It’s a Wednesday morning, and two Canadian heavy metal dudes are sitting in a conference room in the Viacom building in Los Angeles, talking to a bunch of reporters on a conference call at 9:00 a.m. Why would a self-respecting rock & roll band be up at such an ungodly hour so far away from home to do something so seemingly trivial? To promote their movie, of course.

The Canadians in question are Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner, respectively the lead guitarist/vocalist and drummer with the veteran Toronto metal band Anvil, and after years of toiling in obscurity fate finally cut them some serious breaks in 2009. Sacha Gervasi was a teenaged metal fan who struck up a friendship with Anvil when they toured England in the early 1980s. Gervasi spent a summer as a roadie for Anvil during a lengthy tour of Canada, when the band were at the peak of their popularity after releasing the groundbreaking 1982 album Metal For Metal. Gervasi went on to become a successful screenwriter, while Anvil’s career took a long, slow detour to nowhere thanks to bad record deals and uncomprehending management, though Kudlow and Reiner stubbornly refused to throw in the towel. In 2005, Gervasi reconnected with Kudlow and Reiner, who were blocking out plans for a low-budget European tour. Gervasi put together a camera crew, followed the band on tour, and in early 2008 Anvil! The Story of Anvil played to wildly enthusiastic audiences at the Sundance Film Festival.

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Michael Moore is a man of many hats, both figuratively (director, activist, idealist), and literally (does he ever wear the same baseball cap twice?). When I sat down with a group of Michiganders for a hastily relocated interview — it was intended to take place at The Renaissance Center (General Motors headquarters) in Detroit, but Moore wasn’t allowed in the building — I wasn’t sure which version of Michael I was going to get. Would he be, as some television and radio outlets have implied, a crazed, rabid extremist spouting liberal rhetoric potent enough to turn the room into a bunch of hippies? Would he bring a bullhorn? Was this all a political stunt? I could be wrong, of course, but in reality I don’t think any of this was the case. Despite his hulking stature, he came across, if anything, as meek.

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Watching Babel, 21 Grams, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Amores Perros might lead audiences to believe that the screenwriter behind all three, Guillermo Arriaga, is a dark, brooding man with an equally bleak outlook on humanity. His directorial debut, the drama The Burning Plain, employs a similar, non-linear structure as his other films, and it also returns to a few of his recurring themes, including redemption and regret. When I sat down with Arriaga at a roundtable interview, I was surprised by the warm, gracious man who seemed to be so incongruous with the surface of his films.

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With their burglar-versus-serial killer shocker The Collector opening in theaters nationwide today, filmmakers Marcus Dunston and Patrick Melton were kind enough to sit down with me for a revealing chat about the making of their unforgiving new flick, their love of Italian horror legend Dario Argento, the state of the Saw franchise, and just what went wrong with their proposed remake of the William Castle classic The Tingler.

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One of our favorite Academy Award season traditions is Turner Classic Movies’ 31 Days of Oscar. Every February, TCM showcases hundreds of former Oscar winners and nominees, usually introducing them with even more fun, nerdy facts and analysis than usual. This year, they take the geek-factor up a notch with TCM University, a clever theme that presents the movies as college course material. Each night has a department, each department has its classes, and each class has its pertinent cinematic coursework. Saturday the 21st, for instance, belongs to the American History Dept., where your first class of the day is American Military Heroes, and the lecture starts with 1960’s The Alamo. In honor of this tribute to the film student in all of us, TCM University Dean Robert Osborne recently talked to reporters about the curriculum, and shared his thoughts about this year’s crop of nominees.

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Shortly after graduating from college, I began to obsess about a movie that I must have watched on cable about 500 times growing up. The title of that movie is Super Fuzz, and for a while it seemed like it was something that I had dreamt up when I was stricken with a bad case of chicken pox. None of my friends had ever heard of it, and no video store in Southwestern Michigan had it for rental. But it had to be real, right? After all, I could still hum the theme nearly two decades later. Scouring the Internet, I managed to track down a videocassette of Super Fuzz, and — oddly enough — it was every bit as fun as I remembered it to be. Childhood favorites can often be slightly embarrassing upon later reflection, and while no one could ever mistake Super Fuzz for high art, the goofball comedy still possessed a charm that, for me at least, proved impossible to resist. Sure it’s nothing more than a low-budget, lowbrow cop comedy shot on the cheap in Florida, but something about the catchy theme and unabashed corniness of it all, not to mention the sight of a frazzled Ernest Borgnine floating on an over-sized chewing-gum bubble during the awesomely ridiculous climax, just clicked with me. It was my first real movie memory, and to this day the mere sight of Borgnine still takes me right back to my childhood living room.

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One of the most diverse talents in modern filmmaking, Danny Boyle has shacked up with the greedy set (Shallow Grave), run with the junkies (Trainspotting), watched paradise wither (The Beach), shown us the end (28 Days Later), and followed the journey for a new beginning (Sunshine). Yet while Boyle’s films are often impressively varied in terms of both genre and tone, they all retain a certain intensity and visual aesthetic that makes them instantly recognizable as his own.

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Drop the name Bruce Campbell to genre fans, and chances are good that their faces will light up as their thoughts drift back to the first time they saw one of the Evil Dead films, or his surprisingly poignant performance in Don Coscarelli’s endearingly bizarre Bubba Ho-Tep back in 2001. For me, it was the thrill of spending the night at a friend’s place back in eighth grade and sneaking into a forbidden midnight viewing of Evil Dead. It was so over the top that we didn’t really even know what to make of it, we only knew that we were completely exhilarated by the time it ended, and we would be burnt toast if we ever accidentally slipped up and mentioned it to our parents. Years later, I showed Evil Dead II to my college girlfriend on our first date — a kind of trial by fire to try and gauge whether she’d be able to tolerate my bizarre taste in movies — and she laughed so hard that I was actually kind of frightened…. What choice did I have but to eventually marry her?

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