Byzantium

Dear Moira Buffini, Screenwriter,

It’s always frustrating when a movie comes so close to achieving greatness, only to stumble and eventually fall on its face right before the finish line. Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh. But I really wanted to love Byzantium and the genuinely fresh and compelling angle you took on the vampire mythos.  A welcome breath of fresh air, and perhaps even a revitalizing shot to a subgenre that has been irrevocably damaged by Twilight. While Byzantium is certainly far from being a terrible movie, it is nevertheless marred by some pretty serious character issues. Which I’ll get into soon.

Click to read more ...

Touchy Feely

Dear Kelsey Wood, Biking Lifestyle Consultant,

Biking Lifestyle Consultant seems a nebulous yet professional sounding title, the kind of thing you murmur to someone you’re trying to impress at a Citizen Dick concert. I noticed on IMDB, you’re also listed as the sound mixer, sound designer and supervising sound editor. This is probably good for you, because curiously, we don’t actually see any cycling in Touchy Feely, which leads me to believe ‘biking lifestyle consultant’ doesn’t exactly pay the rent.

Click to read more ...

Oculus

Dear Tony Ciccone, Editorial Consultant,

I checked out your resume on IMDB before I started writing this letter to you. If there’s something to be said about the movie business, persistence and being able to outlast your rivals are some of the key factors to success (or so people keep telling me). You’ve been around since the late 70s as both an actor and editor, with some work in visual effects too. I’m assuming you rode the wave of TV acting gigs through the 80s to pay the bills, when the game was played a little differently than it is today. There’s nothing wrong with that. It shows that you’ve been able to change gears along the way and managed to find yourself a way to hold onto a career in the sometimes topsy-turvy world of moving pictures.

Click to read more ...

The Raid 2: Berendal

Dear Sean England, Foley Artist, 

So, they brought in the big guns. Not literally, of course. While guns play an occasional role in martial arts films like The Raid 2: Berendal, they might as well not exist. The whole precept of the genre is that (a) when a gun might prove most useful (i.e. when being attacked by an unstoppable master of kicking and punching) there is never a gun present, and (b) during a brawl, in the case of a laughable numerical mismatch, all comers must attack the lone fighter one at a time. My point is, having worked on films ranging from Forrest Gump to Gladiator to The Avengers, you’re one of the big guns in the world of sound effects, but on this particular job, you didn’t have to scroll through libraries of stock gunshots.

No, this film is a lot more interesting than that.

Click to read more ...

Mitt

Dear Erik Olsen, Camera Operator,

When I think about the filming of a documentary, I sometimes picture the person operating the camera as, literally, a fly on the wall; ignored, to varying degrees, by your subjects, with a level of access that allows them to observe things no one else might see.  In Greg Whiteley’s Mitt, you were that fly on the wall. I’m glad you were able to follow the Romney family through both of Mitt’s swings at the Presidential piñata, because during the 2012 elections I often wondered what he was really like. Political candidates always insist that, “what you see is what you get, folks!”—but I never believe them. I was curious to see what Netflix promised would reveal “the man behind the soundbites.”

Click to read more ...