Film Strategy

Lone Survivor | Peter Berg | 2013 | USA | Format: RED Code Raw (negative) 35mm (printed) | 121 min   US poster for Lone Survivor The action drama based on true events and the biography by Marcus Luttrell is gearing up to be a sleeper hit of critical acclaim and box-office strength.  Director Peter Berg secured the financing to make the film by agreeing to direct the big flop, Battleship . It was such a passion project of his that he went low-budget on the shoot, directing it for the DGA minimum, shooting with the RED camera in New Mexico (great production incentives there btw) and convincing his cast to lower their salaries too.  Despite the criticisms of jingoism and being crude propaganda or snuff porn akin to The Passion of the Christ , the movie is generally described by critics as expertly made and engaging. If Lone Survivor makes the $34 million it is projected to make during opening weekend plus gets nominated for and wins some Oscars then the Battleship flop will h

Don't Look Now | Nicolas Roeg | 1973 | UK, Italy | Format: 35mm | 110 min  Released in the US 40 years ago today on December 9, 1973.   When British director Nicolas Roeg’s perverse thriller Don’t Look Now hit American theaters, not everyone was happy. In the New York Times review, Vincent Canby claimed that when this “fragile soap bubble of a horror film” ends, “you may feel, as I did, that you've been had.” Adapted from a Daphne Du Maurier short story, Don’t Look Now previewed many of the director’s upcoming themes—chaotic, realistic sex; disjunctive narrative montages; storylines that collapse the psychological and the supernatural. Here a young couple (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland), traumatized by the recent drowning of their young daughter, comes to Venice for a working holiday and possible relief from their grief. What they find instead is a mystery lost in the maze of Venice’s back streets and canals and shrouded in the city’s famous fog