Movie Making: Wordplay - Best Independent Scriptwriting Site I Know of…
August 29, 2008
A lifetime ago, when I was living in Hollywood and the internet was still young I spent a great deal of time at Wordplay for one reason: it’s excellent material.
The best scriptwriter I know of, and she is because she’s honest and not just brilliant is Max Adams. Max just tells it like it is. Well, Wordplay is like Max Adams, screenwriters in their own words sharing the benefit of their experience and it’s excellent. Read more
Hollywood’s Anti-War Inactivism
March 19, 2008
What’s happened to Hollywood? Or rather, what’s happened to the society I live in today? Two days from the writing of this article is the 5 year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Whether due to that or some other reason, there has been a surge of anti-war “activism” in Hollywood in the form of movies. And everyone from Susan Sarandon to Reese Witherspoon is jumping on the band wagon. Read more
30 Second Review: Elizabeth, The Golden Age
October 13, 2007
I’d read somewhere it’s taken Shekhar Kapur, the director of the first Elizabeth movie, all these years (nearly a decade) to convince Cate Blanchett to reprise the titular role that made stars of them both. A word of advice for Blanchett - You should have said “No.”
I haven’t seen the first film, but I found this one overwhelmingly long and disjointed. At just under two hours the movie plodded for as long as all the years it covered. The film awkwardly spends little of its time on the Holy War England faces and the epic Spanish loss to the British in favor of frivolous court scenes, romantic intrigue and CGI sea battles. Also incessant and unnecessary is the director’s determination to rewrite a powerful monarch into little more than an angst-ridden teenager with astounding historical inaccuracies.
Even though Blanchett keeps the film aloft with her immense acting power, presence and grace, she is no match for the overwhelming detail of her costumes. A small detail compared to the movie’s other shortcomings, but they are simply tiresome to look at after the five years it takes the film to end.
Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto”
July 4, 2007
The Free Articulator is in support of Creative Artists and is written and published by Creative Artists. I’m pushing to the side the arguments that Apocalypto is a poor movie because it has some ’slight cultural inaccuracies’; and getting on to reviewing a work of fiction. Mel Gibson is not a historian or an academic; he’s a storyteller and actor, directing a work of art in order to deliver a story. Some anthropologists in the middle of New York decided that Gibson had picked and chosen elements of history and culture that suited the story’s ability to build up tension and drama.
