Film Festival Articles
Film Magazines: A Wellspring of Interest In Cinema
Hollywood movies are a large business, with billions of dollars at stake, and, judging from box office and DVD takes, an exceedingly popular one. Finding out information about movies, how they're made, and opinions from people who've seen them is an important part of the trade of producing movies.
Likewise, a large part of a movie's production and overall budget comes from promotion – in fact, for most movies, the promotion budget is usually a significant fraction of the production budget! A case in point – Joss Whedon's Serenity, based off the Firefly television series, cost 31 million dollars to produce, and had a promotion budget of only 18 million dollars; its total box office proceeds were about 35 million, meaning that the theater run didn't turn a profit compared to the budget needed to produce and promote the film. (It's DVD sales have probably made the entire production a profitable one, but not at a fast enough return on investment to justify making another film.)
To get a feel for the ins and outs of movie making, there are dozens of magazines to look over. Focus on what you want to learn – do you want critical commentary on classics of the genre? Consider looking into Audience Magazine, or Filmmaker Magazine for perspectives from movie lovers, and from people who make movies from a living – sometimes they see radically different things in the same film. Another venue that's utterly excellent on this is Bright Lights, which will often spotlight a given range of related (and not so obviously related) films, giving tie ins that range from aesthetic to cultural, to religious to budgetary.
If you're more interested in the business side of making movies, there are magazines for every possible interest, ranging from Cineaste and Film Comment, which can loosely be described as the quarterly journal of film production and film criticism, respectively, to industry magazines like Premier, the Hollywood Report, FilmInk and MovieMaker, which are the places where film promotion happens in print. If it's being shot on a sound stage or even being considered for shooting on a sound stage, it's covered in one of those three magazines.
If all you're looking for is interviews with the creatives who make movies, look into Hollywood Life for traditional Hollywood talent, to Filmmaker for the independent and up and coming crowd. Reviews of upcoming movies can be found in a wide range of magazines, from Future Movies, to Preview, to Rotten Tomatoes. You can tailor your reviewing habits and tastes with several magazines in this niche, including ones tailored to genres, or ones aimed at steering you away from the really bad flicks.
In the "specialized review" category, you may also want to check
out Locus Magazine for science fiction movies, Starlog and Horror-Cine for
generalized media franchise movies like Star Trek and the like. If you want
to be steered away from really bad movies, the Z Review specializes in reviews
of movies that are bad, boring or formulaic. Likewise, Mr. Cranky writes
the most hilarious bad reviews of movies of all time – he rates movies
on a scale of one to 4 bombs, with special categories for movies like Battlefield
Earth, which were so gawd awfully bad that they ruptured the space time
continuum with the sheer force of their mediocrity.
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