Your Monday Motivation
In case you, like me, need this today (or any day):
Category: Producing
Acting Producing Writing
It’s Time for a Montage: A 2024 Film Montage
“Supercuts” are always fun and supercuts of a past year’s films are a fine tradition to uphold. For over a decade, I’m enjoyed the meticulously crafted montages by David Ehrlich, a film critic and, as quickly becomes apparent: wholly unrepentant cinemaniac. His tastes and judgment on films are as varied as they are unexpected, paired beautifully with a veritable mixtape of a soundtrack that grabs you as much as it startles you. Basically, one minute…
Producing Writing
May His Memory Be a Disturbing Blessing, R.I.P., David Lynch
Filmmaker and singular artist David Lynch died on January 15, 2025, just days before today, what would be his 79th birthday. You can read obituaries and remembrances from: Variety also has a collection of remembrances from Steven Spielberg and others about Lynch and the Hard Times has an appropriately satirical take on Lynch’s passing. As fate would have it, the first David Lynch film I saw was his least favorite, if for no other reason…
Producing Various and Sundry Writing
More Public Domain Highlights for 2025
I think I’m going to need to expand my list of usual suspects for 2026, because there’s two more public domain pieces I want to share beyond the resources shared yesterday. First is an article, with plenty of audiovisual samples, by Ellen Wexler for Smithsonian Magazine. As you might imagine, the Smithsonian is very into collections, culture, and curating. Here, Wexler relies in part on Jennifer Jenkins, and the Center for the Study of the…
Producing Various and Sundry Writing
Public Domain Day, 2025
Happy New Year! One of my favorite new traditions since 2019 has been noting all the creative works that enter the public domain here in the United States every January 1st. For this year, 2025, that means creative works first published in the U.S. in 1929 as well as sound recordings from 1924. There’s a host of caveats and, of course, U.S. copyright is different from other parts of the world, often markedly so. That’s…
Producing Various and Sundry
When the Video Toaster was Punk AF
There’s a meme going around that generations should now be divided by “Too old to know Homestar Runner/at the right age to know and love Homestar Runner/too young to know Homestar Runner.” Admittedly, this is rather prejudiced towards knowing Homestar Runner, but seeing as I do (and seriously Stwong Bad, he’s the bee’s knees!), I don’t find this a problem. In part, because I think anyone at any age can discover the sparkling majesty of…
Producing
Making the Most of Your Bad Film Watch
Like many a cinemaniac, I watch a lot of movies and, much to the confusion of friends and family, I will watch movies that are not only clearly bad, but are not of the so-bad-it’s-good variety. Why do I do this to myself? Well, if it’s a version of the Robin Hood legend or Treasure Island (see also my post last week), then I gotta see how they treat the story. Some folklore and pop…
Producing
Every Frame a Painting is Back! (For a Second)
The algorithm fae have decided to gift me with the news that Every Frame a Painting is back… if only for a short while. Tricky fae. Starting about 10 years ago, and for tantalizingly too few episodes, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou crafted meticulous videos that remind one of why cinema is magical. The care in making the videos is, of course, why there are not a gazillion episodes, but that invigorating feeling is why…
Producing Various and Sundry
From “Future TV” to “Does TV Have a Future?”
One of the first tags I created here on the blog was “Future TV” which seemed to best sum up the various articles and such I was absorbing about what was sometimes called “Peak TV” and sometimes a new “Golden Age” of television. In hindsight, “the streaming wars” should have been coined as a nod to the far more fun “cola wars.” That’s because it became clear that Peak TV and the “wars” were over…
Producing
A24: You Sunk my Hollywood Battleship!
If I had a dollar for every time I heard or read about major studios being too risk averse, I could fund feature films to my heart’s content… or could I? Films cost a lot of money, which is why there aren’t 147 major studios and, as one indie filmmaker friend of mine is wont to say, money isn’t a thing, it’s the thing. So how did such a small non-studio become such a major…