“We expected the Marvel films, Star Wars, and the super company’s many animated classics. But peppered in between the stalwarts were countless Disney Vault oddities: implausible animal farces, strange Christmas movies, far more Herbie sequels than we remembered, and something called Fuzzbucket.” Read the full article at Vulture
"The Amusement Park is the scariest film Romero ever made — an unsentimental, unbridled, bleak-o-rama reminder that, past a certain age, we may all be discarded, unless we have excess cash. It doesn’t need such Romero frights as zombies or vampires or poison gas or sinister helper monkeys or murderous alter egos to scare the Dickens out of us; it just needs the cold, hard truth about the worst case scenario that may befall any of us.” Complete review over at Consequence of Sound
“I think film as a medium is growing. It’s become so democratized by how many new outlets of distribution there are, and how many new eyes there are on content every single day. Democratization is a good thing. It allows the space for more nuanced, non-commercial stories to be taken seriously and to have a marketplace.” Full interview here with a filmmaker who completed the movie in question when he was still in high school.
“I really like that in an age when we’re all trying to figure out how to make movies that will be liked — by the people who buy them, the people who distribute them — that there are still people who can’t actually think that way ... If I can make their movie happen, then I’ve achieved what I want to achieve in my career.” Full interview here.
“I am terrified of going blind and I’m doing everything that I can to maintain the vision that I have ... It’s not something I am slowly resigning myself to. I find it enraging, and being in this liminal space between the fully-sighted and the fully blind is a very emotionally fraught place to be.” Full interview here.
“Movies are the most expensive art form; even ones they call ‘no-budget’ aren’t. You need to learn about business eventually, and in today’s world, even independent filmmakers need to understand terms like ‘transferable rebates,’ ‘soft money’ and ‘100 percent deductibility.’” Full article here.
“I never think about an audience, whether it’s the people who are in the place or the people in a movie theater. I don’t know how to predict their reactions, and I think anybody who says they do is bullshitting you.“ Full interview with one of the masters of non-fiction cinema here.
“Throughout D’Souza does what he always does: he drops a bombshell, then before you’ve had a chance to recover, he hits you with another, over and over and over, for nearly two hours. It’s a downright Trumpian move: exhaust your enemies (and your supporters) through the sheer volume of your nonsense.” Looked back at the prolific work of the right’s slimiest and most prolific creep for The Guardian, but couldn’t even squeeze in, e.g., the time he made fun of the Parkland teens.
The series co-creator/”showrunner” talks test screenings, those low Blumhouse budgets and how to make a movie set in D.C. that features people with guns running around the streets (spoiler: you shoot somewhere else). Interview right here.
It was “only” my third time speaking to one of my favorite working filmmakers, this time about my favorite of his movies. This one, for Filmmaker, gets into the nitty-gritty about music rights issues, its absence from U.S. screens for a quarter of a century and the TV movie series that birthed it. We also nerded out over Roxy Music.
This is a crazily ambitious piece that floated a theory I haven’t really read anywhere else (and might honestly be a touch on the arguable side): We can thank TV horror movie hosts like Vampira and Elvira (and later Gilbert Gottfried!) for the current bad movie craze.
Last fall, I spent a week sitting in on the panels for IFP Week, the annual roundelay for up-and-coming indie filmmakers. That included writing down the sage/funny things said by Barry Jenkins, Dee Rees, Sean Baker, the Safdie Bros. and many others that are probably most conveniently found by scrolling through my Filmmaker Mag bio.
More Halloween duties, this time rounding up streaming Asian horror — and not just the ever popular Southeast Asian fare that eats up Midnight Movie slots. Those too, but also Gareth Evans’ Indonesia-set segment of V/H/S 2, the Indian Raaz films and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
