the burning reel

Film 6 (365) Skyfall While in my hometown last summer perusing a Best Buy I overheard a portly fellow express to his wife how boring Skyfall  was. "The first ten minutes were great, but that was it." This, my dear reader, is the mountain I must climb as a filmmaker. I watched Skyfall  for the first time yesterday. I know, I'm behind the times, but at no point was I bored. It worries me that our audiences of today want spoon fed exposition and moment to moment action. That's why Robert Rodriguez keeps getting paid and The Fast and the Furious  now has six films to top off its franchise. Heaven forbid James Bond would have a backstory or have time to grow as a character. If you don't know, James is out of commission for apparently six months while everyone thought he was dead. He goes a drinking in the Pacific Islands it would seem. Good ol' Jimmy B also seems to get soft. His aim is off after a bullet enters his right shoulder and a lack o

Film 5 (365) Under Fire: Journalists in Combat A wall at the Newseum in Washington, DC holds the portraits of every American journalist killed in a conflict. As a combat photographer in the Marines I expected to see more combat than I did. In fact I didn't see any real  combat. The Grunts (what Marines call Infantrymen) would make light of this fact by nicknaming me "Combat". "Get over here Combat!" This makes me feel two very complicated emotions. On one hand I'm blessed. I have no physical or psychological damage to burden my family with. On the other hand I'm upset. Does it make me less of a Marine having not seen combat? Often I question what I might have done under those circumstances. Would I have buckled or "maned up" and focused on my mission? Would I have hid behind my lens and captured the events or picked up my rifle and fought back? Under Fire  interviews a group of men and women who never had that last option. The

Film 4 (365) Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream In New York City there are two Park Avenues. There's the one in Manhattan, where the largest concentration of Billionaires in the world are located, and there's the one in the Bronx north of the river where poverty is rampant. This film doesn't talk much about those north of the river. Instead it focuses one particular building. 740 Park. The most intriguing part of this film for me was the metaphor one psychiatrist uses in the beginning. He asks us to imagine sitting down to a game of Monopoly. The catch? All the properties have already been bought up and houses/hotels built. It wouldn't take long and you're worse off than when you started. This same psychiatrist did an experiment. He pitted two player against one another in Monopoly. After the throw of a dice one player is randomly selected to be the "wealthy" player. Every time the wealthy player crosses Go he gets $200,