Screen Scene
A filmmaker thinks about the movies. In the dark.
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Cine-meh: Small-screen Blues
TV is not really TV anymore. It’s more like a video jukebox fed by the internet. It’s also one of the few remaining platforms on the internet that we can talk back to and only annoy the person next to us. Anything else shared online could get us digitally dogpiled, so do what my dad…
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True Stories: Weekly World News Starts Studio
As the saying goes, “If you remember the ’90s, you were there and bored.” That’s unless you were a reader of an inky supermarket tabloid that boasted headlines about the fabled “Bat Boy” and other “journalistic” meshugas that instantly turned your coffee table into a Ripley’s Believe it, Or Not exhibit. Well, believe it or not—it’s back: The Weekly World…
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How to Write Your Pandemic Movie
Fresh from my gig as the editor of the North Bay Bohemian, here’s a bit from my Press Pass column for screenwriters and those who love them. Why wait for the inevitable pandemic movie deluge when you can script your very own COVID-19 horror film right now? Every filmmaker worth a roll of gaffer’s tape…
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Cinema Purgatorio: When Should Movie Theaters Reopen? Maybe Never.
Netflix fatigue. It’s practically a pandemic itself. The remedy? A shot of real-life cinema — square in the eye — coming soon to a theater near you. Someday. Maybe. As part of Trump’s plan to reopen post-coronavirus America, cinemas will be among the first businesses to in the queue — at least according to this…
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Mile Davis: Birth of the Cool at a Screen Near You
Few artists in the pantheon of contemporary music have shaped the American soundscape as much as Miles Davis. Coming to theaters in time for the anniversary of the jazz trumpeter and composer’s death 28-years ago this September is documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson’s much-anticipated Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool. Borrowing its name from Davis’ groundbreaking…
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Trump Tweets Lead Universal to Shelve ‘The Hunt’
President Donald Trump, long known for his sensitivity to social satire and nuanced political commentary, recently decried the release of Universal Pictures’ dark comedy The Hunt and now the studio has shelved the picture. A sort of redux of The Most Dangerous Game but with liberal elites apparently hunting MAGA-types for sport, the President accused…
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Movies and Magic and Mustaches
When we were in production on Pill Head, I ran to the local deli to pick up sandwiches because, this being a nano-budget indie, it was sandwiches for dinner personally delivered by yours truly, the director. Fresh from the set, I must have entered the deli aisle with an added flourish — after all, I…
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Happy 100, Pauline Kael
Today marks the centenary of film critic Pauline Kael’s birth. Beside recreating film criticism in her New Yorker column and giving shape to our conversations of cinema — particularly that of America in the 70s (if not launching the careers of more than a few directors), Kael was a product of my hometown. “She had discovered…
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Art House Films for the Compleat Idiot
Before we discuss art house films, we must take a stroll: Long before the “Dummies” guides, there was How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual Of Step By Step Procedures For the Compleat Idiot. For a time in the early 80s, our family vehicle was a Volkswagen microbus and my father kept an edition of…