• UNESCO passed an initiative this week to halt American globalization of foreign film markets. Translation: 191 states apparently concur with the French opinion that Hollywood films are taking up too much of the market abroad. Says French culture czar Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, "This makes culture an exception, which is to say that it's not the market that should regulate, it's the states that should support and promote their own artists." Translation: why are French people going to see Herbie: Fully Loaded when they have The Beat that My Heart Skipped?
  • Universal has set a release date for Flight 93, Paul Greengrass' September 11 movie. It'll open on April 28 – four months before Oliver Stone's still-untitled September 11 movie, which stars Nicolas Cage, and which bows on August 11. Both camps are trying to steer clear of the actual date September 11; as this will be the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, no one wants to be accused of exploitation. But how will two serious films about the touchiest subject in an extremely touchy era fare in the middle of the notoriously brain-dead summer movie season?
  • AMC has ordered a pilot for a series of short, celebrity documentaries from Nanette Burstein, the director of The Kid Stays in the Picture. The no-longer-Classic network also ordered a heap of new episodes of Peter Bart's attrociously boring Sunday Morning Shootout.
  • Greg Jacobs will direct Wind Chill, a horror flick, for George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh's Section Eight. The incredibly pedestrian sounding story follows "two college students who share a ride home for the holidays but break down on a deserted stretch of road, where they are menaced by the ghosts of all those who died there.."