MAJESTIC MICRO MOVIES ESSAY ON CINEMA #1
Kendra Elliott and the three Js take a superficial look at deep focus . . .
Kendra Elliott and the three Js take a superficial look at deep focus . . .
Jae Song’s Majestic Micro Movie essays on cinema won a special award at the Worldfest Houston — as a collaborator, I got a citation. Cool. You can see the essays here: Deep Focus Shallow Focus TrackingChamps Contre Champs
In Douglas Sirk’s movies the women think. I haven’t noticed that with any other director. With any. Usually the women just react, do the things women usually do, and here they actually think. That’s something you’ve got to see. It’s … Continue reading
Story meetings. Teacher and cultural critic Dave Hickey (above, looking like the Benjamin Franklin of the 21st Century) explains what's wrong with them: “My one rule is that I do not do group crits. They are social occasions that reinforce … Continue reading
About six years ago, my friend Jae Song, a filmmaker, told me, in abject astonishment, that with the new HD cameras just coming on the market it was possible to fit the camera and lighting package for a feature film … Continue reading
When new technologies appear, the instinct is to try and figure out ways to make them the vessels for existing content. But new technologies usually need a new kind of content — or old content wholly re-imagined. When it became … Continue reading
Here's Cory Doctorow, of Boing Boing, on the future of movies, from a recent article at the Internet Evolution web site — an article which deals with the future of traditional media in general:The specific, rarefied animal that is the … Continue reading
An industry that seems to have concluded that its best hope is to dramatize the comic-strip literature of an earlier and more vigorous era is one whose fevers have finally destroyed its nerve. With rare exceptions the pictures coming out … Continue reading
At the end of his life, Leo Tolstoy saw a moving picture show, and wrote this about the new medium: “It is a direct attack on the old methods of literary art. We writers shall have to adapt ourselves to … Continue reading
March 22nd, 1950 — February 19th, 2015 Lloyd Fonvielle, a writer whose prolific career encompassed erudite essays on photography, screenplays for Hollywood and freewheeling short stories about the American West, died on Feb. 19, 2015 at his apartment in Las … Continue reading
Popeye the sailor man first appeared as a secondary character ten years into the run of E. C. Segar’s comic strip Thimble Theatre, which offered up parodies of dumb Hollywood movies. Almost instantly, however, he took over the strip. Violent, … Continue reading
Many people consider this series the pinnacle of comic strip art, and it’s hard to argue with the proposition. George Herriman had a distinctive and brilliant visual style — the lines of his drawings are alive with an electric energy … Continue reading
D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, from 1916 is — not to put too fine a point on it — the greatest movie ever made, maybe the greatest movie that ever will be made. Pauline Kael summed up the film eloquently and … Continue reading
. . . on Front Street in Wilmington, North Carolina, across from my grandfather’s men’s clothing store. I saw movies here in my youth — now it’s a parking lot. My grandfather’s men’s clothing store is now a brew pub, … Continue reading
Lumina, a dance hall by the sea, was still around when I was growing up. It had become a roller rink. In my mom’s youth it had hosted big name dance bands. Folks from Wilmington, about 10 miles inland, would … Continue reading