The faith driven series ONE returns with a story by Christian movie-maker De Miller.
100% of the author’s proceeds will be donated to Bridge to Ability Specialized Learning Center, a not-for-profit organization serving the educational and therapeutic needs of fragile children with severe physical and cognitive disabilities. www.BridgeToAbility.org. The authors, creator and publisher are in no other way affiliated with this organization.Mark Miller’s One 2013 is a spiritual anthology examining True-Life experiences of Authors and their Faith. As the series evolves expect to discover what it means to have faith, no matter what that faith is and no matter where they live. Remember that we are all part of this One World.In Story Six, author and Christian filmmaker De Miller relates some of the inspirational experiences along his cinematic journey. From his early beginnings with a secular comedy to almost twenty years later and two feature-length Christian-themed movies, Miller sees God at work in his life. This is a moving story of miracles happening in the least expected ways.
My Review: Higher Stakes refers to the title of a personal piece of shared history. My father wrote this story recounting his experiences and growth in the world of movie making. Maybe you have him to thank (or blame) for the author I am today. However, hindsight is, as they say, 20/20 and we have learned from our past. Looking back, from a spiritually higher vantage point, it is interesting how things lined up and worked out. This story brings into focus a fuzzy past and paves the way for a brighter future. Aspiring artists, be it film or book or something else, can read this story and look for those moments in their own journey.
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Fubar Redux from Hasraf HaZ Dulull on Vimeo.
Fubar Redux is an epic short film portraying the atrocities of an on-going political war for territories. Told in an alternate reality with cats and dogs, this film mixes exciting action with tense drama, driven by an uniquely animated visual style. Critics are calling it "Platoon Meets Animal Farm"
Animated and directed by Hasraf Dulull, Fubar Redux has been screened at various film festivals throughout the world this year including, the Short Film Corner at Cannes, Film and Media Exchange (FMX), and Phoenix Comicon.
By Robert Kolker
“That’s that,” quoting Ace Rothstein at the end of Casino. I didn’t end the Martin Scorsese chapter on an optimistic note in the fourth edition of A Cinema of Loneliness. There is more than a hint that the Scorsese’s creative energies might be flagging.
My pessimism grew from the direction — or lack of direction — Scorsese’s films had taken over the past decade. I thought that the big productions of the 2000s — Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed — indicated some kind of flailing about for ideas. These films were not as lean and mean as the earlier gangster movies that worked at the speed of light and were deliriously comic in their basic brutality.
Copyright Paramount Pictures. Source: shutterisland.com.
Shutter Island seemed to seal the decline. An unofficial remake of Samuel Fuller’s 1963 Shock Corridor, the film could have been made, I thought, by anyone. It bore none of the hallmarks of Scorsese’s style and all of the hallmarks of an overwrought Hollywood gothic tale.
An obvious riposte to my pessimism is that I am not in a position to question an artist’s evolution. Scorsese no more than any other filmmaker is bound to repeat himself, and the great gangster and street films of his early period are a thing of the past. Artists change with time, and the results of that change may not be to everyone’s taste. At least not to mine.
With this in mind, I went to see Hugo with a lot of skepticism. Why would Scorsese make a film in 3D? The only reason I could come up with — aside from the fact that he might just wish to experiment with the old/new screen technology of the moment — is that Alfred Hitchcock made a 3D film when that format was first introduced in the 1950s: Dial M For Murder. Scorsese almost always roots his work in films of the past. His imagination is constructed of film. He is an amateur archivist, with a huge collection of movies that he watches continually. He has his cast and crew look at old movies when they are preparing a new one. His films become something of archival works themselves, full of allusions to their predecessors. But there is more to it than this.
I have resisted the recent 3D craze. I did go to see Avatar out of curiosity. James Cameron does not often repay curiosity. But something stood out in that film. The mise-en-scène of Cameron’s mythical world, with its floating vegetation in a liquid like atmosphere, reminded me of the underwater sequences of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans la lune, 1902). This magical film — Méliès was a magician as well as a filmmaker — was just one entry into his enormous filmography of fantasy filmmaking, his counter to the
Amazing post and very interesting stuff you got here! I definitely learned a lot from reading through some of your earlier posts as well and decided to drop a comment on this one!
Thanks! Come back anytime