R&R Consulting's Sylvain Raines comments on plans by veteran investigator Jules B. Kroll to create a new credit rating agency. Read the full article by Geraldine Fabrikant, "Corporate Sleuth Plans to Start Credit Rating Firm," The New York Times, August 28, 2009....
It's a bit tangential to our usual focus, but I can't resist responding to Roger Ebert's blog piece from Aug. 6 In an article subtly entitled "The Gathering Dark Age," the aging master of the thumb has just determined that the quality of movies...
It rained in Manhattan on our 60th wedding anniversary. Lightning, thunder, a relentless downpour, the whole flashing, roaring, drenching package of a storm that pounded over West 44th Street like the drums of eternity. I took it as God's recognition of Cinelli's endurance. In the vast...
Back in 1993, the Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima directed the movie Sankofa. It was an incredibly unflinching look at the conditions of slavery at a pre-Civil War plantation, which also means that it was widely considered unreleasable. Since no distributor would touch it, Gerima took...
The biggest problem in show business is that if there is no show, then there is no business. That's why theatrical distribution (mostly, the lack of it) is one of the most critical problems currently facing indie movies. Of approximately 38,000 screens in the US (a...
Over the past few weeks of this summer of discontent, the search for sub-prime villains has grown ever more intense and sordid. Media-bound auto da fe has been set up to burn the most obviously flawed Wall Street personalities at the stake of incompetence, allegedly...
It's hard to believe that almost 40 years after the humiliating end of the Vietnam War Jane Fonda is still held responsible. Not for our defeat but for committing what a small group of veterans regard as a treasonous act in her visit to Hanoi...
The 2008 taxpayer bailout and a long string of corporate restructurings and downsizings have shifted risk from corporations to individuals. Most Americans were caught in a high-stakes Monopoly game where they didn't know the rules. Read the full article on the Carnegie Council website....
A documentary filmmaker once described the process of making a small budget movie as "crawling through a field of broken glass." Admittedly, he was making political documentaries and shooting in various war zones of the Middle East. Over there, it's hard to find the glass...