This Post Is Not About Avatar

posted by Jett Loe

Oh, sure I’d like to go all Avatar here - discuss in detail my response to this most Camerony of films – but that’ll have to wait till this weekend’s podcast Dear Reader.

Instead I proffer some experiences of the last few days and a some selected gems from this week’s trawling of the webs:

First off – The Film Talk now has a weekly newsletter!  Click here to for weekly-newsletter-signup-action!

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Next up – below is the latest viral rage – a 70-minute (!) tearing apart/analysis of ‘The Phantam Menace’.  I appreciate the intense yawns just the idea of this might generate – but it’s worth watching, (especially Part 1 – the later ‘Basement’ activities are distasteful), for its spot-on Robert McKee-esque explication of mainstream/standard story-telling structure.

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We have the interesting news that Paramount has just announced it will spend $1 Million annually to finance 10 to 20 micro-budget films, (quote from Variety):

Seeking to replicate the stunning success of “Paranormal Activity,” Paramount’s launching an initiative that will spend $1 million annually to develop and produce microbudget films.Move, unveiled Thursday, is designed to place between 10 and 20 projects in development by the end of next year, with no individual budget topping $100,000.Paramount Film Group prexy Adam Goodman, promoted to the slot in June, cooked up the plan in the successful wake of “Paranormal,” made for $15,000 and grossing more than $100 million domestically.Goodman indicated the funds, which will come out of the studio’s overall production budget, will be targeted at both unknowns and established filmmakers, with the goal of increasing the studio’s ability to find new voices and ideas. In addition, the initiative’s aimed at giving Paramount a more diverse portfolio of titles at a time when Hollywood’s devoting most of its resources to megabudget pics, such as Par’s “Transformers” and “Star Trek” franchises.The studio hasn’t set a target of how many projects would receive a theatrical release. The microbudget projects could also conceivably be remade with conventional budgets.Paramount originally planned to release “Shutter Island” in early October but, citing costs, decided in late August to push that title back to February and opted for “Paranormal Activity” instead.Par was able to make effective use of a low-cost grassroots release strategy, starting with a dozen midnight screenings of Oren Peli’s horror-thriller in college towns before launching a gradual rollout that built on strong word of mouth.

I love this story – I’ve been wishing for years that instead of studios spending $100 million on one film they’d spend $1 million on one hundred films. We’re seeing fantastic work coming from the low-budget sector – this needs to be encouraged – not just in terms of the ‘negative cost’ but also with monies and innovative thinking for distribution and marketing – damnit, we need to find and encourage ‘the little fat girl in Ohio’!:

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Forget about The Princess and the Frog – David Ehrenstein has some thoughts on both the historical and contemporary use of Black Culture as soothing balm for the all-so-troubled souls of White Folks in these USAs: UNCLE REMUS REDUX

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Glenn Kenny, (a guest on TFT 71 and on our upcoming ‘Avatar-Last-Show-Ever?’ Special, lists his top 17 films of the year: My Best of 2009: Special “I haven’t seen ‘Up In The Air’ yet” Edition

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I screened The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans; it’s the most joyous, life affirming film I’ve seen in years.  At The Belcourt from Christmas Day.

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And finally I was intensely depressed by the trailer of the new Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe Robin Hood.  It seems that Scott has settled into some some sort of ‘generic-Ridley-style’ that seems without wit or substance – The Film Talk is on Facebook now – so I’ll leave the rest of the commentary to the TFT Facebook fans:

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 9:18 pm. It is filed under Blog, The Changing Cinema, Videos, Who Knows?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.