Tag: film
Oscars, Schmoscars: Why I’m Boycotting This Show on TV in 2015
I refuse to watch the Academy Awards next year. That’s right. I’m unofficially boycotting it. When it comes on TV, I’m gonna change the channel. Maybe watch Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). Or a cooking show. Just not the annual debacle that is the Oscars. Why am I so adamant? Well, I’ll tell ya.…
Little People with Large Talent: Cinema’s Under-Appreciated Performers
Little people, sometimes known as dwarfs and once derogatively referred to as ‘midgets’, did not always get a fair deal from the cinema industry. Generally portrayed as figures of fun, or cast as clowns, and sometimes relegated to sitting inside small machines to play robots, or strange alien creatures, their lot was not a happy…
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,…