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 […] Continue Reading…
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 […] Continue Reading…
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 […] Continue Reading…
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 […] Continue Reading…
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 […] Continue Reading…
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 […] Continue Reading…
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 […] Continue Reading…
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, […] Continue Reading…
“Why do healthcare costs rise as much as they do? What, specifically, is driving it?” This was the question posed to Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean by Maria Bartiromo during his appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program on July […] Continue Reading…
Back in the early spring of 1977, an executive in charge of booking for a major Midwestern theater chain was feeling perplexed. He was trying to pick what might be the big summer hit for his company and had […] Continue Reading…