February 2012
5 posts
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Writing for Television and Web.
For the past few years I’ve been chipping away at writing a pilot for a one-hour scripted television drama. Ever since I first saw The West Wing many many years ago, I’d been wanting to write for television, as it embraced dialogue and character. It also provided a writer the opportunity to develop said characters over many episodes, as well as several narrative threads. Film - at...
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WTF, Puppy Bowl?!
Super Bowl Sunday used to be about football. And when it stopped being about football and more about promotion of products, then it became about the Puppy Bowl. Ah yes, the Puppy Bowl. That last bastion of sport that hadn’t been sucked down by the undertow of corporate greed. No longer did I have to endure giant men wearing pink Susan G. Komen gloves and cleats and pretending that they care...
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Bringing back the DVD.
I’m planning the mastering for the Lilith DVD, and I’m hell-bent on packing as many special features that I can onto the disc. From a business standpoint, I want to make sure that I’m delivering bang-for-buck. DVDs aren’t cheap, and as a consumer I often feel ripped-off when all I get is the movie and and the trailer for the film (along with trailers for other movies). I...
January 2012
7 posts
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“Boredom is the wish for a hobby. I love looking at things and going, I can do...”
– Ricky Gervais
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The Santorum Files: Hypocrisy and Moral Decency....
WARNING: This post contains pornographic images. Please forward them to Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich’s offices.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was going to do an in-depth post on the hypocrisy of the GOP and the religious right, an idea that stemmed from my viewing of the GOP primary debates. In the time since then, the situation has not improved. Sure, Rick Perry dropped out of the...
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Kindred Spirit: Ti West and 'Slow Burn' movies.
During early pre-production on Lilith, I remember watching Ti West’s indie horror film House of the Devil and being completely enamored with it. It was a film that spoke to me in terms of aesthetics, a commitment to technical precision, and most importantly, it understood that great horror requires context and characterization, something which needs time to develop in the pacing and edit....
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I need your help...
…with identifying this piece of music. I want to use it in my Paul Pope script but I have no idea what it is. I’ve watched it over and over (which isn’t hard, given the subject matter), Shazam’d it, and asked a bunch of my colleagues, and we’ve come up with squat. In the recesses of my brain, I think I heard it in an old French film, something with Alain Delon,...
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Back Home.
Got off the plane to a cold, frozen Chicago late last night, but it’s wonderful to be home. India was a whirlwind, as we went to six different cities in 18 days. It’ll be nice to be stationed in one place for the near future.
Lilith premiered at the Festivus Film Festival, and from the initial reports it was a success, despite an attendance hit due to the Broncos playoff game....
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The World Premiere of Lilith...
…is only eight days away!
Both Julia Voth and Nancy Telzerow, who plays Flora, Julia’s mom, in the film (it’s an absolutely brilliant and batshit-crazy performance) will be at the screening for the Q&A. For my readers in the Denver area, make sure to head over to the Festivus Film Festival ticketing website to find your tickets, which are selling out fast!
She’s...
December 2011
10 posts
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15 Things I Liked in 2011, Part 2.
Landed in India yesterday and already hit the ground running, it’s going to be a hectic three weeks ahead of me. While on the plane I finished scripting my short film, and am in the process of locking down two locations. I’m going to try my level best to keep everyone in the loop on the short, which is titled A Brief History of Love, but as I’m operating out of a mobile office, updating might be a...
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15 Things I Liked in 2011, Part 1.
I don’t feel like I partook in much in 2011. We didn’t go out to eat as much, in large part that I spent almost all of my free money on finishing Lilith. Movies were few and far between. Even my reading slowed down quite a bit due to my writing and work schedule. But, like last year, there were definitely some highlights.
15) Psycho Bunny. About two years ago I put a moratorium on...
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A new short, and Festivus news!
So I’m off to India next week, and in a bout of midnight inspiration, I’ve decided to shoot a short film whilst there. Two days, two actors, a vague concept, and a ton of improvisation.
My forays into particle physics and mathematics have inspired a short story about what it takes to leave our galaxy. There’s a huge spiritual component to it, as the energy required to transport...
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My Top 10 Greatest Short Films.
Let listmania continue on! It occurred to me that in my posts regarding my Top 30 Greatest Films (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) I had promised to put together a list of my top short films. Since there are so many, I’ve truncated it down to ten films.
I had written some time ago on the importance of short films, and why we need to continue making them. It is without a doubt that the short film...
