Filmmakers

Casting director Pat Moran, a co-founder of John Waters' Dreamland Films, helped create the human tapestries that give Waters' midnight specials their Fellini-like ebullience. But she has also done her part to imbue such Barry Levinson memory plays as "Avalon" and "Liberty Heights" with their gnarly warmth and David Simon's hard-hitting TV shows, "The Corner" and "The Wire," with their bluesy grit. On the eve of the famous trio's first joint appearance for the Maryland Film Festival (Saturday night at MICA's Brown Hall)

It's a breezy morning in eastern Annapolis. Sea gulls squawk overhead. Boats bob beside a dock. And on the deck of a tied-up charter vessel, two folk musicians in ball caps strum a shuffle on a banjo and ukelele, looking every inch the easy-living Jimmy Buffetts of the Chesapeake. It's the final day of shooting for "Seize the Bay," the latest creation from Daphne Glover and Bob Ferrier, filmmakers from Severna Park, and as the two roll videotape, neither one can suppress a smile. "Fantastic," says Ferrier, the director, clapping his hands as the music ends.

Committing yourself for 12 hours to any TV production is a big deal. But before you decide you don't have the time for Ken Burns' new multipart documentary, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea," consider just giving it a 30-minute tryout. Watch the first half-hour tonight on PBS, and I bet you will become hooked on one of the best and most rewarding viewing experiences of the TV year. This is a film with both beauty and brains - it is gorgeous to look at, it will make you think and possibly even stir your soul.

HOLLYWOOD - - Filmmaker John Hughes burned brightest in the 1980s, when he defined teen angst in terms of the caste system of the suburban high school experience, a thread that others would pick up again and again. His films were talky, in a good way. Like the kids whose stories he was telling, he let them ramble. Teen self-absorption was treated with reverence, not ridicule. The world might make fun of them, their classmates, their bothers and sisters too, but never John Hughes. And a generation of kids and future filmmakers like Kevin Smith and Judd Apatow embraced it. Mr. Hughes, who died Thursday at age 59, was fascinated with the human as outsider.

The last shirt Stringer Bell ever wore. Detective Jimmy McNulty's gun. Avon Barksdale's prison jumpsuit. For more than a year, those and about 150 other pieces of The Wire, the extended HBO morality play that spent five seasons exploring Charm City's meaner streets, have been on display at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. But just as the HBO show ended in March 2008, the BMI exhibit has reached the end of its run. What better excuse for a party? "Disconnecting The Wire ... What's Next?"

Growing up in Baltimore in the late 1980s, Dan Griffiths and Jeremy Kasten knew each other just enough to be wary. When, as freshmen at Boston's Emerson College, fate cast them as roommates, neither was exactly thrilled. "I called the school right away," says Griffiths, "to say, 'Hey, I kind of know this guy. Is there a way I can not live in this guy's room?' " The two men roar with laughter. If the housing people at Emerson had only listened. But they didn't, and now, some two decades later, these two Baltimore guys are sitting together on a couch in a largely deserted West Baltimore school building.

A samurai's wife dazzles a bandit as she and her husband make their way through a deep wood. The brigand rapes her. Someone kills the samurai. (Maybe it was himself.) That's all we know for sure about the action in Rashomon, even after the director, Akira Kurosawa, stages it from four different perspectives. No director has matched his ability to develop a story by leaps and bounds while revealing irresolvable discrepancies. Is the bandit a bold combatant and ladies' man or a feral pig?

Kelly Macdonald, so memorable as the tragic victim of a psychotic assassin in No Country for Old Men, becomes another hit man's best friend in The Merry Gentleman. She should have quit while she was ahead. This attenuated urban mood piece is filled with Christian imagery and is also Communion wafer-thin. It stars Michael Keaton as morose professional killer Frank Logan. Office worker Kate Frazier (Macdonald) startles him out of suicide when she looks skyward to catch sight of the year's first snow and sees him teetering on a building ledge across the street.

A record number of teams, 53 as of Friday afternoon, are out frantically making movies in and around Baltimore this weekend, part of the annual exercise in creative cinematic anarchy otherwise known as the 48-Hour Film Project. "There will be at least 500 people out on the streets," said Rob Hatch, project organizer for Baltimore. "If they're aiming something at you, it's just a camera." Under the competition's rules, teams of filmmakers have exactly 48 hours to make a film between four and seven minutes long.