Month: September 2017

6 Degrees: Friday Flix

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Hello out there to all the film fans from Six Degrees of Film. Here’s some of the films that were reviewed this week. Victoria & Abdul has been getting good reviews, particularly surrounding Judi Dench’s portrayal of an aging Queen Victoria. And Battle of the Sexes with Emma Stone and Steve Carrell has also received highly favorable reviews

From the Vaults: Apocalypse Now is reviewed on The MacGuffin site. And from Turner Classics, there’s a piece featuring Martin Scorcese’s Age of Innocence with Michelle Pfeiffer and Daniel Day Lewis.

The New York Film Festival is celebrating its 55th year, and this is a nostalgic look back at the choices made in 1967. The piece is in Film Comment and available in 6 Degrees of Film magazine. Speaking of film festivals, Director Wim Wenders was also honored at the Toronto Film Festival this year. Wenders clarifies his role: “I’m not an artist, I’m a craftsman, and the craft is life.” One of his best known films may be “Wings of Desire” and he also directed “Paris, Texas” and won a BAFTA for it. Wenders article is online at Ebert.com and is featured in the magazine.

Speaking about film festivals, Author Mark Brooks writes eloquently about the choices that Susan Sontag made when opening the festival in New York in 1967. Brooks writes, “It is difficult, in the era of DVD and Blu-ray streaming, and one-touch availability, to imagine that if you didn’t see a movie at a festival, you might have missed your only chance. But 50 years ago, that sense of urgency fueled cinephile culture.”

 

Books on Film: There’s a piece on Ebert.com about a book called Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes by a film professor at Columbia. There is something to be said for the idea of an artistic approach to immersing oneself in the Cinematic Experience, as opposed to flopping down and just screaming inwardly, “Entertain me Please!”

Some of the contenders for this seasons film awards will be among the films released in the next few months. Some of the early leads go to Frances McDormand for the indie Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Oscars love the quirky types, and this one delivers. Holly Hunter, always in the running, has been mentioned for her take as the mother in The Big Sick.

Speaking of Quirky: The very unconventional and immensely talented Sci-Fi writer Harlan Ellison is featured in a piece on Ebert.com. Here’s a small exchange that is priceless and SO Harlan!

Ellison: I just saw, “Back to the Future.”
Writer Goldberg: “Great movie, isn’t it?”
Ellison: “Piece of shit”
Goldberg: “You didn’t like it?!”

Ellison: “It is one of the most ridiculous, stupid pieces of shit I have ever seen in my life. It’s a rip-off, a steal from Bob Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, to begin with. It is absolutely mindless, empty-headed, manipulative, and it’s a sitcom.”

(Tell us what your really think, Harlan!) I can relate to this as I recently watched Seth McFarlane’s opening stint on The Orville, where they are transported to a zoo on a planet in which humans are put on display. Such a blatant rip-off of the classic Twilight Zone with Roddy McDowall starring in “People are alike all over” written by Rod Serling is almost too much to bear. S***t happens, Harlan! There are still blatant rip-offs of old Twilight Zone plots.

There’s lots of good buzz surrounding the sequel to Bladerunner. And the films that continue to draw some measure of controversy are Mother!, for it’s blatant badness, and American Made, which has some mixed reviews, but is still considered a marginal success.

One more thing: There’s a quiz floating around online from Buzzfeed that lists many of the comedies of the past two d

 

ecades with the deciding factor declaring if you have seen many of them, you are funny. The thing is, lots of these films really aren’t very good. Sadly, if you do think, as Harlan Ellison would about many of these films, they are mindless, empty-headed, manipulative and should really just have been made as sit-coms.

I think the take-away here is to always think for yourself and work hard to avoid becoming part of the Group Think & Herd Mentality mindset that tells you unless you think certain things are funny or popular or whatever, then you are somehow not relevant. Sometimes, it’s better to hear the different drum a drummin. Keep on Beating the drum and till next time, see you at the movies!-ML

