By Andrew O'Hehir nice. via his link to nora-vincent as author in salon directory, I cracked the code. http://dir.salon.com/topics/andrew_ohehir well not that I couldn't have found his name linked somewhere, but it wasn't linked in the byline so.

cool he writes a regular Beyond the Multiplex -here, linking to installment of [2006-01-12] :
A gritty drama about teenage girls that's the talk of the festival set. Plus: Two documentaries about a nation driven mad by terrorism. which, great, is about On the Outs, the one jaime had that I really liked the look of. 'motherlesschildrenhaveahardtime.' and he says it's a compact, fatalistic little drama with its beats in all the right places.

yes I seem to like what he says. like, rants agnst the same kinda thing as me: I'm getting to hate those words "Based on a true story." Even a movie I raved about last week, Lajos Koltai's Holocaust film "Fateless," begins with that irritating phrase. I had two responses: First of all, no, it's not. "Fateless" is adapted from a work of fiction by Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, Hungary's greatest living novelist. And second of all, well, sure it is: Kertész himself was in the camps, and the Holocaust is "a true story." But for Christ's sake, isn't every remotely realistic work of art -- and some that aren't realistic at all -- based on a true story?

see also: Beyond the Multiplex: The best of 2005:

Years ago, films were judged primarily on their artistic merits," says Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures, whose releases include the hit documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" ...[Now] "Films might be judged on their artistic merits the day they come out," he goes on, "but by Monday morning, they're being judged by what they did at the box office. Who knew what Fellini and Truffaut were earning at the box office? Nobody knew, and nobody cared." Bowles adds that he thinks there's no "cultural imperative" to experience "defining aesthetic films" right now, in the way an earlier generation ate up the cinematic experiments of the '60s and '70s art-house gods -- or, more recently, paradigm-shifting flicks like "Blue Velvet" or "Pulp Fiction" or "Being John Malkovich."
That may seem counterintuitive at this moment, given the impressive audiences turning out across the country for that movie about two cowboys in love (technically an independent production). But six years after the supposed indie revolution of 1999, the independent film universe is an amorphous realm where the water is deep and the rocks are jagged. jaime. It's internally divided between documentaries and dramatic features, between mini-major studios that produce safe, "Hollywood-lite" product and adventurous distributors who work out of P.O. boxes and can barely scrape up the funds for a newspaper ad