Two things you will learn from the new documentary "Lynch," which plays May 23-25 at Webster University on a double bill with "Eraserhead":

1. David Lynch practices Transcendental Meditation^TM every day (OK, you may already know that, given his much-publicized fund-raising/contributions to that organization) and wishes everyone else would, too.

2. David Lynch does not own or know how to use an ashtray. Early on in "Lynch," as we see the director sitting at a desk taping one of his frequent video messages/weather reports for his Web site, it's hard not to be distracted by the clutter on his office floor. What's going on? Some kind of behind-the-radiator visual ambience concocted for the film? No, the mess is real, and the chain-smoking creator of "Eraserhead" tends to toss his smoldering butts onto the floor behind him when he's done with them. It's a curious detail - especially given that the film shows him earnestly sweeping a studio floor and carefully rearranging furniture on a set - but it's about as close to a personal detail as "Lynch" ever gets.

"The Visitor," now playing at both the Plaza Frontenac and Tivoli, is a film I could relate to. In the movie, a spiritually dried-up, aging professor is about buried in routine when an extraordinary event (actually it involves his simply doing what his college expects of him for a change!) drags him back into life. So it speaks to this aging professor (fortunately, I'm in English lit, not some truly dismal academic calling like economics, which is the character's field in the film).

In honor of the video release of "Youth Without Youth," we draw your attention to this forgotten banished item from Francis Ford Coppola's career:

I sometimes suspect that the air of been-there-before boredom that has been used to dismiss most of Woody Allen’s work for the last two decades has less to do with outrage over his personal life (since most people still seem to get the details of the whole Mia/Soon-Yi saga wrong) than with the creeping anti-intellectualism that has infected nearly every aspect of American life since the early ’80s.

When it was announced about a year ago that Scarlett Johansson was recording an album of Tom Waits songs, many commentators feigned a kind of exasperated surprise, as if the idea of an actress (or actor) taking a chance on a musical project was unknown. It’s not. Just ask Bruce Willis. Or Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, Clint Eastwood, Raquel Welch, Cybill Shepherd, Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek, Rex Harrison, Kevin Bacon, Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges, Lee Marvin, John Travolta, Jack Nicholson, Burt Reynolds or Robert Mitchum. Nor is the reverse career path so unusual, as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Bowie, Elvis, Prince, Madonna and J-Lo have established.

But the Johansson project was unusual from the start.

Welcome to Cinema St. Louis' new blog, The Lens.

Because this is a collaborative venture with the St. Louis Beacon, which is generously co-hosting our blog, some readers may need an introduction not only to The Lens but also to Cinema St. Louis (CSL), so before we move to the feature presentation, let's start with a short subject.

There could be a surprise move-up in the vote to bring back photo ID requirements for voters in Missouri, if Gov. Matt Blunt decides to pull a Bob Holden and take the issue to the voters in August.  If that happens, the ID requirement could be enforced in November's important presidential and gubernatorial election.

Fourteen members of Washington University's law faculty called upon the university to rescind its honorary degree offer to Phyllis Schlafly, just as Northwestern University recently "had the good sense to rescind its honorary degree offer to Jeremiah Wright."  

The Missouri House has passed a proposed state constitutional amendment that would permit the Legislature to require a photo i.d. to vote. If passed by the Senate and approved by the voters, the amendment would negate a 2006 Missouri Supreme Court decision throwing out a photo i.d. requirement. Robin Carnahan, the Democratic Secetary of State, says up to 240,000 registered voters may not have the kind of i.d. that would be required.