Friends and colleagues (and some folks who fall into both categories) have been asking me what exactly I'm doing these days, what with my byline appearing in some half dozen outlets now on a regular basis, making it hard to find the common thread. Well, there is one, kinda. Around January, I became involved with a newly launched online magazine called Stream, which focuses on independent filmmakers using the internet as a major resource for production, marketing and other related areas. It's a great way to delve into new media discourse without getting bogged down with constant reporting on the corporate world (although there's a little of that), and I'm constantly amazed at all the artists out there becoming pioneers of fresh distribution models. History is now, people.

I add news updates and features to Stream on a daily basis, and we've got a wide variety of material, from filmmaker profiles to revenue reports to festival dispatches and more. The magazine is attached to a revolutionary online film search engine called The Looking Glass Guide that's well worth checking out.

In the meantime, I'm still regularly contributing to New York Press (although I'm just doing a few pieces a month now, rather than jotting down a couple reviews each week), and I've been doing a number of interviews, features and festival notebooks for indieWIRE.

I've also got a couple of magazine pieces on the stands now: A nifty survey of Christian cinema in Hollywood that I wrote for Heeb, a survey of some up-and-coming writer-directors for Moviemaker (print only), and an overview of New York City film production for The Hollywood Reporter.

On the more eccentric side of things, I wrote an essay about Jonas Mekas' A Letter from Greenpoint in the brilliant new issue of Reverse Shot, and Cinematical, a blog I've admired and learned much from over the years, has brought me on board to contribute posts throughout the week. Recent subjects range from Amy Poehler to movie accents to misogyny. Yes, misogyny.

GOREY GATHERING

The Lost

Before Chris Sivertson guided Lindsay Lohan through the unintentionally hilarious highlight of her career in I Know Who Killed Me, he had already developed a proficient style of visceral filmmaking in his preceding directorial effort, The Lost. Viewing this earlier independent work gives context to the big-screen joke that followed it: Say what you want about the amazingly miscalculated sequences that turn I Know Who Killed Me into an epic highlight reel of craptastic abuse, but there was a definite skill to the splendiferous sleaze. There’s even more of it in The Lost, which screens February 13 at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema in anticipation of a March DVD release.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

FINDING FORMAN

Milos Forman: A Retrospective

The funny moments in a Milos Forman movie are nearly indistinguishable from the sad ones. Not a prophet of doom as much as a chronicler of contemporary despair, Forman meshes satire with realism and wields irony as a cultural weapon. From his early efforts as a progenitor of the Czech New Wave in the 1960s through his landmark contributions to the golden age of American cinema in the 1970s and continuing in his recent works, Forman has maintained a consistently dour tone. The humor emerges as a natural reflex—nervous laughter over the uncertainty of our times.

Read more in New York Press...

RESURRECTING ROMERO

Diary of the Dead

As a cinematic pioneer, George A. Romero remains uniquely selective. For nearly 40 years, the father of the modern zombie movie contributed a humble quartet of undead squalor to the newly revived genre, applying anthropological focus to the collapse of civilization. In his latest entry, Diary of the Dead, the aging director returns to his starting point and sets the now-legendary story of a zombie outbreak in the present. The times have changed, but his unflinching portrait of humanity’s innately self-destructive tendencies hasn’t frayed a bit.

For his fifth outing, Romero chose to ditch the original timetable: The first four zombie films, beginning with 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and culminating with Land of the Dead in 2005, adhered to a chronological progression. The world gradually adapted to its debilitating plague, and so did the infected. In Diary, Romero pits the zombie epidemic against the digital quirks of the new millennium (the survivors download a news report of the outbreak off the web), which completely shatters the real-time logic of the earlier entries. In doing so, however, he makes a valiant attempt to resurrect their original impact.

Read the rest of the review in New York Press...

PENCIL DRAMA

Steal a Pencil for Me

Holocaust survival tales have never lacked dramatic tension. History is an easy crutch when it comes to the construction of hazardous scenarios, whether they’re profound or facile: Both Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful build staying power out of their relationships to events beyond their specific storylines. In Steal a Pencil for Me, the new documentary about a couple whose concentration camp experiences were preceded by their romantic entanglement, the survival narrative pulls together an ubiquitous significance, whether or not you actually care about the couple’s romantic adhesion.

Read the rest of the review in the New York Press...