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11 Best Films of 2011, Part 2.
Continuing from yesterday, here are the top five films of 2011. I’d previously written extensive reviews for three of them on this blog before, and have provided links accordingly.
5) Senna, Asif Kapadia, United Kingdom.
Senna is one of those rare films where everyone - regardless of income, beliefs or politics, will find something poignant to relate to. Seems odd that a documentary...
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11 Best Films of 2011, Part 1.
A disclosure: I still haven’t seen Steve McQueen’s Shame, Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, Michel Hazanavicius’ critically-acclaimed silent film The Artist, or Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation. Given my upcoming travel schedule, there will be a high liklihood that I won’t be able to get around to them before the New Year. I’ve also not much desire to see...
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Notebooks.
I’ve been doing a ton of research for my current screenplay (my Paul Pope graphic novel adaptation), and this entails collecting thousands of articles, photographs, art pieces, books and even pieces of clothing. I’m very serious about my research - for Lilith I accumulated almost nine thousand separate pieces of references, of which by the time production rolled around I actually used...
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Rethinking Video on Demand.
Talks are continuing on how to properly distribute Lilith, and the inevitable discussion of streaming, Video on Demand and iTunes has come up.
I guess I’m a product of my generation. It used to be a joke when a film went “straight to video” or was “made for tv.” It was a slogan of a film’s failure, that it didn’t get the royal treatment of a theatrical...
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Music for the Weekend: Major Tom by Peter...
November 2011
12 posts
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Catch Lili Reinhart on 'Law & Order: SVU' tonight!
Lili Reinhart, who plays the title character in Lilith, will be making her prime time debut on tonight’s Law & Order: SVU. Lili’s had quite a year, starring in four feature films - Gibsonburg, a true story about an underdog baseball team that defies the odds to win a state championship, Not Waving But Drowning, a coming-of-age drama that has been tipped as a strong contender for...
neighborhoodthreat asked: I'd just like to say, as both a follower of your blog and projects as well as an aspiring filmmaker, that your thoughts, criticisms, breakdowns, reviews, and so on, have been really helpful and ultimately very enlightening. You've got a great perspective as both a creator and consumer, and while sometimes our tastes differ, your open-mindedness towards cinema and it's place in art...
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“Feelings of worth can flourish only in an atmosphere where individual...”
– Virginia Satir
This is why art is my home, and vice versa.
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5-star Review: Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part...
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS FLOWERY LANGUAGE. And also spoilers. Like I give a flying fuck. The movie’s made a bazillion dollars. You’ve been warned.
Let’s get this out in the open. From the very first Twilight movie, when the marketing teams posited the choice of allegiance, I took Team Jacob. I find werewolves to be the much cooler iteration, as there are tribal overtones and...
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Science and the Screenwriter.
I was gobsmacked when a few days ago I looked at the front page of the BBC News website and saw that a story about Twilight: Breaking Dawn had taken greater precedence over the recent findings from the CERN Labs that a neutrino had been recorded to have traveled faster than the speed of light. Just process that for a second: faster than the speed of light. This means that our fundamentals of...
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This brings a tear to my eye every time.
The power of cinema, the genius of Chaplin, the depths of the human heart. Simply beautiful.
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Hot Topic: Branding.
I’ve been living on the road and in airports for the past few weeks, and I’ll be honest - I love hanging out in airports. Great people watching, and there’s this level of anonymity that makes people behave in strange ways. There’s a lot of mystery - is that person the CEO of a billion dollar company? Is that woman a model? Does that guy eat four chili cheese dogs and read...
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My Top 30 Greatest Movies, Part 3.
Continuing from Part 1 and Part 2, here’s the final ten films in My Top 30 Greatest Films. I’ve made a particular omission in these lists, in that I’ve not added any short films, as these are only feature length films. I might make another list for shorts, as there are many that I love and that have played an important part of my film appreciation and education.
And now, the...
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My Top 30 Greatest Movies, Part 2.
Continued from the last post, here are entries 20-11 for my greatest films. Only one of you has challenged my choices thus far - c’mon now, I can’t be that spot on, right? BTW to answer the challenge, I chose Enter the Dragon knowing it is a bad movie, but it’s all about the presence of Bruce Lee. In a rare admission, it is a love letter to a true blue movie star, and I’m...
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My Top 30 Greatest Movies, Part 1.
