Whee! Happy Anniversary to the GreenCine Dispatch, which today celebrates (in its few seconds of spare time) its 100th issue. It seems like only yesterday the Dispatch was a toddler, barely able to walk, and now... just look at it! All grown up at 100. Well, here's to 100 more.

Meanwhile, in between sips of champagne, we bring you the latest happenings from the world of DVD, VOD, and other cinematic happenings, all designed to get your mind off the news and weather. Cheers!

"I was always just interested in arms trafficking because there is so much attention on drug trafficking, but this is so much more devastating," writer and director Andrew Niccol tells Sean Axmaker. Following the "social science fiction" of Gattaca, The Truman Show and S1m0ne, Niccol turns to the here and now in Lord of War.

Ardent eco-activist David Brower didn't just leave behind a legacy of environmental legislation and preservation; he also left us exquisite, vivid footage of some of America's most valuable Western wilderness. Jennie Rose takes a look at Monumental, Kelly Duane's Brower documentary that tapped the Brower archives for what The Oregonian called "a feast of nourishing images - as well as a persuasive reminder of what exactly environmentalists are fighting for."

Coming momentarily, an interview with director Mike Mills, whose Thumbsucker is just now hitting theaters and, according to critics everywhere, very much doesn't... suck.

The GreenCine Daily wraps up its coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, while continuing to track the San Sebastian Fest. And then, as always, our coverage of the rest of the world of film which adds up to what one blogger called "The 800-pound gorilla of the film blog world."

Video-on-Demand: Learning Curve (1998).

Learning Curve, also known as Detention, is an undeservingly obscure little film by Texan Andy Anderson, who first made a splash five years earlier with Positive I.D. Learning Curve, with the tagline "Goodbye Mister Chips, Hello Midnight Express" pretty much summing it up, stars John Davies as a substitute teacher in a destitute school district stuck teaching out of control students. Unable to make a difference, the teacher shifts to some rather, ah, original approaches to discipline and punishment. The film was called out by filmcritic.com as "one of the most deliciously perverse and twisted independents to hit [home video] this year. You'll never listen to 'Hey Mickey!' the same way again." The film has "cult" written all over it, providing no easy answers but provoking in all the right ways. You won't be graded on a Learning Curve if you watch this film via GreenCine's constantly expanding Video-on-Demand service.

GreenCine Staff Pick of the Week: My Life as a Dog (1993).

Chris Sullivan in the Independent (UK) recently praised My Life as a Dog as "one of the greatest films about childhood that has ever been made," and, while that could be overstating the case, I won't argue. Lasse Hallström has since gone on to make several successful Hollywood films but it was with this film that he earned his reputation and it is this film that remains his most resonant. Set in 1950s Sweden, it's the tale of young Ingemar (a remarkable Anton Glazelius), his mother terminally ill with tuberculosis, who is separated from his brother to live with relatives. Add to this the fact that he has to temporarily put his dog in a kennel, along with the natural confusion inherent with being on the cusp of puberty, and you have some turmoil. He empathizes with poor Laika, the Russian dog-turned-Cosmonaut, although one hopes he won't meet the same fate ("They put her in space. I don't think she felt so good about it. She went round and round until her doggy bag was empty. Then she starved to death," he narrates in one of his soliloquies in the film). But he soon finds himself distracted by his new surroundings, and in particular by the tomboyish Saga - their budding friendship only adding to his confusion. The film is episodic in nature, building whatever narrative momentum it has on smaller events, going for atmosphere and character over huge moments, but Hallstrom seamlessly blends humor and tragedy in what amounts to an incredibly poignant coming of age evocation.

Also available in the original DVD version, which is fine, too, but the Criterion disc has a superior high-definition digital transfer supervised by the director and improved English subtitle translation, as well as a 1973 short film by Hallstrom. -- Craig Phillips

Documentaries and international treats - both new and older - highlight this week's slate of new DVD releases (as well as a favorite late 70s American cult film):

Cowards Bend the Knee (2003). "I told you this before but I'll mention it again - Cowards is my favorite of your films," Jonathan Marlow said to Guy Maddin in an interview late last year. Replied the director: "I think that it might be my favorite, too. It was my favorite experience." Raved Manohla Dargis in the New York Times (after praising Maddin's "singular genius"): "There is also something rather splendid about this extended-play peep show, as if Mr. Maddin had stumbled across a hitherto lost archive of cinema's less-than-innocent past. What makes all this nostalgia for a movie history that never happened (as far as I know) is that, as is always the case with Mr. Maddin's work, it's executed with more love than irony and not a whit of derision."

Born Into Brothels (2003). "As upsetting as it is to see these children of India's red-light district growing up with so little chance in the world, the movie is equally heartening and disheartening because of the filmmakers' link to the kids and their very real and productive attempts to help half a dozen of them," writes talltale of this winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

"In It's All Gone Pete Tong (2004), everything that can go wrong generally does, mostly to surprisingly sweet effect," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, noting that Paul Kaye "appears in almost every scene and he carries that weight admirably. He manages the very neat trick of keeping you interested in a character who doesn't merit our affection but earns it nonetheless."

