Sharing its name with a 2010 MoMA show and the documentary we’re screening next month, Pippin Barr’s 8-bit videogame The Artist is Present simulates the experience of waiting in line for a chance to sit down and stare into artist Marina Abramović’s eyes.

Equally critical of studios and filmmakers, Terry Gilliam says he sees no one making challenging art about current global instability. Studios want directors who are “a safe pair of hands,” while artists “are just looking for jobs and looking to get paid.”

John Waters, filmmaker and curator of the Walker’s Absentee Landlord show, is continuing his cross-country hitch-hiking trip. After news last week that he’d been picked up in Ohio, he’s now in Denver… and pondering a book on his sojourn.

Beard-wearing protesters from the feminist group La Barbe are angered that of the 22 directors up for a Palme d’Or at Cannes, none are women. “Men love their women to have depth, but only when it comes to their cleavage,” they argued in a letter.

Amos Vogel—founder of Cinema 16 and, later, the New York Film Festival—felt that “in a democracy it was crucial to offer the public a range of films that would question, enlighten, and enervate with the goal of undermining previous ways of thinking and feeling.”

Maybe we’re missing the point of this cats+internet thing—cuteness counts, right?—but we couldn’t pass on Lee Hardcastle’s spot-on, but grisly remake of Gareth Evans’ ultra-violent Indonesian film The Raid (2011), using claymation cats.

While driving in Ohio recently, members of the band Here We Go Magic noticed a familiar-looking hitch-hiker on highway on-ramp. Circling back, they picked up none other than filmmaker, artist, and curator of our Absentee Landlord show John Waters.

Long opposed by neighbors, George Lucas’ plan to build a 300,000 s.f. studio complex in Marin County, CA, has been ditched. Noting that the community indicated it’d prefer housing over commerce, the director now aims to use the land for low-income housing.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul—whose web-only film will screen exclusively on the Walker Channel from July through December—screens Mekong Hotel at Cannes next week. Stills of the Palme d’Or winner’s latest have been released, although some mystery persists.