Iranian and Austria 2006, 107 min. dir: Bahman Ghobadi, cast: Ismail Ghaffari, Hedieh Tehrani) A hand-me-down school bus, a collection of battered musical instruments and the men who can play them travel the desolate border region of Iran and Kurdistan to play a gig. Where do filmmakers like Ghobadi get their ideas? Sometimes I think the roots of narrative storytelling came down from the high mountain valleys of Turkistan and wove themselves like coats around the ethnology of the mountain people and the magical realism that serves as a warm comfort in the freezing air.

Everyone in this film, except the girl, looks like an unshaven bandit. And yet they are musicians whose only goal is finding a way to run the closed border and earn a couple of coins for a night’s work (the girl is the singer, their most prized instrument).

There is a very old (and very good) Soviet era film called “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” (1964) that is also set in a limbo world of dusty mountains and snowy valleys that is the nether region of our minds. The soul of both these movies is the notion of stripping away everything from human experience but the humanity. That last is the source of pathos, humor, honesty and attempted deception in Half Moon.

Why doesn’t somebody make a film like this traveling across Utah? Could be interesting to see the band trying to cross through Orem for a gig down in Provo. What magic is waiting to be found in that bleakness? What emotional similarities? I’d sure watch it.

Can Hollywood go back to the future and reclaim streaming and digital copying of movies? This week they’ll give us all what we haven’t been waiting for. January brings snow and cold as surely as it brings the Consumer Electronics Show back to Las Vegas. This annual gadget fest has become very important because there is usually so little to write about in the recovery week after New Year’s Eve.

A gaggle of Hollywood Studios along with Comcast, Best Buy, and the usual suspects is about to tell us they have a better way for us to watch movies. D.E.C.E. (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem) will let us buy movies and see them on any approved device (yet to be defined) that we like. Amazon already does some of this with DVD+ and Netflix does it with Watch Instantly. But DECE is intended to do it with everything. The theory is that if you give people the choice of how to watch, they will stop pirating movies on the internet and start paying for them. With DECE, you only need to pay once and then you can stream to TV, computer, netbook, smartphone and any future device still unknown in the universe.

DECE is supposed to be an answer to both piracy and price point. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) estimates that between 50 and 80 percent of internet content is illegal. (Bernstein Research calls the size of this estimate “an urban legend”).

The bigger problem is price point. Hollywood complains that iTunes has a monopoly to set prices. This is unfair. Hollywood has a monopoly to set movie ticket prices and DVD prices. This is fair. We’re told the business needs price competition. By this they mean themselves (DECE), but nobody else. When I was producing, I was found of referring to a dusted up old concept as “an idea whose time has came.” DECE may be just that. Perhaps I’m rushing to judgment. Like an executive hearing a pitch, I like to say, “surprise me.”

Meanwhile, at MovieWithMe.com we keep chugging along on our own; searching to bring you the best suggestions for what to watch on any machine you like. Regardless of the delivery system, the story is still all that matters.