This edition of the GreenCine Dispatch is dedicated to our pets, our four-legged, loyal friends who are with us through thick fur and thin times. During these hot summer months, keep your animals indoors or somewhere cool, with plenty of liquids available. (Wait, what is this, Animal Planet?) And sit Rover or Tabby in front of the telly for some good animal-tainment, like Babe (but the second one may disturb both pets and small children), Benji (but not Old Yeller), The Cat From Outer Space (but definitely not this one), and, for the rodent lovers among you, Stuart Little (or this one, if you're a weird rodent lover). And now we'll fetch the rest of this week's news.

A new film aims to school the world about the power of the seminal punk band The Minutemen, whose creative force was at its very peak when brought to a tragic halt. We Jam Econo is a sorely overdue eulogy of sorts, with an excess of musicians, artists and cultural trackers testifying to The Minutemen's legacy. And front and center of course are the dearly departed D. Boon's former bandmates, drummer George Hurley and, most prominently, bassist Mike Watt, who takes the filmmakers on a tour of old haunts in his van, obviously still grieving over the loss of Boon and still touched by having known him. But it's an abundance of footage of The Minutemen in action that will send people out looking for their LPs. Craig Phillips spoke with We Jam Econo co-director Tim Irwin about the making of the film and the power of the music.

The GreenCine Daily, our award-winning blog, is back with full-time, full-on coverage of the world of cinema. You better log on soon if you haven't for awhile; you'll have your reading cut out for you!

Video-on-Demand: Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the... (2005).

This week only! A GreenCine exclusive: Can a movie made for $99 be more entertaining than a $200,000,000 Hollywood mega-flick? That's the question Jim Riffel poses with Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Hellbound, Crawling, Zombified Living Dead, Part 3 - certainly the longest title we have available via Video-on-Demand. Now that Riffel's completed his film, he's challenged Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds to a "War of the Films," claiming his film is the more enjoyable viewing experience. Riffel is asking anyone who watches the films to email their critique to Jim@warofthefilms.com and he'll post it on the site. Watch it now or any time this week.

GreenCine Staff Pick of the Week: In July (2000).

German filmmaker Fatih Akin, whose most recent film, Head-On (Gegen die Wand), was arguably one of the more brilliant films of the past year, previously made a more whimsically enjoyable little film called In July. This summertime treat makes for perfectly appropriate viewing as we wind down its namesake month, but the title also refers to the free-spirited character played by Christiane Paul, who has a secret crush on a Hamburg student teacher (Moritz Bleibtreu, whom you might remember from an obscure little film called Run Lola Run). The road trip movie - which takes us from Hamburg to Istanbul - is enhanced by Akin's playfully non-chronological narrative, beginning mid-narrative and then moving backwards. While for some films, this sort of contrivance only serves to mask other deficiencies, for In July it merely adds to the pleasure, keeping us off-balance but engaged. Both Paul and Bleibtreu are winning presences, who also play their characters as believably imperfect, and it's a further pleasure to glimpse such cinematically underrepresented locales as Hungary and Turkey. You will forgive some coincidences and what may seem on paper a derivative plot, as In July still ends up feeling original and, ultimately, surprisingly deep. -- Tamara Lees

This week's batch of new DVD releases includes a top documentary filmmaker's eagerly awaited back catalog and an anime epic:

Steamboy (2004). "Katsuhiro Otomo's epic Steamboy cost 20.2 million dollars to make, took 180,000 cels to produce and ate up the last ten solid years of Otomo's life," writes Gabriel Reldman for the Anime News Network. "The hype surrounding this film is unreal; could the director of Akira, one of the most popular anime films ever, live up to his own legacy? The answer, thankfully, is a resounding yes. Steamboy outclasses all of Otomo's other films and most of his competitors' films; this is an instant classic, something to be loved and remembered by audiences of every shape and size."

The Upside of Anger (2004). "Part of the pleasure in watching [Joan] Allen and [Kevin] Costner comes from seeing them slip comfortably into the kinds of characters they have always done best," wrote A.O. Scott in the New York Times, "as if, in some parallel movie universe, Crash Davis, the semi-washed-up baseball player in Bull Durham, had hooked up with Elena Hood, the stifled and betrayed wife and mother from The Ice Storm."

This week sees the long overdue release of three landmark documentaries by Academy Award-winner Errol Morris as well as the complete collection of his television series, First Person. "After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven't found another filmmaker who intrigues me more," Roger Ebert once wrote. "Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini."

