Category: Articles
A Lesson in Film Structure: The Jolson Story & Humoresque
This is a story about film structure. At various times, I have tried to lecture on the subject of structure in screenwriting, and I usually am forced to admit that we teach structure, in part, because it is something that can be taught. There’s some sort of indefinable spark of creation in any work of…
Twilight Cinema: Three Recent Films About Ageing
Twenty-five years ago, Christopher Guest made a lovely little movie called The Big Picture. It is a mostly gentle satire about Hollywood, which features Kevin Bacon as a young film school graduate who has come out west to make his fortune. The movie he wants to make – the one that the whole industry is…
Novel Choices: 4 Classic Books That Should Be Made Into Movies
Sometimes I wonder if the movie industry has a small box containing only 10 or so classic novels, from which they draw periodically to craft prestige pictures. Case in point: Come 2015, we’ll be getting a new version of the Thomas Hardy classic Far from the Madding Crowd … despite the fact that an excellent,…
The 100 Greatest Australian Films of All Time: Part 3 (1982-1995)
In Part 3 of our five part series on the 100 greatest Australian films of all time, we take a look at the tail end of the Australian New Wave and the birth of a new era of internationally successful film production in the 1990s. If the movies of the 70s and 80s revealed the…
The 100 Greatest Australian Films of All Time: Part 2 (1971-1982)
Well here it is, Part 2 of our five part series on the 100 greatest Australian films of all time. While Part 1 focused on the earliest beginnings of the nation’s cinema through to the end of the 1960s, here we’ll be exploring the birth of the Australian New Wave in the 1970s. This was…