I took some time to read my old posts in this blog, and it occurred to me that while I reference a ton of my favorite films, I’ve never given you a definitive list of films that make up my personal canon of what I consider the greatest films. So in a three-part series, I’ll break down what I consider to be the greatest films in my personal experience. It’s all subjective, of...
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October 2011
11 posts
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AFM - American Film Market.
So these past few weeks have been spent preparing for the American Film Market, or AFM. It’s been a long, twisty journey for Lilith thus far, as we’d been accepted to a few festivals but were advised to preserve our world premiere status for future opportunities. And now we’ve come to the market.
There are two primary markets for film - the Marché du Film at Cannes (which is...
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The Week Before Halloween: 7 Weird, Wonderful...
Halloween is the best holiday of the year. Hands down. It’s the time when it gets chilly out (and for almost a decade in Denver it was the first major snowfall), our thoughts turn to the macabre and we get to live outside of our skin. On what other holiday can we do that?
It’s also the time for weird movies, and here are seven of my favorite lesser-known films to watch, one every...
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Hot Topic: Why Occupy Wall Street Matters.
On my last day in NYC after Comic-Con, I made a trip down to Wall Street to see what all the hubbub over the Occupy Wall Street movement was all about. It was a bit overwhelming at first, seeing a throng of thousands sitting in peaceful demonstration. The news media had one aspect right, which was that there are indeed a fair share of trustafarians, snarky unemployed hipsters, and waaay too many...
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Sorry for the lack of posts recently...
Been doing a lot of moving and shaking these past ten days. Back soon!
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“The so-called “digital” is not a mere technical medium, but a medium...”
– Jean-Luc Godard on the classification of film formats. Taken from an excellent article on the nature of celluloid filmmaking.
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Marketing 'Moneyball'
Last week I saw Bennett Miller’s Moneyball starring Brad Pitt. But of course you already knew that it was starring Brad Pitt because if you saw the trailers or commercials, then he’s all you’d see. Him and maybe a smattering of pre-weight loss Jonah Hill.
If you’ve already seen the movie, then the trailer makes absolute sense and is extremely compelling. But if you...
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Prashant Bhargava and Patang (The Kite).
Prashant Bhargava’s Patang (The Kite) has had a marvelous festival run thus far, playing at Berlin, Tribeca, Vancouver, Monterrey, and a host of other major film festivals. It has been warmly recieved by all, including a wonderful review from Roger Ebert:
“[PATANG is] one of this year’s best sleepers, directed by Chicagoan Prashant Bhargava. An affluent Delhi businessman...
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Hot Topic: Remakes, Reimaginings and Sequels - Are...
I’m completely baffled by The Smurfs. At last check, the movie has grossed $519 million worldwide, with another glut of income anticipated from cable, DVD and VOD sales. In total I’d estimate a total gross of around $700 million for the film, making a net of around $220 million. That’s damn good business.
And yet it’s not a good movie, rather it’s cashing in on the...
September 2011
12 posts
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Music for the Weekend: All Fires by Swan Lake.
...
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New York Comic-Con.
So I can’t reveal too many details, but I’m going to be a special guest on a panel at this year’s New York Comic-Con, where we’ll officially be announcing my next project.
This has been almost two years in the making, and I’ve been burning the midnight oil on completing the first draft of the film’s screenplay. Between researching and writing for the...
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cryptocleveland asked: Alright, so if some distributor offered to buy Lilith but they wanted to change the title and reedit the film with Nicolas Cage possessing Sarah in kinda a reverse John Malkovich sorta deal, would you go for it?
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Art: Our Missing Rage, Nirvana at 20, and the New...
iconAclass - Long Haul Official Video from deadverse recordings.
“I carried my world on these shoulders like Atlas.” - Will Brooks, aka MC dälek, aka iconAclass.
I was a fan of dälek long, long before they worked on Lilith, and our collaboration was something of a wish fulfillment for me, as I got to work with a band that truly inspired me and fueled my inner passions. dälek is...
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On Directing: Why Stanley Kubrick was Always...
Stanley Kubrick was a legendary perfectionist, a filmmaker who left no detail to the wayside and who insisted on dozens, sometimes hundreds of takes per shot. Many actors speak of disdain of Kubrick’s method whilst simultaneously praising his genius, most notably Kirk Douglas, star of Kubrick’s Paths of Glory and Spartacus, calling Kubrick “a talented shit.” Kubrick’s...