"Extending the language of film sometimes starts with just trying to show one true thing."

Samuel Fuller via Criterion

"Cinema IS technology and no other art-form so wholly relies on technology for both its construction and reception. Kubrick certainly understood this and the precision, artistry and visual richness of his films can be seen as stemming directly from his deep knowledge of cinema as a technical process. Kubrick was a director never at the mercy of the technology or ignorance of it. And the results are on the screen, camera movement by gloriously exposed and lit camera movement."

Mike Jones, 5 Lesson from Stanley Kubrick

"Australia makes so few science fiction films. Its history of cinema is rich and varied but we’ve made so few science fiction films, and yet we would seem to be a nation well-groomed to make science fiction film. We have good science, you know world-leading science in this country, we are naturally a frontier which is so much a part of the science fiction canon, so it’s a bit of a mystery why we don’t. And yet science fiction films continuously perform very well at the Australian box office, international science fiction films are enormously popular amongst Australian audiences. So there’s this strange gap between the popularity of the genre as a film genre, and young film makers who are interested in it and yet not actually making a lot of sci-fi at the other end."

] Mike Jones on Future-Tense

(Source: mikejones.tv)

"[T]he degree to which children’s genres have colonized the entire movie industry goes beyond overkill. More often than not, these collectively infantilizing movies are breeding an audience—not to mention a generation of future filmmakers and studio executives—who will grow up believing that movies aimed at adults should be considered a peculiar and antique art. Like books. Or plays."

] Mark Harris, “The Day The Movies Died”

Peter Weir was saying exactly this when I saw him interviewed last week. At least there is a growing awareness of the problem. His advice was for those wanting to make adult movies was to move into television.

Read the whole article. Its an excellent piece of writing, even though what it is describing is awful.

"

And herein lies the key to why so many of our films don’t work. Nearly all of the films I saw this year felt like short stories. They lacked a ‘second act’.

[…]

This dismissive approach to the second act is a sullen rejection of what movie audiences have been brought up to like: the sheer pleasure of watching a master storyteller twist elements of plot and subplot into a surprising third act. It seems our puritanical streak runs deeper than our attitudes to sex – even our storytelling is austere and joyless

"

] Louis Nowra, “Nowhere Near Hollywood” in The Monthly

"Hollywood makes the human face a dreaming site for the audience. Beauty is enhanced, with imperfections hidden by sympathetic lighting. In Hollywood, actors drive the story; in Australia, actors are the vehicles for the story. If Hollywood treats actors like Rolls-Royces, here they are used like clapped-out Holdens – which is a pity, because audiences here, as everywhere, want to adore those beautiful, fascinating creatures on the screen."

] Louis Nowra, “Nowhere Near Hollywood” in the Monthly

(Source: )