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...

It has become increasingly popular, in our modern society, to view the role of the critic with more aggression than was previous. This comes mainly from the divergence of the critic from his audience. Our society today places emphasis on the individual, who need only surround him or herself with those of likeminded interests and opinions. Outside opinions are not welcome to the individual, who holds his or her beliefs to be the highest and most supreme authority. Often enough the individual believes they are the beacon of truth, transmitting a message of absolutes, which they apparently received from within their closed off adolescent experience. The narcissistic hold on the public has been ever tightening with the onset of social networking sites and other web based social media, placing the individual in a position of influential power over others, without any proper understanding of that influence or power, and without the slightest credentials for what they are pushing. Th...