Masculin/Feminin (1966). Let's first get that famous intertitle out of the way: "The children of Marx and Coca Cola - understand who will." Now then, take it away, Pauline Kael: "Godard has liberated his feeling for modern youth from the American gangster movie framework... He has made up the strands of what was most original in his best films - the life of the uncomprehending heroine, the blank-eyed career-happy little opportunist betrayer from Breathless, and the hully-gully, the dance of sexual isolation, from Band of Outsiders. Using neither crime nor the romance of crime but a simple kind of romance for a kind of interwoven story line, Godard has, at last, created the form he needed. It is a combination of essay, journalistic sketches, news and portraiture, love lyric and satire."

Grimm (2003). A sort of contemporary retelling from the Netherlands of the tale of Hansel and Gretel, only with an absurdist sense of both humor and narrative and just a dash of Angela Carter.

Inside Deep Throat (2004)."As with Bill Condon's Kinsey," writes Nick Schager at Slant, "Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's Inside Deep Throat proves that the sexual revolution that began in the '60s was spearheaded not only by daring risk-takers who believed in personal freedom and sexual openness, but also by creeps who had no qualms about cavorting with lowlifes and degenerates to accomplish their libido-liberating goals." Narrated by Dennis Hopper and featuring members of the cast and crew who worked on the cultural (and ultimately, financial) phenomenon that was Deep Throat as well as Gore Vidal, Erica Jong, Camille Paglia, Bill Maher and Norman Mailer and many, many more.

Divan (2003). A "charming first-person account of the filmmaker's trip to Hungary to retrieve a family heirloom - a couch upon which, one late 19th-century Sabbath, a legendary rebbe passed the night," writes J. Hoberman in the Village Voice. "Warmhearted but unsentimental, touching but not mawkish, clever but never cute, Divan is almost miraculously modest."

An Angel at My Table (1990). "In her 3-volume autobiography Janet Frame repeatedly links the problem of identity to matters of perspective," writes Sue Gillett at Senses of Cinema. "Jane Campion is also a director who understands the intricate circuits of vision between a woman and the world she tries to see. Her films are remarkable for the independence they give to images of women and their gazes. In her adaptation of Frame's autobiography, Campion creates a visual language to match Frame's literary preoccupation with seeing her self from both within and without and placing herself within those frames of vision." Criterion packs the disc with a doc on the film's making, deleted scenes, an audio interview with Frame from 1982, commentary featuring Campion, cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh and lead actress Kerry Fox.

Naked (1993). "An unapologetic masterpiece," Edward Champion declared recently, "a brutally honest and almost Doestoevskyian depiction of a drifter (played brilliantly by David Thewlis) and the lives he seems to alter and disrupt (when in fact it may be other lives and class trappings that alter and disrupt him)." Thewlis won Best Actor at Cannes, Mike Leigh, Best Director.

Over the Edge (1979). "What we have here," began Roger Ebert in his review, "depressing and harrowing and often very real, is the other side of the coin of Breaking Away. That movie was a celebration of the possibilities involved in coming of age in a small town. Over the Edge is a funeral service held at the graveside of the suburban dream. It tells a ragged story that ends with an improbable climax, but it's acted so well and truly by its mostly teen-age cast that we somehow feel we're eavesdropping."

New Anime:

Kodocha. Volume 2: Hayama Hijinks (2005). "This series has been called "Marmalade Boy on steroids," and that sums it up nicely," says drseid. "This long and "oh so good" shoujo series is super wacky and hyper, but it is so very funny with great characters!" Very high ratings all around from other GreenCiners as well.

For a complete list of all of this week's new releases, go here.

We get Misty. Or, we've got Misty, as we extend our congratulations to the lucky winners of the The Seduction of Misty Mundae trivia contest: RepairmanJack, billp1w, rastanaut, Madpuppy and SPat (the answer was Lord of the G-Strings: The Femaleship of the Ring). We'll announce more contest winners in this space next week. Meanwhile, check back Friday for our next trivia contest giveaway, for X-Files Mythology: Colonization.

The member list of the week: "Sound Design+++," by polarglitch. "just listen... if sound design is done well most people don't even notice..."

The next GreenCine-sponsored screening will be on October 5, as we present Youssef Chahine's masterpiece Cairo Station (1958). The director, in a rare acting role, stars as a crippled newspaper dealer who falls in love with a lovely lemonade seller. She, however, is only interested in another man, thus setting the stage for a series of hopeless actions and terrible consequences. The film was banned for more than a decade in Egypt after its initial release. "All human life is here: the phrase really does apply to Chahine's tragicomic masterpiece," wrote Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian (U.K.), while his colleague Gaby Wood added, "We can see how brilliantly it predates Robert Altman." At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 7:30 pm, Wednesday, October 5.