- The Mad Men Account by Daniel Mendelsohn (NYRB) – With these standouts, Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish. Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues”—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic.
- The Hit Parade: Memorable Movie Hit Men –
- McBain: the Movie (video) –
- Nic Cage: "For example, Drive Angry I’m not wearing a wig" – SJ: There’s also that YouTube clip of “Nicolas Cage Losing His Sh*t.” Are you happy that people are celebrating those moments?
NC: Oh yeah. That’s very exciting. I was happy to see that this person found it and was going back to some of the really early work like Zandalee and even the movie I made with my brother Deadfall. It was very exciting to see that be reawakened.
SJ: With Drive Angry, did 3D give you a new tool for your acting?
NC: Yeah, I wanted to find ways to go into the audience. I even tried to get my tongue into the audience but I don’t know if that made it into the movie. That would’ve been an extreme moment but I’m not sure that it’s still in there or not. Yeah, trying to find ways to dance with the 3D cameras so that I could get into the fourth row of the audience or more.
- How much money does a movie need to make to be profitable? – The short answer is, it depends on a number of factors, but a rule of thumb seems to be that the film needs to make twice its production budget globally. For the longer answer, read on.