January 15, 2010
Career-long collaborators share Martin Scorsese memories
Today, nobody thinks twice about film school as a path to directing, but Jay Cocks remembers a time when the very idea of teaching such a trade seemed preposterous, even risible. Back in those days, Cocks was working as a reporter for Time magazine, where his editor assigned him to look into the phenomenon, a hunt that led him to a motor-mouthed movie buff -- and recent NYU grad -- named Martin Scorsese.
"We immediately became friends because of the holy communion of movies," Cocks says. "I found in him someone who loved movies even more than I did and had seen even more than I had -- and I thought I'd seen a lot."
Scorsese's career-long editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, was similarly impressed when she met the director a few years earlier. She had responded to an ad in the paper for a six-week summer course at NYU, where Scorsese was putting the finishing touches on his first short, "What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?"
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
January 14, 2010
On the debt District 9 (and other '09 releases) owe reality TV
Remember the mockumentary genre? Classics such as This Is Spinal Tap and A Hard Day's Night seem almost quaint by comparison with the narrative tricks featured in such 2009 films as The Hurt Locker, District 9, In the Loop and Bruno, all of which use docu-style tactics to immerse us in the action -- or comedy, as the case may be.
Had those four films been released a decade earlier, moviegoers almost surely would have scratched their heads in confusion. What is Bruno exactly (or Borat before it), with its unique mix of scripted material and Candid Camera-style stunts? But the Hollywood aesthetic has changed radically in the 10 years since The Blair Witch Project -- a span that saw the rise of reality television, a boom in theatrical documentary attendance and the advent of YouTube -- and audiences are savvier for it.
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Posted by Peter Debruge at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)