There’s a meme going around that generations should now be divided by “Too old to know Homestar Runner/at the right age to know and love Homestar Runner/too young to know Homestar Runner.” Admittedly, this is rather prejudiced towards knowing Homestar Runner, but seeing as I do (and seriously Stwong Bad, he’s the bee’s knees!), I don’t find this a problem. In part, because I think anyone at any age can discover the sparkling majesty of…
Like many a cinemaniac, I watch a lot of movies and, much to the confusion of friends and family, I will watch movies that are not only clearly bad, but are not of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. Why do I do this to myself? Well, if it’s a version of the Robin Hood legend or Treasure Island (see also my post last week), then I gotta see how they treat the story. Some folklore and pop…
The algorithm fae have decided to gift me with the news that Every Frame a Painting is back… if only for a short while. Tricky fae. Starting about 10 years ago, and for tantalizingly too few episodes, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou crafted meticulous videos that remind one of why cinema is magical. The care in making the videos is, of course, why there are not a gazillion episodes, but that invigorating feeling is why…
One of the first tags I created here on the blog was “Future TV” which seemed to best sum up the various articles and such I was absorbing about what was sometimes called “Peak TV” and sometimes a new “Golden Age” of television. In hindsight, “the streaming wars” should have been coined as a nod to the far more fun “cola wars.” That’s because it became clear that Peak TV and the “wars” were over…
If I had a dollar for every time I heard or read about major studios being too risk averse, I could fund feature films to my heart’s content… or could I? Films cost a lot of money, which is why there aren’t 147 major studios and, as one indie filmmaker friend of mine is wont to say, money isn’t a thing, it’s the thing. So how did such a small non-studio become such a major…
I mean, the writing has been on the blog posts for some time now. I even had one back last year where far more professional prognosticators saw what the future would hold with streaming. Well, not only are the belts tightening on prestige TV series, streaming services are making sure you, the viewer, will pay more. Sigh.
So I’ve been meaning to do a few more posts about screenwriting and I realized I never followed up on “The 11 Laws of Showrunning by Javier Grillo-Marxuach” which I wrote about back in April… and which shows how the year is racing away from me. You see, I meant to follow up the next week with this interview with Javier Grillo-Marxuach where he talks about the 11 Laws, his books Shoot This One and…
I am in the evidently crowded camp of people wary of many a trailer because they reveal too much of the plot. However, I do still enjoy trailers that give you the feel of the film journey they want you to take: you have an idea of the characters, the genres, the tropes to be honored, the tropes to be subverted, and the overall tone. These days, the trailers that pull this off are usually…
I’ve been thinking of Monday’s post about Roger Corman and how B movies are chock full of tropes. Tropes for days! This reminded me of another Corman story where the movie poster was created before the film: it provided the inspiration for what the film would be. I forget the specifics. It might have been a giant dinosaur rampaging downtown a la Godzilla or even Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. A delightful creature feature trope to…
Roger Corman, the producer of close to 500 feature films and the director of over 50, has died at the age of 98. You can read obituaries and appreciations about his career from: A common theme amongst the pieces is not only how prodigious his filmography is, but how various films within it represent “the break” for a nontrivial amount of filmmakers from directors like Francis Ford Coppola to Martin Scorsese to James Cameron as…