Last night, I returned home after a very long and very trying day. All I wanted was to do was order Thai food and curl up in front of the tube with a less-than demanding movie and my comfy socks. I went with The Winning Season, written and directed by James C. Strouse, because I'd seen and loved Strauss's screenwriting debut, Lonesome Jim, an indie slacker comedy directed by Steve Buscemi and starring Casey Affleck as a hard-on-his-luck wannabe writer who moves back in with his parents in Indiana after his brother tries and fails to commit suicide. Affleck's character is forced to coach a girls basketball team while his brother recovers. Funny stuff happens. He smokes crack with his uncle, learns to deal with premature ejaculation, and eventually falls in love with Liv Tyler. The Winning Season is also about women's basketball and features a slacker hero coach - this time played by the excellent Sam Rockwell - who drinks too much, says un-PC things, and eventually learns what love is. But if this all sounds too ugly-duckling-turned-beautiful-swan, it's not.

It’s been proven many times over that director Stanley Kubrick was an obsessive magpie who kept (but didn’t necessarily catalog) every stray idea he ever had. That no one has yet successfully culled a script from his voluminous archive—Spielberg’s in my opinion lamentable A.I. notwithstanding—is rather astonishing. I’ve read the script for his great, lost passion project, Napoleon, but the epic scope of the thing will likely preclude its ever being realized. More feasible, apparently, is Lunatic At Large, a mystery picture based on a treatment St. Stanley commissioned from pulp novelist Jim Thompson. Re-discovered by Kubrick’s son-in-law, Philip Hobbs, back in 1999, the treatment has since been turned into a script by Stephen R. Clarke, and after a couple of false starts has now got some big names attached.

Director & star on their sci-fi psyche-out

The Tribeca Film Festival is over, and Duncan Jones is one happy dude. His directorial debut Moon -- a lonely sci-fi spookfest starring Sam Rockwell -- was extremely well received and is riding a lunar module of buzz all the way to its June 12 release date. Jones -- born Zowie Bowie to some Brit named David -- celebrated his film's premiere last week at new Meatpacking catacomb Bar 675 (at a Heineken and Stoli-sponsored event), where he talked about releasing an indie in sea of blockbusters, the genius of Sam Rockwell, and knowing thyself.

Mr. Gregg, Mr. Rockwell, and Mr. Palahniuk face some odd questions