Steph Green Living on the Short Circuit by Jay S. Jacobs It’s not like film directors just appear working feature films with no prior experience. Most great directors have gotten their feet wet working on short films: including Steven Spielberg (“Amblin’”), Martin Scorsese (“What’s A Nice Girl Like You Doing In A Place Like This?”), … Continue reading
Tom Cruise and Bryan Singer With Valkyrie, They Illustrate That Slide Down the Slippery Slope to Fascism by Brad Balfour Though he totally missed the Oscar loop, you have to give some credit to media magnet Tom Cruise for releasing his World War II drama, Valkyrie at the end of 2008 despite the surge of … Continue reading
matt nix burn notice after reading by jay s. jacobs It takes skills to reinvigorate a tried-and-true genre like the spy story, however with his fast and funny hit series Burn Notice, Matt Nix is doing what he can to throw the style a changeup. Nix created and still runs the popular USA Network drama, about a former spy … Continue reading
Director John Walter Talkin’ About a Theater of War and Meryl Streep by Brad Balfour While Oscar-winning actress Meryl Streep garners attention for her role as the authoritarian nun in Doubt, another film – the doc Theater of War out now – offers insight into Steep as an actress, and it grapples with the nature of war as … Continue reading
Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, James Franco, Emile Hirsch, Alison Pill, Gus Van Sant and Dustin Lance Black Recruited by Harvey Milk by Jay S. Jacobs “I’m Harvey Milk, and I’m here to recruit you!” This was the battle cry of 1970s San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man voted into public office … Continue reading
Clint Eastwood Becomes a Changeling by Brad Balfour An avowed Republican in Hollywood is nearly as rare as the giant Comodo Dragon — and they’ve had the spiteful bite of one as well. But with Barack Obama’s victory, they’ve made themselves pretty scarce since election day. Hell, even a straight-shooting, no bullshitter like Clint Eastwood — long known as … Continue reading
ALEX GIBNEY The Director Goes Gonzo on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, His Life and Work by Brad Balfour At a time when we need counter-culture heroes more than ever, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s Gonzo-The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson explores in a relatively unvarnished fashion Rolling Stone magazine’s late wild man of journalism and a counter-culture … Continue reading
Another Happening from Director M. Night Shyamalan by Brad Balfour Like his work or not, director M. Night Shyamalan employs big ideas and challenges himself and his viewers with unusual and dark storylines with the framework to express them. After his incredible success with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, he was hailed as a youthful wunderkind with a … Continue reading
John Leguizamo, Katherine Waterston and David Ross Adventures in Babysitting by Jay S. Jacobs The hot-button topic film The Babysitters was a low-budgeted labor of love. Written and directed by David Ross, it starts as a star-crossed infatuation story that spirals wildly out of control. A teen babysitter who has a crush on one of her clients … Continue reading
A Very Brady Musical Lloyd Schwartz and Hope Juber Reimagine the Family Business by Ronald Sklar For the producers of The Brady Bunch, it was more like Family Affair. Creator Sherwood Schwartz (who also gave the world Gilligan’s Island) worked closely with his son, Lloyd, and still does. However, for those five sunshine-day seasons on ABC, the Schwartz team lived, … Continue reading
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