Inevitably, the seasons turn, in the slow, majestic way they do. They nicely divide out our lives into climatic themes: eras of birth, growth, yielding to the quiet dark of winter. This is true, of course unless you live in California. In Southern California there really aren’t any seasons, just stretches of shorter and longer [...]

A few months back I mentioned I finished a feature-length screenplay. This is not really news per se: I’m sure yours is coming along nicely. But if ya ask me it’s what you do with the finished manuscript that’s important.
Last fall John (the co-writer of the thing) and I took a free half-hour of advice [...]

Salon, the online magazine, has been running a contest to find the worst pitch. Pitching, to those of you untouched by the sinister tendrils of showbiznezz, is the practice of summarizing your movie idea to its barest most marketable essence. The Salon contest was judged by Harvey Weinstein, who was probably relieved that he already [...]

This Daily Variety review caught my eye - they’re at Cannes looking at the movies in competition.
No doubt it will be back to the drawings board for “Che,” Steven Soderbergh’s intricately ambitious, defiantly nondramatic four-hour, 18-minute presentation of scenes from the life of revolutionary icon Che Guevara.
Here’s my thinking - if I were writing a [...]

The odyssey that is “Arrangements” sort of met it’s logical conclusion. It was programmed into a screening block called “Homegrown,” a showcase for Santa Cruz filmmakers. It took place in the afternoon, between a women-themed program and one on African hip-hop. The screening venue was the Regal Cinemas Riverfront Theatre, a big ol’ twin-plex [...]

I’m proud of TPN:: Box Office Weekly. I believe the editorial and critical content on these pages is of a generally higher level than most media-news blogsites. At the end of the film Ratatouille, the food critic Anton Ego put forth a splendid little summary of what criticism truly is. I’ll excerpt it here:
In [...]

Having seen “Arrangements,” I soon saw the importance of getting the film ready for it’s life on the festival circuit. The first step to this end is preparing a definitive tape master: the other is showing those who actually made the film the need to do so.
Really, nobody needed convincing: the short was shot and [...]

As we’ve learned from better science fiction, our creations sometimes surpass their original parameters. Sometimes they run amok (2001), sometimes they kill everyone everywhere (”Battlestar Galactica,” The Matrix), and sometimes they turn into charming naïfs (Data from Star Trek). Another unusual example can currently be seen during commercial breaks on American television.
Esurance, an online insurance [...]

The summer heat is beginning to be felt here in April: Comic-book movies are already jockeying for position. Next month sees the release of Iron Man, the Robert Downey Jr. starrer. And a few weeks later we get another Marvel comics release: The Incredible Hulk.
Everything about this new Hulk film seems to be in reaction [...]

The ol’ Trek-o-Meter, that linear scale used to track the intensity of one’s Star Trek fandom essayed in these pages last July, apparently isn’t quite ready to be retired yet. For one thing, there is finally a new original cast Star Trek movie in production, with Chris Pine (Smokin’ Aces) as Kirk and Simon Pegg [...]