THB #93: The Batman (no spoilers)
| March 6, 2022
“In a course I teach on feminist film, I have taught Ducournau’s Raw, with uneven success. Centered on a young woman veterinary student who goes from vegetarian to cannibal, the film is ‘about’ hazing on campus, female sexual desire, sister solidarity, racial tensions in contemporary France, and more. Many (not all) of my students get turned off by the body horror of seeing the heroine snack on the finger of her sister or cause car accidents in order to feast on the bodies of the victims. We discuss the monstrosity of female desire, its dangers, its posing of trouble for rules of gender and racial binaries and the ways we organize and structure our world. But I am struggling now as I think of how to teach Titane on my eclectic and constantly changing feminist film syllabus. In conversations with my students, we ask whether a film is feminist if it flips the scripts from male to female, if it helps us get inside the heads of women characters, if it helps us understand women’s subjectivities and perspectives, or something else. Sometimes we are stymied by the rules for feminist film and the ways certain films both fit and resist.”
Teaching Titane
-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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