The Hollywood Foreign Press Association will award eight-time Golden Globe nominee Robert De Niro (who won for Raging Bull) with their Cecil B. De Mille award for lifetime achievement at the 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards show on NBC on Sunday, January 16, 2011, which will air live from 5 to 8 PM (PST) and 8-11 (EST) from the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The show is broadcast in 160 countries. De Niro’s long-time director Martin Scorsese won the award last year, following other winners Steven Spielberg, Al Pacino, and Barbra Streisand. Ricky Gervais returns as host.

For More on this article: http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/2010/11/09/golden_globes_to_honor_robert_de_niro_with_cecil_b._demille_award/

TCM

From left, G. W. Bitzer, called Billy, and D. W. Griffith in TCM’s series “Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood.”

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TCM

The Warner brothers, seen in this seven-part documentary.

That may represent food for the soul, but it’s not much of a business model for TCM. So you really can’t complain when the channel does something a little different to drum up publicity, exploiting the finite resource of its movie library — as in the mostly dreary 31 Days of Oscar programming stunt each February — or creating its own content, like original documentaries about Chuck Jones or Clint Eastwood.

Or when it does something a whole lot different, like “Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood,” a seven-week series (beginning Monday night) that represents the channel’s most ambitious venture yet into original programming.

For more on this article please visit: http://tv.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/arts/television/01moguls.html?_r=1&ref=movies

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — In the perfect little town of Paradise, Ohio, a pretty-faced new kid has a crush on the sweet blonde who is showing him around. By the way, the kid is also a space alien, on the run from some other aliens who are anything but pretty.

After two years in the throes of a financial restructuring, Steven Spielberg and his DreamWorks Studios are back with some typically Spielbergian stuff. And they are starting the next round with the sort of fanciful, scary, sometimes heartwarming movies they know best — and their new distribution ally, Walt Disney Studios, needs most.

Success for DreamWorks might quickly return Disney to its former status as a “full service” studio offering a wide range of action movies and dramas, after it had focused for years on animation and family fare that paid the bills but kept the company out of the Hollywood mainstream.

To read the rest of the article please visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/business/media/01dreamworks.html?_r=2&ref=movies

by Brian Brooks

 

 Photo by indieWIRE.

FILM DOCUMENTARIES (IN NAME ONLY) OF EVERY STRIPE

 

 

Wiley FosterParamount Vantage

“ALL I want is the truth. Just gimme some truth!” John Lennon sang. Lennon, who would have turned 70 last weekend, is the subject of Michael Epstein’s new documentary, “LENNONYC,” shown at the recently concluded New York Film Festival and slated for broadcast on PBS next month. Mr. Epstein’s film is part of a surge of documentaries, some shown on television, some released in theaters, that try to answer Lennon’s plea while demonstrating just how tricky the pursuit of cinematic truth can be.

 

Documentary seems, more than ever, like a catchall rubric, a label that can be affixed to heterogeneous, even contradictory products, ranging from the pranks of the elusive street artist Banksy (recorded in “Exit Through the Gift Shop”) to “Baseball: The Tenth Inning,” Ken Burns’s meditation on the recent history of baseball. Errol Morris’s “Tabloid” is obviously a documentary, but the term seems small and tidy next to the film itself, which may be visually restrained (Mr. Morris’s usual face-to-camera interviews, spiked by music and counterpointed with old still photographs and bits of stock footage), but is as wild as anything you can imagine. Cloned dogs! Mormon sex scandals! How can such things exist at all, much less coexist in a single movie?

 

And how can the same word usefully apply to “Jackass 3-D,” the latest anthology of perilous stunts from Johnny Knoxville and his masochistic pals, and to “Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s angry exposé of the roots of the current economic crisis? This is not just a question of tone or subject matter — “Jackass” and “Inside Job” contemplate ingenious and destructive acts of wanton stupidity, while Mr. Burns and Banksy are preoccupied with fame, money and deceit — but also a matter of formal rules and intellectual procedures.

Basic practical considerations — How much voice-over? How much vérité? To re-enact or not? — have a way of opening thorny ethical and philosophical problems. Is the documentarian’s job to show stuff happening or to listen to people talking? To disclose, faithfully and without overt artifice, the way the world is, or to try to explain why it is that way? Is the point of documentary, to cite an old Marxist slogan, not to explain the world, but to change it?

For the entire article please visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/movies/17scott.html?_r=2&ref=movies

The Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) has announced its selection for the 100 Best First Feature Films of All Time. Not surprisingly, “Citizen Kane” grabs the top spot but Tarantino pulls out an impressive six spot for “Reservoir Dogs.” From the official press release:

The Online Film Critics Society (OFCS), the professional association for Internet-based film reviewers, has announced its selection for the 100 Best First Feature Films of All Time. Spanning the cinematic experience from the silent era to the digital age, the OFCS writers pay tribute to the most impressive filmmaking debuts of all time.

For movie lovers, there are few things more exciting than the discovery of a bold new filmmaker. Through cinema history, many extraordinary directors immediately made their marks on the industry with their first feature-length films. The OFCS writers have voted on their choices for the most provocative, innovative and memorable directing debuts in cinema history.

The top 10 choices of the 100 Best First Feature Films of All Time, as chosen by the OFCS, are:

1. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
2. Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)
3. Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968)
4. The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)
5. Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)
6. Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992)
7. The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)
8. Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984)
9. The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959)
10. 12 Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)

The full list is available online at http://www.ofcs.org/2010/10/ofcs-top-100-100-best-first-films.html?spref=fb

Read more: http://www.filmthreat.com/news/26450/#ixzz13UD1Vfwf