This year’s New York Film Festival opened Friday night with a screening of French director Laurent Cantet’s The Class.

The film, which has already won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, focuses on a multicultural classroom in Paris’ rapidly gentrifying 20th Arrondissement. With the exception of the role of the teacher, who is played by the author of the memoir that inspired the movie, the cast is made up of a group of amateur teenage actors, most of whom had traveled to New York for the festival.

Maybe it was the serious, relatively low-profile film—The Darjeeling Limited was last year's selection, and The Queen opened the year before that—or the rain or the presidential debates on TV, but the red carpet was particularly quiet.  read more »

Last night the much-discussed Hollywood contingent here in Denver, who have been lending their "visibility" to myriad events and causes all over town, congregated in the V.I.P. section of the Black Eyed Peas concert. Members of the Creative Coalition's hard-working band of entertainers—Alan Cumming, Tim Daly, Anne Hathaway, Spike Lee, Barry Levinson, Josh Lucas, Matthew Modine, Susan Sarandon—were joined by various showbiz colleagues including Jessica Alba and Hayden Panettiere in the balcony area at the Fillmore Auditorium, as Fergie & Co. shook their rumps on stage below.

Meanwhile, local nightclub impresario Jesse Morreale wondered if the glamorous crowd would have enough energy to return for another after after party at the Rockbar.  read more »

The hair-product maven John Paul DeJoria, dressed in a black suit with a black T-shirt underneath, was assessing the hair of Denver during a luncheon hosted by the Creative Coalition this afternoon at Panzano, the downtown restaurant.

“The people of Denver have the nice looking hair,” said Mr. DeJoria, who is the co-founder of Paul Mitchell hair-care products. “I wish they would grow it a little bit longer. I think this is an excellent market for Paul Mitchell.”

Denver isn't such an easy city to get around, especially when the Pepsi Center belches forth its thousands into a relatively small network of streets to fight for cabs.  read more »

Now that we're into the second day of the Democratic National Convention, it's time for a poll of all that "celebrity power" that was supposed to follow Barack Obama to Denver.

While Paris Hilton has not shown up yet (much to the disappointment of John McCain supporters), here are some noteworthy names that attended events during the first day of the convention as put together by Associated Press, with a little additional research by the Daily Transom:

Danny Glover showed up at the Creative Coalition event wearing a Martin Luther King Jr. T-shirt under his blazer.  read more »

Modine, Delpy, Forster teach moviemaking on Prince Street.  read more »