The last time I interviewed somebody at the Liberty Hotel it was known as the Charles Street Jail. That was about 25 years ago and the subject of the interview was a white-bearded, sleight, elderly fellow known to some as "The Globe Man" -- not for any journalistic reason, but because he used to ride around Harvard Square in an old station wagon inscribed with countless cryptic writings and surmounted by a huge, papier maché world globe, about eight feet in diameter.

Yesterday I saw two films about critics.

The first, Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience," is ostensibly about a high-priced Manhattan call girl (played by Sasha Grey, a real life porn actress). To promote her business the woman agrees to meet with an "erotic connoiseur" (played by Glenn Kenny, a real life film critic, in a creepily hilarious break-out performance) who arranges to sample her wares for free in exchange for a rave review on his web site -- I guess it's kind of a Rotten Tomatoes for the sex industry.

Here's two more that didn't make the cut:

Aliens Among Us:

Did I mention that if you punch "Lou Dobbs" and "Antichrist" into Google you get 19,000 hits?

He just might want to take note of the fact that aliens -- extraterrestrial for the most part and most likely illegal -- are in Hollywood right now taking jobs away from earthling movie premises.

Maybe the newspaper movie, which I mentioned a few postings back as a "Dead End Trends," has got some life in it after all. I've been reminded that there is indeed a third film that falls into that category in addition to "State of Play" and "The Soloist" -- Rod Lurie's "Nothing But the Truth" -- thus fulfilling the hallowed "rule of three" that distinguishes a meaningless "trend" from a meaningless coincidence.

As expected, Jody Hill's unconstrained black comedy "Observe and Report" has stirred controversy, in particular concerning a scene in which Seth Rogen's unstable mall cop character has sex with a woman played by Anna Faris who is semi-conscious and wasted. The scene, say the outraged critics, condones and encourages date rape, exploiting it for cheap laughs.

Having worked a few years as a security guard myself (and given the state of print journalism, might someday again; I can always put it on my resume), I can attest to the authenticity of Jody Hill's black comedy about the profession, "Observe and Report." So we already had a lot in common when we started our conversation (which was conducted before the Anna Faris date-rape scene became a media firestorm, although I did ask him about it).

Okay, now it's starting to get on my nerves. Not only has Ramin Bahrani been declared a founder of a new film movement by A.O. Scott and declared "the new great American director" by Roger Ebert, he just won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Why don't we just give him the Nobel Prize and be done with it? O the other hand, it probably couldn't happen to a nicer or more talented guy.

PK: You've said that if Buñuel was going to make "Los Olvidados" today he'd make it in Willets Point.

RB:Yeah.

PK: Is it three films you've made or four?

RB: "The Strangers" is a medium length film. It's like 60 some minutes, I think with the credits it's like 71. It was basically a thesis film. I was just finishing Columbia University and it was done in an Arts organization in Iran and it was kind of like I could go to Iran, live there and through this arts organization make a film.

It used to be that someone had to make a bunch of films over several decades to earn a career retrospective. Now three seems to do the trick. As noted earlier "Adventureland" director Greg Mattola just had one at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. Now Ramin Bahrani will be similarly celebrated this weekend when he appears at the Harvard Film Archive which will be screening his three features (there is a fourth called "Strangers" that won't be on the program, but that is on the short side) "Man Push Cart," "Chop Shop" and "Goodbye Solo."

This is a little last minute, but you should not miss the opportunity to meet and listen to Mira Nair, the director of such films as "Salaam Bombay," "Mississippi Masala," "Monsoon Wedding" and "The Namesake," to mention a few. Not only is she a fine filmmaker but she is also a knowledgeable, intelligent and witty speaker, as I have witnessed first hand.

As part of my job I’m supposed to spot patterns of themes, subjects, motifs and whatnot in movies and relate them to what’s going on in the culture at large. The Zeitgeist. The Big Picture. The rule of thumb is: two similar films is a coincidence, three is a trend. Needless to say a lot of these apparent trends go nowhere or mean nothing.

Is all of comedy destined to be variations on 80s classics like “Porky’s” and “Revenge of the Nerds?” Are they merely falling in the noble tradition of such coming of age classics as Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” and Fellini’s “I Vitelloni” but with vomit takes and fart jokes? Those are just a couple of questions I didn’t ask, and probably just as well.