Smart Words About Cinema
You could say that Flight is new territory for John Gatins. Before he finally got the film off the ground, a journey that took twelve years from his first draft to principle photography, he was a specialist in scripting such sport-centric stories as Hard Ball, Coach Carter, and Real Steel. It was an unexpected change [...]
David Ayer is something of a specialist when it comes to cop movies. And by that, I mean the day to day lives of cops on the beat, the kind of stories that tend to get overlooked in favor or big action movies or corruption thrillers. End of Watch, which adopts a found-footage aesthetic by [...]
Dennis Doros and Amy Heller created Milestone Films in 1990, a company dedicated to the restoration and rediscovery of forgotten and neglected films, be they classic or contemporary. They first brought Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Mabarosi (1995) and Takeshi Kitano’s Fireworks (1997) stateside and they distribute such silent landmarks as South (1920), Beyond the Rocks (1922), and [...]
Dennis Doros and Amy Heller, partners in business and marriage, launched Milestone Films in 1990. They made a reputation for the company not merely for its restorations and revivals, but for rescuing and nurturing films that might otherwise have been drowned in the noise of the busy movie landscape, from Mikhail Kalatozov’s all but orphaned [...]
Joe Dante graduated from the Roger Corman School of Practical Filmmaking, honing his craft on drive-in movies like Hollywood Boulevard (1976) and Piranha (1978) before graduating to such pop-culture genre riffs as Gremlins (1984) and Small Soldiers (1998), not to mention Gremlins 2 (1990), one of the funniest movies of its generation. All of those films are largely defined by [...]
Drew Goddard goes way back with Joss Whedon. He got his start writing episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, his launching pad to Alias and Lost and his first feature film screenplay, Cloverfield (produced by Lost creator J.J. Abrams). The Cabin in the Woods reunited Goddard with Whedon, who co-wrote and produced the [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976] Alain Tanner, now 45, served a long apprenticeship before he was able to make his first feature film six years ago. Before he could become a Swiss filmmaker it was necessary to invent Swiss film. There had been some activity in the German-speaking part of the country [...]
Matthew Modine has been making movies for thirty years. After making his big screen debut in a small role in John Sayles’ Baby It’s You, he quickly became one of the most in-demand young actors of his generation, with major roles in Robert Altman’s Streamers, Alan Parker’s Birdie, and Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs. Soffel, before landing [...]
Andrew Sarris came to Seattle for a talk on the night of March 12, 1987. My friend Tom Keogh and I had recently founded a non-profit organization dedicated to showing movie repertory, the Seattle Filmhouse, at just exactly the wrong moment to found such a thing. But before that enterprise fell apart, we managed to [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 49, April 1976] Richard Lester is sitting in the study of his house in Surrey “looking out over a garden filled with rain and daffodils.” He was raised in Philadelphia but he has spent nearly half of his 42 years in England and he has no particular wish to return [...]
Despite the elemental grandeur of its setting and the irony of its title, The Loneliest Planet (2011) hinges neither on the cruelty of nature nor of civilization, but on the betrayals endemic to interpersonal relationships. A deceptively minimal and decidedly haunted pastoral tour that follows a couple of affianced Americans trekking through the rugged beauty of Georgia’s [...]
By her own admission, Susan Sarandon considers herself a character actor. She’s interested in being challenged by roles, in playing different characters, and in the messages of her films. After a career spanning over forty years, five Oscar nominations, and a Best Actress Oscar for “Dead Man Walking,” it’s still a challenge to find those [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976] Sam Fuller: “You can always tell about a leaper by the distance his toes are from the edge of either the window or the ledge of the roof he’s threatening to jump from. If you’re covering it, watch those toes. If they stick out, he’s not a [...]
Ron Ely seem to be enjoying his retirement. Most famous for playing Tarzan in the first TV incarnation of the story, he also played another great pulp hero, Doc Savage, in a 1975 movie, starred in a short-lived revival of the TV series “Sea Hunt” and even took over hosting duties for The Miss American [...]
Chinatown is an American masterpiece, a great film released in a year full of great films. It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, but in the face of “The Godfather Part II” (among others), it won only a single Oscar: Best Original Screenplay by Robert Towne. It is a magnificent original script, a great American novel [...]