Thoughtful reviews, the Boulder film scene

Betty Blue

There can be beauty in tragedy, particularly when the key ingredient is the same in both —Marty Mapes (review...)

Betty arrives like a bolt from the Blue

" I am the monster’s mother "
— Sigourney Weaver, Alien Resurrection

MRQE Top Critic

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In addition to movie and DVD reviews, Movie Habit occasionally offers special features. Our essays are often interviews with filmmakers or coverage of some of America’s film festivals. While these features aren’t our bread-and-butter, we published some interesting essays in 2003.

March

Pablo Kjolseth interviewed David Cronenberg about Spider, and his long career in movies.

Cronenberg: “Movies, of course, use language, but there’s a level of abstraction in a book, a novel, that is much more extreme than in film. You cannot photograph an abstract concept. If you want to generate abstract concepts from your film, you have to do it by photographing actual physical objects.”

June

Neil Paananen wrote his first piece for Movie Habit, about the Waterfront Film Festival in Saugatuck, Michigan. What’s so special about that? For one thing, Saugatuck is a town without a single movie theater.

Paananen: “I went around listening to people and interviewing the police officers who were standing by in case a particularly nasty popcorn fight broke out. I couldn’t get much out of the cops, except that ‘they didn’t expect any trouble.’ The junior of the two police officers looked more willing to talk, but his partner kept him quiet. Beware, ye keepers of the peace, for I AM MEDIA.”

Matt Anderson interviewed Valeria Golino, in town to promote the neat little Italian film Respiro. After the interview, Golino drew a little heart in his notebook, which we suspect will be preserved forever.

Golino: “In Hollywood, [my character] would’ve been a manic depressive and they would have put her on Prozac.”

August

Marty Mapes spent a week in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, to cover the 2003 Great Plains Film Festival in eleven articles.

Mapes: “One of the ‘friends of the Ross’ I met drives the 50 miles from Omaha to support independent movies in Lincoln because there’s just no indie scene in Omaha. She said there was one art (she used her fingers as quotation marks) theater in Omaha, which she described as a ‘mall town.’”

September

Marty Mapes interviewed the creator of some of his favorite movies, the Qatsi trilogy, for The Colorado Daily and for TurnerClassicMovies.com. Godfrey Reggio came to Boulder and brought his own personal 35mm print of Koyaanisqatsi, along with a 35mm copy of his 7-minute short, Evidence.

Reggio: “When I was a young man at the age of fourteen I joined the Christian Brothers. I learned something rather remarkable upon all the other things that happened. The most practical thing in life is to be idealistic.”

See our essay archive at http://www.moviehabit.com/essay_archive.shtml for more interviews and essays.