Ray Pride

Information wants to be free, runs the Web bromide.

All the film magazines and trades and books that I pore over in a given week aren't necessarily free, but there are indispensable Web resources that can keep you as informed as e-mail or gossip does in the real world.

Variety, the showbiz bible, and The Hollywood Reporter (the showbiz Apocrypha?), are online a little after midnight most days. Both sites offer headlines, with certain features only available to subscribers. Inside.com, a site that wanted to be subscriber-driven with zeitgeisty profiles and investigative pieces, didn't become the success its founders hoped, but its longer pieces on film and television offer the perspectives of a number of industry-seasoned writers. indieWIRE keeps tabs on the independent film scene, with news, festival coverage, reviews and business headlines at www.indiewire.com. For a more Eurocentric slant, Screen International covers the industry from the U.K. at www.screendaily.com. The insightful former Variety reviewer Emanuel Levy's reviews are available there as well. All of these sites offer email headline services that arrive in your mailbox early each day.

Showbizdata.com offers a range of the latest hard figures (or soft estimates), and a key site where Monday morning box office quarterbacks find estimated and final weekend numbers is www.ACNielsenEDI.com/bonews/bonewsframes.html. These sites, and more, are glossed by Yahoo's news wire. The Wall Street Journal's coverage of the industry is often superb, if you overlook the awful, ill-informed Weekend industry column by Tom King. And of course, for those who want the insidest of inside baseball on the media game, there's always Jim Romenesko's Media News, www.medianews.org.

For general information about the facts and figures of film history, there's always Amazon's Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com. There are mistakes to be found, but it's a great place to start. The most productive of search engines I've found remains google.com, which arrays articles and sites by how often others have linked to the particular page. I'm always discovering sites through Google, such as mrqe.com, "The Movie Review Query Engine," which links the work of dozens of movie critics by film title. Among Internet news and gossip sites, I like my sometimes-colleague David Poland's earnest and oft-personal Hot Button column, moved over from TNT's defunct Rough Cut site: check it out at www.davidpoland.com.

England's Observer and Guardian combine their diverse, intelligent coverage of the film scene in what is probably the best single film-oriented site I know http://www.filmunlimited.co.uk/). I don't care for their short, snarky film reviews, but the lengthy, habitually controversial and profane interviews are a highlight.

But, many times, I find myself returning to the printed word (if you have any ideas about how to keep from drowning under back issues of magazines, I'd like to hear them). Premiere has a new editor, and its sparky first two issues under his guidance suggest the possibility of at least pulling alongside the consumer's showbiz bible, Entertainment Weekly. (Some people laugh when I mention EW, and when they do, it's obvious they don't read it.) More specialized magazines that I absorb include the BFI's Sight & Sound, Res, Filmmaker, the newly erratic Film Comment, and a promising new kid on the block, with its sixth text-dense issue, Toronto's Cinema Scope. You can sample its content in the zine section at www.insound.com.

Among fat reference works, "Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide" is priceless, with years of copyediting making for a terrifically accurate reference (Signet, $7.99). To show how important it is to write well but not overreach, I'm also fond of David Thomson's "Biographical Dictionary of Film" (Knopf, $25), even if I repeatedly disagree with him. Emanuel Levy's "Cinema of Outsiders" (NYU, $24.95), while heavy on the sociology, is the smartest, best-informed single volume I've read about the history of American indie film.

"Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook," the veteran critic's annual compendium of his full-length reviews (Andrews McMeel, $16.95) showcases the television veteran at his best, as a writer rather than performed, a gifted essayist whose high notes are high indeed, making the occasional perfunctory set of observations just a page to flip past on the way to something truly memorable.

My office walls are covered with film festival catalogs, biographies, how-tos, how-not-tos, collected criticism and other writings on film, but whenever I need a short, sharp kick to the butt, I have to say as regularly as a kid with hiccups, there's the brilliantly honed writing of Manny Farber, collected in "Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies" (DaCapo, $15.95). (2001-03-22)

Also by Ray Pride

MANNY FROM HEAVEN
In Manny Farber's essential omnibus, "Negative Space," Farber says, "I can't imagine a more perfect art form, a more perfect career than criticism. I can't imagine anything more valuable to do, and I've always felt that way." Yes -- and if one could say it as witheringly, as wisely and wittily as Manny Farber.
(2001-03-08)

RAINSTORMS OF WORDS
There's a lovely gift of language and love on every page of "The Element of Lavishness," a collection of a forty-year correspondence between New Yorker magazine editor and short story writer William Maxwell and British writer Sylvia Townsend Warner.
(2001-03-01)

MEET JOE BLOW
In "The Mexican," Pitt co-stars as Jerry, a hapless criminal and diffident bag man who must repay one last debt before he can accede to demands that he quit from girlfriend Samantha (Julia Roberts), an always-agitated therapy-speak bitch.
(2001-03-01)

KNOWING DICK
While Jessica Villines' keen, sidelong portrait of Cynthia is chockfull of diverse interviews with the likes of artist Ed Paschke and Camille Paglia defending Cynthia's pursuits, her dentist, Dr. Michael Feinberg, shares the keenest insight. Artists have fixated on features of the human form throughout history; Rodin liked hands, Cynthia Plaster Caster admires rocker's cocks.
(2001-02-22)

CROUCHING PRODUCER, HIDDEN EGO
(2001-02-22)

HANNIBAL THE AMICABLE
(2001-02-08)

WATERY, GRAVE
(2001-02-08)

SLIPPERY SLOPES
(2001-02-01)

SLY CONCEPT
(2001-01-25)

GUY STUFF
(2001-01-18)

CINE-MAGIC!
(2001-01-18)

KIDS IN TULSA
(2001-01-11)

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