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21Mar

“East Side Sushi”: Little film, big ideas

Posted by: mark Categories: Movies
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The best characters are little people with outsized ideas of where they should be. East Side Sushi, a small, low-budget indie, is populated with them. But the scale and proportionality is important – these are not people who aim to be astronauts, CEOs or leaders of the free world. A job with health benefits will […]

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9Mar

One year later: an update

Posted by: mark Categories: In The Soup Press Uncategorized
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A lot has happened since my last post, in February of 2018. First, I changed out the Judgment of Parrish page for Advocate + Guardian. Back in 2015(!), I paused production on Judgment of Parrish when it won the FadeIn grand prize and was being circulated among producers, none of whom want a movie already in the works. Nobody […]

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20Feb

Idrissa Ouédraogo (1954-2018)

Posted by: mark Categories: Moviemakers Movies
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Sunday marked the death of Idrissa Ouédraogo, Burkina Faso’s most renowned filmmaker. If you haven’t heard of him, that’s okay. Most people haven’t heard of Burkina Faso. I wouldn’t know Ouédraogo’s work either if not for a free film series I attended faithfully when I lived in Richmond. Even though my degree is in film […]

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19Dec

Santa Fraud is coming to town

Posted by: mark Categories: In The Soup
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My kids have been haranguing me for a PlayStation 4 for years now. I’m fed up. So they’re getting this, courtesy of their former packaging designer dad. Yes, I’ve worked with quite a few Chinese vendors. No, the game titles on the back aren’t “real.” (But yes, there’s a real “PS4” in there.)

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17Jan

To tell the truth

Posted by: mark Categories: Moviemakers Movies
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The internet is not the truth, but sometimes it exhibits a common grace. A sampling of websites and forums, for example, will teach a writer the proper form of address for a female superior officer. (If you don’t know, it’s ma’am.) If instead you relied on television writers, you would think sir was proper. I […]

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1Dec

Writer to Journalist – Best interview ever

Posted by: mark Categories: Moviemakers Movies
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I have worked as a journalist and a documentarian, and I can attest the worst thing either can do is to approach a story with an agendum*. I can also attest that this is exactly what the majority of journalists and documentarians do. Agenda have worked well for Barbara Kopple and Michael Moore, but journalists […]

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26Oct

Hypergraphics and the people who envy them

Posted by: mark Categories: In The Soup Moviemakers
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“Comparison is the thief of joy” – attributed to Theodore Roosevelt I’m writing a book. It started as a screenplay, but on draft three, I realized it bore a fundamental flaw that wrecked the entire story. So I started writing in prose form the thoughts and observations of the various characters in order to get […]

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