The best thing about Alex Holdridge’s In Search of a Midnight Kiss (trailer above) is its conceptual audacity: not only is it a film about walking in L.A., but it devotes much of its screen time to romanticizing corners and aspects of the city well-known to natives but rarely seen on film (and never as the backdrop for meet-cute one-night-stand cinema). As long as it sticks to being a visually stunning love letter to the much-maligned city, an inverse of the L.A. segment of Annie Hall, a filmic rehab from City of Quartz to a city of romantic fantasy––I can totally get on board with it. It’s when the actors open their mouths that I start to have a problem.

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• “Thank God for the strike,” says Bob Rehak at Graphic Engine. “There is just too much new content out there, and with the scribes picketing, we now have a chance to recover — to catch up.” Meanwhile,
  Nikki Finke reports that Jason Bateman is just one star who is refusing to promote an upcoming film by crossing picket lines to tape interviews. We think Micheal Bluth would have accidentally driven the stair car through the picket line.
• At Re:Sources, Pamela Cohn conducts a “case study in indie distribution” with Ben Niles, director of the documentary Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, and Jim Browne of Argot Pictures. Browne says that if you really want to book your self-produced film in theaters, you’ll have better luck if it’s a documentary: “Theaters aren’t willing to take a chance on narrative features that have no name actors in them. I see little indies all the time that are really strong, well-made movies, but they don’t have the cash to take out the kind of advertising you would need to drive audiences to the theater, or they don’t have any kind of recognizable talent.”
• Spout Maven Demndiary has posted reviews of Frownland, The Tracey Fragments, Grace is Gone and tons more from the Denver Film Festival.
• At Libertas, Dirty Harry says liberal polemics like Lions For Lambs are failing because blogs like his have pulled back the curtain and engendered mass distrust of the Hollywood system. Of course, they also spread negative buzz sight unseen from the moment the logline appears in Variety, but that’s just part of the process…
• On Day 10 of AFI Fest, Craig Kennedy calls In Search of a Midnight Kiss “the nicest surprise of the festival.”
• In the name of making a “dent on [his] December bills with money that I earned by expressing myself on this website,” Michael Tully is taking a Radioheadian approach to blogging.

• Strike talks broke down last night, with both sides refusing to budge on DVD residuals. The producers say the’re willing to make concessions on everything else; the writers say that after three months of negotiation, “the AMPTP still has not responded to a single one of our important proposals. Every issue that matters to writers, including Internet reuse, original writing for new media, DVDs and jurisdiction, has been ignored. This is completely unacceptable.” WGA has scheduled a membership meeting for 7pm tonight; they may or may not return to the bargaining table tomorrow.
• IFC has picked up all North American rights to In Search of a Midnight Kiss, a one-night-in-LA romantic comedy by first time director Alex Holdridge. The film premiered at Tribeca and won the “Best of the Fest” prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival.
• Clive Owen Alert: The constant object of Karina’s imaginary affections will again star opposite Julia Roberts, this time in Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity. They’ll play “longtime lovers who happened to work as spies on opposite sides. They team up to stage an elaborate con to rip off corporations and steal a valuable product.”
• Terry Gilliam’s next project will be “a modern-day fantasy adventure” called The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It’ll co-star Heath Ledger, who previously worked with Gilliam on The Brothers Grimm.
• Simon Wincer–who, in the picture tagged to the Variety story, actually looks a bit like Kevin Costner, but for a tweak in the aging process–will direct a sequel to Dances with Wolves called The Holy Road. Costner, who won two Oscars for directing and producing Wolves, doesn’t seem to be involved in the sequel.