Zeitgeist

Deepa Mehta's sorrowful film, "Earth," the second in a projected trilogy of fire, earth and water, is bathed in a deep golden light that at moments recalls the orange sky silhouetting the sweaty faces of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in "Gone With the Wind" during the burning of Atlanta. This amber glow gives the film, which remembers the tragic events surrounding the partition of India in 1947, a ruddy sensuality along with a sense of nocturnal foreboding. "Earth," adapted from Bapsi Sidhwa's semi-autobiographical novel "Cracking India," views these events through the eyes of 8-year-old Lenny Suthna (Maia Sethna)

Maybe you weren't around the last time John H. Glenn went into space. Maybe you're a Gen-Xer, an MTV kid, a disco baby. If so, you can be forgiven for not understanding the country's latest nostalgia jag. But let's all pause for a moment and consider those pre-Beatles days when manned space flight was a new and out-of-this-world phenomenon, filling the future with promise.Glenns four-hour ride was sci-fi made real. Even life with the Jetsons seemed a possibility. All we needed was a little more time with those gargantuan Burroughs 6800 computers and Tomorrowland would be ours.

Excuse me but . . . what planet is Peter Greenaway from?His provocative, obscure and recondite oeuvre makes a good deal more sense if one begins with the proposition that he is from some other sphere. Then one can't possibly begin to ask such questions as, "What does it mean?"The avant-garde British filmmaker has confounded audiences and irritated critics for years with such antic strangenesses as "The Belly of an Architect," "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" and "Prospero's Books."

The British documentary "Afghan Star" boldly handles a rich, involving subject - the emergence of an "American Idol"-like TV show in post-Taliban Afghanistan. The film's essential fascination and integrity swamp any qualms about its pacing or all-around moviemaking. Most Americans are aware of religious subcultures that ban dancing. The Taliban banned music itself. Playing instruments and singing have become inspirational releases in a land still starving for liberty and beauty. Just as Western rock helped bring down the Iron Curtain, "Afghan Star" suggests that Eastern pop will break up Afghanistan's ethnic and sexual divisions and traditions of patriarchal tyranny.

What do Janet Jackson, Hurricane Katrina and the Xbox 360 have in common? In 2005, they were among the top news searches on Google, says the company's year-end zeitgeist report. (Ms. Jackson, by the way, was No. 1, doubtless because of her "wardrobe malfunction.") If officers at the world's top search engine wanted to reveal more than that from the company's vast storehouse of retained data, they could go so far as to detail the content of almost half of all Internet searches - down to specific Web sites visited by particular computers.

What if photos of nude children and sex with a minor are consensual? That's the question Jennifer Montgomery asks in her autobiographical film, "Art for Teachers of Children."The movie, which starts playing Monday at the Orpheum in Fells Point, is low-tech, in grainy black and white, with poor sound and nonexistent acting. Because it is filmed in such a dispassionate, flat manner, it comes across as an intellectual exercise, despite its overtly sexual subject matter. But it's disturbing nonetheless.

Robert Stone's "Earth Days" is a surprisingly calm documentary about the history of American ecological activism. But it's good calm, not dead calm. It's a relief to see a filmmaker use commercials and industrial footage from the 1950s, portraying America as a materialistic wonderland, without adding too much jokey or tendentious spin. (The same goes for Stone's use of PSAs from the 1970s warning of environmental blight.) Stone's own greatest visual stroke is conveying an epiphany of the planet as a life-unifying sphere during a drug trip in San Francisco - an experience that eventually led Stewart Brand to found and edit the Whole Earth Catalog.

I can't afford designer clothing, and so what. The fact is, I'd be pretty uncomfortable wearing most designers' visions, even if they didn't send my plastic into meltdown.If I put on one of those gorgeous gowns by Galliano, for example, I'd look like a kitchen chair drowning in a fancy slipcover. If I were dressed in St. Laurent, I'd have to move to Paris so my Euro-chic clothes could feel at home. And if I were compelled to wear Gucci's sexy hippie looks, I'd contemplate suicide the way I did back in the '70s when I had to stuff my thighs into bell-bottoms.

It's heeerrrrrrre!Though I suspect many would just as soon it went away, forever. Especially those who are black and of the liberal to leftist political persuasion."

Sylvia Ingram doesn't much like to talk about herself.In fact, the associate professor of English and director of the office of affirmative action at Anne Arundel Community College can't quite figure out why she's become a celebrity."