Someone is not enamored of Natalie Portman.
Mr. Sun conceives a strategy for Gilligan to wed Mary Ann: spread rumors that the Professor is Gay.
Tastefully presented list of most interesting urinals in the world.
Corey Pein on the Memogate scandal: Guess what– the memo might actually be real!
Red flags wave here, or should have. Newcomer begins with the presumption that the documents are forgeries, and as evidence submits that he can create a very similar document on his computer. This proves nothing ? you could make a replica of almost any document using Word. Yet Newcomer?s aggressive conclusion is based on this logical error.
ADAM LEIPZIG on getting film distribution:
Every month, in fact, between 20 and 50 spec scripts and pitches are sold. (In 2004, according to The Hollywood Reporter, 298 new projects were sold: 98 were spec scripts, 87 came from literary material, 70 were pitches, 16 were remakes, 10 were comic books, 6 were true-life stories, 4 came from video games, 2 each derived from television shows and magazine articles, and 1 was from an action figure.)…
Or to put it another way: there are about a dozen development executives at Sony, each of whom is assigned to about 20 to 30 projects. Yet there were only three produced projects that weren’t remakes, sequels, purchased from or paid for by another producer, or derived from novels, comic books or video games. So, these dozen executives are competing with each other to get three original movies made, which means each executive has only a 1-in-4 chance of getting the green light for an original script, most of which will have come from veteran writers with impressive credits.
My comment: This is really besides the point. Big studios by definition can’t run with a lot of film ideas. Little projects on shoestring budget can be produced and distributed online; that is their competitive advantage. I’m working on two film projects which will go STW (straight to web). The first film will run 10,000-15000 dollars; the second one should go under 20,000$
We have 2 different criterias for success (actually 3). One, can the project make money (and can you receive funding in advance). Two, can the film/video be a great film. There is no question a cheaply-produced vid can look and be great. It’s another question whether your vid project can get funding. If you had to choice between working on a commercial successful but mediocre vid project and a groundbreaking vid (with no promise of commercial success), which project would you work on?
Ozu has been misperceived in many ways. Even a film lover as knowledgeable as the late Susan Sontag — who had a passion for Japanese cinema and once compared Ozu to Jane Austen — could write in 1995 that “the great Japanese directors (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Naruse, Oshima, Imamura) have tended not to be cinephiles.” This is clearly wrong in Ozu’s case. According to David Bordwell’s 1988 Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, by far the most comprehensive book about Ozu in English, he “was almost certainly the most cinephiliac major director before the New Wave.” Ozu’s journals — which I also know only from the French edition, an 800-page monolith titled Carnets 1933-1963, published the year after Sontag’s essay — contain a record of the numerous films he saw on a regular basis, many of them Hollywood classics. (His all-time favorite was Citizen Kane.) His silent films often show the influence of his favorite directors, including Fritz Lang (That Night’s Wife), Josef von Sternberg (That Night’s Wife, Dragnet Girl), and King Vidor (Tokyo Chorus, Passing Fancy).
Another potential obstacle to grasping Ozu’s work is the relevance of Zen Buddhism to his films, a question raised mainly by the only thing written on his gravestone: the Japanese character “mu,” which means “nothing.” Ozu disparaged the tendency of foreign critics to overemphasize such matters when he said, “They don’t understand — that’s why they say it is Zen or something like that.” I wouldn’t want to claim that his religious beliefs are irrelevant to his work, especially given his profound acceptance of and affection for people as they are. But critics have often concentrated on what’s absent or implied in Ozu’s films instead of what’s visible and audible, then produced a fair amount of mumbo jumbo about it — as they have with Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, and even a certifiable mystic such as Andrei Tarkovsky. As Hasumi points out, despite the seasonal references in the confusingly similar titles of many of Ozu’s later films — Late Spring, Early Summer, Early Spring, Equinox Flower, Late Autumn, The End of Summer, An Autumn Afternoon — the films themselves ignore seasonal changes and lack a seasonal context. Hasumi writes, in what I think is the most important sentence in his book, “Ozu’s talent lies in choosing an image that can function poetically at a particular moment by being assimilated into the film, not by affixing to the film the image of an object that is considered poetic in a domain outside the film.”
Seymour Hersch on the Bush Administration’s military preparations: we’re looking into striking Iran.
Over the weekend, I bought more books, finished Lem’s Fiasco, watched the excellent “In the Mood for Love,” slept, slept, slept and generally did not accomplish anything.
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