeve on the soap opera Love of Life. It was never one of the most popular soaps, but I liked it. It was only 25 minutes long (a newscast filled the rest of the half-hour), so it moved faster than most; but it was still produced live-on-tape, so it lacked the frenetic cutaway editing seen on most of today’s hour-long soaps. Jennifer Aniston’s daddy was a cast member, as were the guy who later played the Twin Peaks killer dad and the guy who played Bogart in Play It Again Sam.

Anyhoo, Reeve was energetic and somehow sympathetic in the role of a slick, two-timing swindler on the show. I could tell he had a big career ahead of him.

The Northwest Film Forum opened its spacious new digs Thursday night with a surrealistic, nearly Fellini-esque party.

Outside, there were big searchlights, a small red carpet, and a dozen beauty-queen hostesses. Each wore a sash reading “Welcome to NWFF” in a different language. Inside, the smaller of the two auditoria displayed short, strange film clips played at half-speed. In the tall-ceilinged but somehow claustrophobic lobby, big-bucks donors hobnobbed with scruffy artist types.

Among the live performers: Drag-queen rock band Cross Dress for Less (above), and our current fave Japanese-inspired pop combo the Buttersprites.

The new space is a big achievement for NWFF, whose operations had been split among two or three smaller storefronts. It originally began as WigglyWorld Studios, which took over the film production and editing equipment of 911 Media Arts when that longstanding cultural-empowerment group decided to phase out that side of its operation.

The 911 folks chose to concentrate on video production, particularly digital video. Their choice seems to have been wise, from the standpoint of supporting DIY creativity. Across North America, digital video has become the overwhelming format of choice for documentaries, no-budget shorts, and at least a few indie feature films, such as Thirteen.

The new NWFF’s theaters are equipped for both film and video projection. But its production/editing facilities, classes, grant program, and forthcoming distribution entity (The Film Company) are religiously devoted to celluloid.

Even here in Software City USA, communities of artisans continue to preserve older ways of making things, such as letterpress printing and analog music recording. Motion-picture film is another technology that’s more cumbersome than its modern successors, but which offers its own distinct qualities.

Film’s lighting and exposure settings are more persnickety than those of digital video, but can produce more stunning results. Film’s slower frame rate gives it a less realistic, more fantastical quality. Most pairs of eyes can tell the difference between film and video, and most still associate the look of film with the look of “a real movie.” Shooting on film, when it’s done right, can give an indie director more credibility, both among audiences and within the marketplace.

Film remains a viable option for moviemakers. But it’s among the most complex art forms around, with many different skills and disciplines to be learned. So it needs places where its secrets can be passed on, where its aesthetics can be learned. Places like the Northwest Film Forum.

As a sidebar, the new NWFF is an anchor for an emerging “arts strip” along Twelfth Avenue on Capitol Hill. Indeed, the Buttersprites followed their NWFF opening-night gig by performing the same set an hour later, a block away, at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. The Photographic Center Northwest and Aftermath Gallery are a few blocks south of NWFF; the offices of Artist Trust are two blocks north. Richard Hugo House holds its literary events and programs a block away on Eleventh. Several storefront galleries have opened nearby on Pike and Pine streets.

Capitol Hill may have lost Cornish College and Fred Meyer this past year, but at least it’s still the heart of Seattle’s arts infrastructure.

…something in common with Truman–The Truman Show, that is. Conspiracy bloggers are speculating that he might have had his debate answers cued to him via a tiny earphone.

…with which to respectfully remember Rodney Dangerfield, who rode the ups and downs of professional comedy for almost half a century; and who, unlike so many Ed Sullivan Show regulars from the ’60s, remained big into the ’90s, thanks largely to a little movie with a puppet gopher.

Just prior to the Veep debate on Tuesday, I viewed the just-released DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11. In addition to the two-hour advocacy movie, the disc contains an hour and a half of additional scenes, mostly longer looks at topics already covered in the feature attraction. (Although you do get a hilarious/poignant bit set at an Arab-American Comedy Festival!)

F 9/11 just might be the first major theatrically-released movie with a “pull-by” date. Director-narrator Michael Moore intended it to be a pre-election persuader. Everything about its domestic release, including the early flap about which company or companies would release it, tied into making it as visible to as many people as possible over the summer and fall of 2004. Now, Moore says he wants a network or (more likely) cable TV airing the night before the election. This might not be feasible—he’d have to find a willing network, and pay off or otherwise appease his home-video licensees.

But yes, F 9/11 will still exist after Nov. 3. Depending on the election’s outcome (if the outcome’s even known the following day), it will become either a historic document or a warning of worse crimes against society yet to come. If the Ashcroft censorship gang has its way, the F 9/11 DVD could even become a contraband rarity, whose mere possession could get you jailed. (I’ve got friends who’d lived in Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile, two countries our right wing wishes the US were more like. It just might happen.)

…to Russ Meyer, the combined Edison, Lumiere, Fellini, and Kevin Smith of the sexploitation cinema. Meyer died at age 82, having never completed The Jaws of Vixen, the magnum opus he’d promised for a quarter century.

FRIDAY NIGHT was a night of triumph for local writer and former zine editor Steve Mandich.

TNT debuted its new Evel Knievel made-for-cable movie, officially based on Mandich’s now-out-of-print book Evel Incarnate. He held a party for some 50 friends and relatives, plus me, at Goofy’s sports bar in Ballard. He’s shown above in a custom Evel suit, which he asked well-wishers to autograph.

Mandich says he didn’t ask for any input in the making of the movie (“I just took their check and deposited it”), and invited his audience to laugh or make snide remarks about it.

It turned out to be a competent if un-stirring biopic, more entertaining than the two ’70s Knievel films (one starring the man himself, the other with George Hamilton). I particularly enjoyed the obviously fake digital paintings of the Las Vegas skyline, which utterly failed to hide the fact that the whole thing was filmed in Ontario.

…I can truthfully say I admire Linda Ronstadt— she sacrificed a high-paying Vegas gig by praising Fahrenheit 9/11 on stage.

Karen Feigenbaum believes it’s the movie stars.

…believes Fahrenheit 9/11 is too conservative; because it doesn’t go far enough to advocate overthrowing the “American empire.”

Here’s a link to a video clip, presumably from a Japanese reality-TV show, featuring male strippers, censored hetero-sex scenes, and an all-female studio audience. (View at your own discretion.)

I found this after coming home tonight from a discussion with a female friend who, like many women I’ve talked with over the years, complained that the media didn’t do enough to depict men as sex objects. But, like all the women with whom I’ve had this discussion, she admitted she didn’t care to view male nudity. It wouldn’t be a direct turn-on for her. She just felt it would be politically fairer for men to have to subject themselves to such treatment.

I tried to tell her that many men would love the chance to be ogled at by women who just wanted one thing from them (if that one thing wasn’t money). I also tried to explain that the traditional male body-image stereotype wasn’t that of a sex object but that of a work object. Lift that barge, tote that bale, go off to war and die for somebody else’s profit. In this muscle-bound context, flopping genitalia are the most un-“manly” body parts imaginable.

So, I’m asking all my dozens of female readers: Do you enjoy male nudes? With or without the “fairness” issue, are you actually interested in such sights? I won’t promise to put any on this site, but I’d like to hear what you have to say about the matter. Include your name (real or fake), and note whether you’d like your response posted on the site.