I find it kind of serendipitous that the release of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” takes place in the midst of the growing controversy about the Jena Six. As you probably know, several thousand people have marched in that small Louisiana town protesting the draconian punishments meted out to African-American high school students goaded by racial harassment (including a noose hung from a tree) into assaulting a white classmate.

As the media gratefully takes a pass on Iraq, the election or anything else of depressing substance for the golden opportunity for endless inanity presented by the new OJ case, the success of the upcoming spate of War on Terror related movies seems in doubt. After all, don’t people go to the movies to escape the troubles of the world rather than be confronted with them? And when the news itself doesn’t even want to think of all that bad stuff, what chance does “In The Valley of Elah” (which I think is a crock, but that’s not my point) have against, say, “Good Luck Chuck?”

Wrapping up the Cronenberg interview, a few notes on synchronicity, Soviet motorcycles, nepotism, Martin Amis and some gratuitous references to Russian literature.

PK: Have you had that happen before in other films, where the theme or some other elements of the film suddenly became reflected in real life.

With two studio films in a row, is Cronenberg selling out? It’s not the kind of question you want to ask even when he’s three hundred miles away on the phone. Note above how I failed to follow up on asking him whether his films have influenced the trend of the “Saws” and “Hostels” (chances are, however, that his answer would be “no.

Terror can be good for you, or so might argue David Cronenberg. He should know, having made some of the most terrifying films of the last thirty years or so, such as “Shivers/They Came From Within” (1975), “Rabid” (1977) , “Scanners” (1981), “Videodrome” (1983), "The Fly"(1986), "eXistenZ" (1999). He’s moonlighted lately in the gangster genre with his last two films, "A History of Violence "(2005) and "Eastern Promises," in the gangster genre (though Cronenberg has said the former is more of a Western).

As we continue our conversation, Mr. Gordon ponders the relationship between gaming and filming, how Secessionist Austrian art can help shape a film about Donkey Kong, the value of teaching as a profession and the sad fate of Mr. Awesome.

Q. There have been a lot of changes in the Mitchell/Wiebe situation since movie ended.

Labor Day brings up reflections on how the American Dream, the myth that hard work and talent will result in success, is often undermined by treachery, deceit, entitlement and greed. I haven’t seen many films that have probed that dichotomy as entertainingly as Seth Gordon’s “King of Kong,” which follows the heated quest of Steve Wiebe, an unemployed man of the people with extraordinary but otherwise apparently not very marketable gifts, to wrest the title of Donkey Kong champion from insufferable hot sauce entrepreneur, Billy Mitchell.