When I started writing this blog last year, I did it on the advice of the friend who had helped me set up my website. The primary purpose of the website was essentially to provide an on-line resume of my editing work, while also offering a resting place for the work I had done years […]
In the short history of DVD, many companies have come and gone. The major distributors are still around, of course, and public domain companies like Mill Creek seem to be surviving despite the generally poor quality of their output. But for collectors, it’s the smaller “boutique” companies that have offered some of the most exciting […]
Alexander Mackendrick (1912-1993), who was born in the United States but grew up in Scotland from the age of five, made only nine features between 1949 and 1969, when he took up a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts. But within that limited output, he managed to create several masterpieces, including his […]
I recently got to see the final film produced by Ealing Studios, The Siege of Pinchgut (1959), a tense hostage drama made far from the cozy English countryside and villages the studio is often associated with. Directed and co-written by Harry Watt, starring an American (Aldo Ray) and shot on location in Australia, it seems […]
Given the vast differences between the written word and the moving image, it’s not surprising that the translation from text to screen can sometimes produce strange results. David Selznick treated source text as gospel, using Margaret Mitchell’s novel as a virtual script for his massive and very popular 1939 adaptation of Gone With the Wind […]
Last summer I had the excellent experience of being sent to Paris for six weeks as assistant editor on the Milla Jovovich movie Faces In the Crowd, which was shooting here in Winnipeg. This was purely a matter of luck and coincidence: because of the tax credit rules here and the divvying up of personnel […]
Two years ago, I edited a documentary for Les Productions Rivard here in Winnipeg. The English title is One River, Two Shores: Reflections on the Mackenzie Gas Pipeline (in French, the more awkward Au pays du fleuve Mackenzie, Un gazoduc au coeur d’un peuple) and it was directed by Yellowknife resident France Benoit. Over the […]
With the Steven Spielberg-Peter Jackson motion-capture version of Tintin due for release next Christmas, the British Film Institute has shown good timing in unearthing, and releasing on all-region DVD, the only two live-action movies ever made featuring Herge’s quiff-haired boy reporter. Apparently, Herge himself had been dissatisfied with previous animated adaptations and approved of plans […]
When I moved from Newfoundland to Manitoba in the spring of 1973, I spent the first two months in the small town of Neepawa – a community of about 4000, 110 miles north-west of Winnipeg. There wasn’t much there; mostly a lumber yard and numerous farm equipment dealerships. But it had both a movie theatre […]
Glenn Erickson over at DVD Savant has put up his annual “wish list” of titles he’d like to see on DVD, a reminder that no matter how many movies have been released over the past decade, there are still many more that remain unavailable. His introductory essay provides a very good overview of the situation […]