THB #93: The Batman (no spoilers)
| March 6, 2022
Molly Haskell: “At the start of the pandemic, I went through a zombie phase with Train to Busan and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s genre films. I had somehow never seen Carnival of Souls—it blew my mind. I discovered two stunning films (restored and streamed by MoMA) by the totally unknown French director Louis Valray. I commune with fellow movie lovers with tips and reactions: one recommends Andre de Toth’s Day of the Outlaw, on YouTube; another, George Cukor’s The Model and the Marriage Broker; still another, Japanese noir on Criterion. I have stacks of unread film books and magazines which I’m finally delving into. We all have favorite movie years or decades, often having less to do with the quality of the movies than with our own age and susceptibility, who we were and were about to be, at the time. For someone who formed an early addiction to transactions between grown-up men and women, my favorite theaters will always be the tiny (often underground) boxes on Paris’s Left Bank where my cinema education and my adulthood really began—screens that, in retrospect, seem both smaller and larger than the one in my living room. On the latter I watched all or most of the films of 2020. And I began to think about the idea of spectacle being as much in the beholder’s eye as on the screen. Certainly I felt transported by the ending of Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, when the sorrow and awkwardness of four Danish teachers’ lives is momentarily forgotten and, among the throngs of a crowded dock, Mads Mikkelsen launches into a delirious, gravity-defying dance. I would trade those few minutes of human-size euphoria for all the CGI wizardry of Christopher Nolan.”
-30-
May 1, 2022
"Netflix, the great disrupter whose algorithms and direct-to-consumer platform have forced powerful media incumbents to rethink their economic models, now seems to need a big strategy change itself. It got me thinking about the simple idea that my film and TV production company Blumhouse is built on: If you give artists a lot of creative freedom and a little money upfront but a big stake in the movie’s or TV show’s commercial success, more often than not the result will be both commercial (the filmmakers are incentivized to make films that will resonate with audiences) and artistically interesting (creative freedom!). This approach has yielded movies as varied as Get Out (made for $4.5 million, with worldwide box office receipts of more than $250 million), Whiplash (made for $3.3 million, winner of three Academy Awards), The Invisible Man (made for $7 million, earned more than $140 million) and Paranormal Activity (made for $15,000, grossed more than $190 million).From the beginning, the most important strategy I used to persuade artists to work with me was to make radically transparent deals: We usually paid the artists (“participants” in Hollywood lingo) the absolute minimum allowable by union contracts upfront, with the promise of healthy bonuses based on actual box office results—instead of the opaque 'percentage points' that artists are usually offered. Anyone can see box office results immediately, so creators don’t quarrel with the payouts. In fact, when it comes time for an artist to collect a bonus based on box office receipts, I email a video clip of myself dropping the check off at FedEx to the recipient."
Jason Blum Sees Room For "Scrappier" Netflix
| April 30, 2022
"As a critic Gavin was entertaining, wry, questioning, sensitive, perceptive"
Critic-Filmmaker Gavin Millar Was 84; Films Include Cream In My Coffee, Dreamchild
April 29, 2022
| January 24, 2022
DP/30 Audio: Bombshell, Jay Roach
| December 13, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Jonathan Majors
| December 4, 2019
DP/30 Audio: The Mustang, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre
| December 4, 2019
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