Spike Lee physically showed up to accept the Guggenheim Honor from the SilverDocs film festival tonight, but mentally, for much of the evening, he seemed to be elsewhere. Maybe his recent squabbles with Clint Eastwood have taken a toll, but when asked to talk about his non-fiction films by Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker was virtually unresponsive. Only two subjects seemed to draw out Lee’s fierce, super-quotable Frankenstein.

One was Tyler Perry, who Lee didn’t quite slam, but definitely dissed by implication. “I’d love to see a great film about Martin Luther King,” Lee said. “But I can’t do everything.” He paused as a smile crept across his face. “I gotta leave something for Tyler Perry.” This got the desired affect from the audience––laughs, claps, a few stray “ooooh!”s––and then Lee offered cryptic clarification. “I made the movie Bamboozled,” he said, as if that’s facetious evidence enough that the master of the modern minstrel show would be the appropriate director for a serious film about Dr. King.

The only other subject that could jolt Lee out of his slumping stupor on stage was Barack Obama, to which all conversational roads seemed to lead. …Read more

indieWIRE has the full lineup for the 2007 New York Film Festival, which is about six weeks away. Pretty much everything I expected to see on this lineup made it, including the highly anticipated latest works by Noah Baumbach, Julian Schnabel, Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant. But there are also some surprises — who could have foreseen a doc about Don Rickles made by the guy who directed “Thriller”?

You can click here to read the whole thing, but here are what stand out to me as highlights:

Blade Runner: The Definitive Cut 

Ridley Scott promises this is the last time he or anyone else is going to tinker with his now-considered-classic 1982 slice of dystopia. NYFF will screen this new version in advance of its upcoming release on DVD, in honor of the film’s 25th year anniversary.

The Axe in the Attic

An ultra-selective festival with no separate program for documentaries, NYFF is usually fairly light on non-fiction films. Of the handful of docs on this year’s slate, I’m most interested in this collaboration from Lucia Small and Ed Pincus delves into “the hardships and sorrows of the Gulf Coast Diaspora two years after Hurricane Katrina.”

The Last Mistress

Catherine Breillat’s adaptation of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s An Old Mistress is the Romance director’s most expensive film to date, and by some reports, her most conventional. It’s also one of two films on the NYFF lineup to star divisive sexpot Asia Argento, after Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Running Down a Dream

“Rarely, if ever, has the history and development of a major rock band been explored with the care and the depth with which Peter Bogdanovich approaches Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,” promises the press release. I’m just interested to see what Bogdanovich has been doing since his last comeback, 2001’s The Cat’s Meow.

Several blurbs of note to report in the documentary world this late Thursday:

***Anthony Kaufman has the news that Errol Morris is blogging for the New York Times. Kaufman interprets Morris’ first entry–a long consideration of photography, truth, interpretation and meaning–as “a sneak peak into what I expect are the theoretical underpinnings” of Morris’ upcoming Abu Ghraib doc, Standard Operating Procedure.

***This is not a TV blog, so we won’t waste time making obscene hand gestures about most of the Emmy nominations. However, it’s worth noting that Spike Lee’s Hurricane Katrina doc When the Levees Broke picked up several nods, as did two recent festival hits: Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and Stanley Nelson’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People’s Temple. A.J. Schnack has further details.

***John Anderson has a review of Your Mommy Kills Animals, a doc on the animal protection debate which begins a one-week Oscar qualifying run today. Calling it “a miraculously evenhanded treatment of a snarlingly divisive debate,” Anderson also notes that the film also makes “it pretty clear that blinkered self-righteousness and unwavering belief in one’s cause don’t much differ, whether you’re a member of the Animal Liberation Front or Al Qaeda. The corollary question is whether anything less than the most militant action will move corporations away from committing cruelty to animals.”