The Thin Blue Line (1988). As we noted in our introduction to Nina Rehfeld's interview with Morris in 2003, perhaps the most historically significant of his films is The Thin Blue Line: "Significant because Blue Line, by including staged reconstructions of crucial events in its story, challenged the notion of what a documentary could be. And do. Morris himself has called it 'the first murder mystery that actually solves a murder.' The project came about when his filmmaking career was stalled and he'd taken a job as a private investigator. 'Two careers intersected,' John Pierson writes in Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes. 'Errol Morris director met Errol Morris detective just in time to return to filmmaking and clear an innocent man who had been on death row.'"

Gates of Heaven (1978). "It's difficult to tell whether Gates of Heaven is comedy, tragedy, or just plain wacky," wrote John Nesbit at CultureDose.net. "You might end up viewing it with your mouth agape." No matter what, animal lovers will enjoy Morris' "winningly absurdist" (TimeOut) look at pet cemeteries and the people who use them. Morris then traveled to Vernon, Florida in 1981 for some "philosophical slapstick," as David Ansen called it in Newsweek, "a film as odd and mysterious as its subjects, and quite unforgettable."

Errol Morris' First Person. Disc 1. The series ran one year on Bravo, a second year on the Independent Film Channel, and incorporates Morris's trademark interviewing machine, the Interrotron, which allows interviewees to look simultaneously at a live image of Morris and directly into the camera. Again, Morris's knack for finding the people with the oddest yet somehow alarmingly resonant stories to tell and then getting them to tell them fully is on full display here. Disc 2. Disc 3.

Gate of Flesh (1964). 82 years young, Seijun Suzuki is currently wowing old fans and winning new ones with his new feature, Princess Raccoon. It's great to see him back in form again and, as a splendid reminder of what's made him one of the world's most unique directors, Criterion is releasing not one but two features from the mid-60s, the period in which he was rattling the Japanese film industry with films like Tokyo Drifter and Fighting Elegy. Gate of Flesh is "a brilliant, lurid, candy colored film able to evoke profound feelings of sorrow and disenchantment," wrote Keith Allen at Movierapture. Criterion's disc includes a new video interview with Seijun Suzuki and art director Takeo Kimura.

The Story of a Prostitute (1965). "A rule-bending take on the popular Taijiro Tamura novel," writes Criterion. The disc includes new video interviews with Seijun Suzuki, production designer Takeo Kimura and film critic Tadao Sato.

New Anime:

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Volume 7 (2005). "It's as clever, funny and long-winded as the comics and adds a touch of the poetic artiness of the films," writes brakhage of the first volume. "Great plotting, direction, voice talent... killer production all the way round."

It's always good to keep an eye on your queue to make sure the films you most want to see are at the top. We also recommend having a minimum of ten times the number of slots you have, i.e., forty if you're on the four-out plan. If you're having trouble thinking of titles to rent, here are a few ideas: check out member lists (which you can look at chronologically, alphabetically or by average rating) and editorial top lists, browse through primers and our active discussion boards, look at our lists of titles coming soon, among other ideas. So queue away! And if you need to watch something right now, take a gander at our rapidly expanding Video-on-Demand offerings. And for ease of browsing, you can look at our currently available VOD titles by genre; go to the main page for a list of all genres.

Congratulations to the winners the Manna From Heaven trivia contest: DubTaylor, badfish and BuddyLee (the answer was Silent Night, Lonely Night). Meanwhile, we have a brand new trivia contest up on the home page today and it's our biggest giveaway ever: twenty-six(!) classic titles from Fox Home Video's World War II collection. From the Halls Of Montezuma To The Shores Of Tripoli, and pretty much literally everything in between, these are some of the best war films ever made - so march on over to our home page and enter!

What music are you listening to? Participate in this new member-created discussion thread. Or jump on in to the boards with a new topic of your own.

Coming soon! GreenCine has not one but two film screenings booked for next month: On August 3 at the Yerba Buena Center, we'll present exploitation queen Doris Wishman's first film, Hideout in the Sun, which was shot at a Florida nudist colony. The screening will be introduced by Grindhouse: The Forbidden World of "Adults Only" Cinema author (and creator of our film noir primer) Eddie Muller.

A week later, on August 10: the winner of the GreenCine Online Film Festival's Narrative Grand Prize, Red Cockroaches, scurries into SF's Balboa Theater.