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The Hobbit Crisis
The story of the fraught negotiations behind the The Hobbit could well turn out to be be more fascinating than the film itself: Over the past five weeks a dramatic series of events has played out in New Zealand in regard to the Hobbit production. Those events tell us interesting things about today’s global filmmaking […]
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Bale’s tantrum, and the sanctity of the creative process
So basically, Christian Bale is on the set of Terminator Salvation and goes absolutely ape-shit at DP Shane Hurlbut for distracting him during a scene. Such outbursts may not be uncommon for movie stars, but what marked this incident is that someone on the crew leaked the audio recording of the 4-minute long tantrum. Bale […]
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Cinema and Language and Shit
It’s ‘Film Thursday!’, and today’s entry pompously considers what makes a film ‘good’; and particularly how we might appraise it from a linguistic perspective. Is the quality of a film merely a matter of subjective taste, or are there characteristics of cinema which can reliably suggest its merits? I might not actually answer these questions, […]
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Ideas as ‘Art’
Ideas do not make good films, or good art period. As in, ‘wouldn’t be be clever if we did this?’ Things are never clever when they’re trying to be clever. (Which is a good measure of modern art, which baffles so many. When it’s relying on the higher brain to applaud it, it is likely […]