Fall is a busy time for most people, but especially those who are invested in film and tv shows such as I. Hope springs eternally for the TV networks as they bring back their ratings hits and try and introduce new TV shows, hoping they will be hits as well. I took a gander at the 59+ show slate of fall premieres and decided to pick 10 new and returning tv shows that I’d be most excited to watch. Here’s the list!
Review originally published at Awards Circuit during the Sundance Film Festival.
Kill Your Darlings is a perfect example of how one can tell a familiar story in a unique, fascinating way. Many are familiar with the Beats generation, but the way debut director Johnathan Krokidas and co-writer Austin Bunn see it you haven’t seen the definitive version of the tale till you see their film. Kill Your Darlings is a fascinating sojourn into the origin story of the Beats, kind of like The Avengers: Beats Edition set in the backdrop of the suffocating rigidity of 1944 Columbia University with a sharp script filled with an incredible social commentary. In short, it’s one of the best films I’ve seen so far at Sundance.
Can you make an abstract idea into a story? This was something posed to my production class this past week in an effort to understand the process of visualizing/externalizing concepts. As filmmakers, we often take the smallest of ideas and turn them into visual stories. I partnered up with one of my classmates to shoot 3 photos that were supposed to convey an abstract emotion in a sequence. Check the photos and see if you can guess what we were going for.
Fall TV is almost upon us and both here and over at AwardsCircuit.com, I’ll be talking lots of TV. I thought I’d start off my coverage by talking about something that has been on my mind for a while. There is a lot of high concept television being put out now and with the rise of cable shows has come a desire to curate highly loyal and rabid fans. One way shows manage to that is by creating complex narratives, that often make the viewer work a little harder by asking the viewer to make logic leaps. Or more recently, intentionally leaving things out of the narrative presented to the audience. It’s certainly one way to engage your audience, by constantly having them pour through the plot and analyze every detail, whilst building their own theories and opinions.
Hello everyone, did you have enjoyable weekend? It’s been a pretty busy one for me as film school has really started to pick up. In an effort to catalog my time there (and satisfy a class requirement), I’m gonna be posting interesting things under the tag Film School Files. And what better way to start then by talking about the project I participated in this weekend. Loyola Marymount hosts something called 10:1 Film Rush for the incoming grad students, where we are put into crews, given three words to choose from, and 10 hours the following day to shoot, edit, and screen the movie.
Review originally published during the SXSW Film Festival at Awards Circuit.
A Teacher, much like other films deal that with taboo subject matter, has the unenviable task of balancing the melodramatic aspects of the story as well as a need to justify every character’s motivations. And try though it may, it never seems to elevate itself from the basics of the story and the script moves from point A to point B without much in the way of shock. However, the tale is elevated by some incredibly nuanced acting from Lindsay Burdge and Will Brittain and just enough visual panache to keep the audience satisfied.