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A look at Disney+ oddities for Vulture

��We expected the Marvel films, Star Wars, and the super company’s many animated classics. But peppered in between the stalwarts were countless Disney Vault oddities: implausible animal farces, strange Christmas movies, far more Herbie sequels than we remembered, and something called Fuzzbucket.” Read the full article at Vulture

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Review of George A. Romero’s The Amusement Park

"The Amusement Park is the scariest film Romero ever made — an unsentimental, unbridled, bleak-o-rama reminder that, past a certain age, we may all be discarded, unless we have excess cash. It doesn’t need such Romero frights as zombies or vampires or poison gas or sinister helper monkeys or murderous alter egos to scare the Dickens out of us; it just needs the cold, hard truth about the worst case scenario that may befall any of us.” Complete review over at Consequence of Sound

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Interview with Phillip Youmans about Burning Cane, for Filmmaker

“I think film as a medium is growing. It’s become so democratized by how many new outlets of distribution there are, and how many new eyes there are on content every single day. Democratization is a good thing. It allows the space for more nuanced, non-commercial stories to be taken seriously and to have a marketplace.” Full interview here with a filmmaker who completed the movie in question when he was still in high school.

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Coverage of IFP Week 2019, for Filmmaker

I spent a week in September going to a pile of panels, featuring the likes of Jon M. Chu, Jehane Noujaim, Todd Douglas Miller, Erin Lee Carr, Kasi Lemmons, and more. All of them can be found here. 

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Interview with Peter Sarsgaard about The Sound of Silence, for AM New York

“I really like that in an age when we’re all trying to figure out how to make movies that will be liked — by the people who buy them, the people who distribute them — that there are still people who can’t actually think that way ... If I can make their movie happen, then I’ve achieved what I want to achieve in my career.” Full interview here.

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Interview with Rodney Evans about Vision Portraits, for AM New York

“I am terrified of going blind and I’m doing everything that I can to maintain the vision that I have ... It’s not something I am slowly resigning myself to. I find it enraging, and being in this liminal space between the fully-sighted and the fully blind is a very emotionally fraught place to be.” Full interview here.

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On the current state of tax incentives, for Filmmaker

“Movies are the most expensive art form; even ones they call ‘no-budget’ aren’t. You need to learn about business eventually, and in today’s world, even independent filmmakers need to understand terms like ‘transferable rebates,’ ‘soft money’ and ‘100 percent deductibility.’” Full article here.

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Interview with Frederick Wiseman about Monrovia, Indiana, for Filmmaker

“I never think about an audience, whether it’s the people who are in the place or the people in a movie theater. I don’t know how to predict their reactions, and I think anybody who says they do is bullshitting you.“ Full interview with one of the masters of non-fiction cinema here.

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Review of Cocote, for The Village Voice

“It’s This Is Where I Leave You crossed with Hamlet but directed like a deep arthouse curio gone extra-rogue.“ Full review of this Dominican whatzit over here.

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A look at Dinesh D’Souza in “honor” of Death of a Nation, for The Guardian

“Throughout D’Souza does what he always does: he drops a bombshell, then before you’ve had a chance to recover, he hits you with another, over and over and over, for nearly two hours. It’s a downright Trumpian move: exhaust your enemies (and your supporters) through the sheer volume of your nonsense.” Looked back at the prolific work of the right’s slimiest and most prolific creep for The Guardian, but couldn’t even squeeze in, e.g., the time he made fun of the Parkland teens.

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Interview with James DeMonaco about The First Purge, for Filmmaker

The series co-creator/”showrunner” talks test screenings, those low Blumhouse budgets and how to make a movie set in D.C. that features people with guns running around the streets (spoiler: you shoot somewhere else). Interview right here.

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Araby review for The Village Voice

“A soundtrack of folk/country classics takes the edge off, but make no mistake: This is a beautiful bummer, giving voice to someone who’s barely a number, but only to remind us that most of us are OK not thinking about numbers at all.” Full review here.

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Believer, the doc in which Imagine Dragons try to solve homophobia, for The Village Voice

“Apparently, filmmakers still do this: Believer is a documentary about the LGBTQ experience told through the perspective of a straight white cis dude.“ Full review here.

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Olivier Assayas on Cold Water, for Filmmaker

It was “only” my third time speaking to one of my favorite working filmmakers, this time about my favorite of his movies. This one, for Filmmaker, gets into the nitty-gritty about music rights issues, its absence from U.S. screens for a quarter of a century and the TV movie series that birthed it. We also nerded out over Roxy Music.

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How Elvira helped bring bad movies into the mainstream, for Uproxx

This is a crazily ambitious piece that floated a theory I haven’t really read anywhere else (and might honestly be a touch on the arguable side): We can thank TV horror movie hosts like Vampira and Elvira (and later Gilbert Gottfried!) for the current bad movie craze.

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IFP Week, for Filmmaker Magazine

Last fall, I spent a week sitting in on the panels for IFP Week, the annual roundelay for up-and-coming indie filmmakers. That included writing down the sage/funny things said by Barry Jenkins, Dee Rees, Sean Baker, the Safdie Bros. and many others that are probably most conveniently found by scrolling through my Filmmaker Mag bio. 

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7 Asian Horror Films for Your Halloween Movie Night, for NBC

More Halloween duties, this time rounding up streaming Asian horror — and not just the ever popular Southeast Asian fare that eats up Midnight Movie slots. Those too, but also Gareth Evans’ Indonesia-set segment of V/H/S 2, the Indian Raaz films and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.