The NY Times on "promising" filmmakers from the 1990s who haven't done much recently...

• Apparently Kimberly Peirce of Boys Don't Cry has something coming out this year (a seven year break)
• Darren Aronofsky took a long long time to come up with The Fountain, which I have no interest in seeing after groaning through the trailer so many times in recent months.
• "David O. Russell, widely admired for his original mix of comedy and seriousness in “Flirting With Disaster” and “Three Kings,” has dropped from view since his disastrous* “I Heart Huckabees” in 2004, and is not close to making a new film."
• Spike Jonze is working on an adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, due in 2008. I am not a fan of the conversion of picture book to full length movie.

According to the Times, "it is possible that the self-indulgent American culture that shaped these filmmakers and made them so successful in the 1990s has left them ill equipped to take on the weightier questions facing society in the new millennium."

Apparently, Mexicans -Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, and Alfonso Cuarón — are better at being productive moviemakers.

*I find "disastrous" an interesting descriptor for Huckabees. I didn't really care for that movie, but Metacritic suggests "mixed reviews" rather than disaster, and converted the NY Times review to a score of 90.