6 Degrees: Friday Flix

6 Degrees of Film

Greetings Film Fans: The Fall Film Newsletter is still available on this 6 Degrees of Film website, so click the link and check out the upcoming films. Some of the big stories happening now in Hollywood include the terrible reviews for Jennifer Lawrence’s Mother! My brother warned me about how terrible this movie was,(which of course, intrigues me even more!), and the audience response has been overwhelmingly negative.
The Stephen King horror film, IT is still the dominant box office winner. And some of the films rolling out this month are featured in the Six Degrees Magazine. The Battle of the Sexes has had some mixed reviews, but not terrible ones. There’s a new trailer for the all-star cast featured in the Murder on the Orient Express remake coming in November.
Each week, I go thru the online film sites and look for interesting and intriguing reviews and articles that don’t simply repeat the main headlines over and over….Some are reviews of classic films, and others are about movies that people may have missed-those that go Under the Radar.
Entertainment Weekly is arguing that The Assassination of Jesse James with Brad Pitt is a “mistreated masterpiece”. I beg to differ, but it’s worth reading the arguments supporting this one. And there’s a good piece on the great Stephen King, who doesn’t need a new Renaissance Revival. If there are people who don’t know of his work, besides the horror field, know that he also penned The Shawshank Redemption as well as notable treatises about the craft of writing.
Film Reviews: Kingsman: Golden Circle has a controversial sex scene supposedly, but I can’t say it’s something that keeps me awake at night! And director Wes Anderson, another controversial filmmaker, has released a trailer for his stop motion feature, Isle of Dogs. There’s a review for Judi Dench’s latest film, Victoria and Abdul, from NPR, which is a favorable one.
And for Hitchcock fans, there is an analysis of supposedly the ‘weakest’ scene in the classic “Psycho”. Some people have told me that “The Princess Bride” is one of their favorite films of all time. For Princess fans, there’s a post from Moviefone with fun facts on the film!
And some of my favorites that have gone unnoticed include the follow-up of  Jack Nicholson’s Chinatown character which he revived in The Two Jakes. And the great ensemble piece from Director Curtis Hanson that was Russell Crowe’s breakout performance, L.A. Confidential, is also reviewed. The other Under the Radar film featured this week is from 2005- a review of the Nicholas Cage film, Lord of War. Cage plays an illegal arms smuggler and the topic is sadly prescient in our current political climate. And finally, the Indie Black comedy starring Don Johnson, before he made it big with Miami Vice is reviewed- A Boy and His Dog.
In the last few months, we’ve lost some of the great avante-garde actors and artists of the last few decades. One is the playwright and actor Sam Shephard, known best most likely for his iconic role in The Right Stuff. The other is the character actor, Harry Dean Stanton, who was a contemporary and sometimes collaborator with Shephard.  Stanton starred in one of Shephard’s adaptations to the screen, Paris, Texas. There’s an article with the three best selected obits on Stanton featured in our magazine.
Recommended Reads: The book Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940’s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling is reviewed on the David Bordwell film site. The 6 Degrees Fall Film Newsletter will  also give you short blurbs for each recommended movie released in the coming weeks.
Next week will feature some of the Turner Classic Movies for the month of October, as well as the upcoming films we’re excited to see debuting in film festivals and touted for Oscars and other notable awards. Looking forward to some of the new crop-till then, see you at the Movies!-ML

6 Degrees: Friday Flix

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6 Degrees of Film

Greetings Film Buffs! Here are the notes from the Hurricane Evacuation last weekend here in Tampa. My Friday Flix notes were not published, but were just a few random thoughts I wrote up in anticipation of the big blow. We were lucky here in Tampa, but Irma didn’t spare many regions, and we’ve been without power in so many places around town, but especially the hard-hit areas in South Florida and the Keys, and in the Caribbean and the US Virgin Islands. Thoughts are with those folks.

Notes from Last week-Notes from Hurricane Irma: We are planning for a big blow here in Tampa from Hurricane Irma. How I long for the carefree days of yore when we treated Hurricanes much like the Addams Family members, planning Hurricane Parties and just having fun in a macabre and sick kind of way! Now, things are serious with evacuations and the forecast models where we track the storms to the point where there is no point in doing anything but, as John Belushi suggested in Animal House, “Start drinking heavily!” With that in mind, I’m offering the Fall Film Newsletter from last week for the Friday Flix Fans.

Back to the Present:  For this week,  6 Degrees Magazine has reviews of many of the new films listed in the newsletter. There’s also an interesting web page from the American Film Institute where you can check off how many films you’ve seen in the top 100 Films List (I saw 89 of them).
There’s another link to the interesting site: Does the Dog Die? Found on Facebook. And the National Film Registry Listing is also featured, which works to nominate and preserve films from the past 100 years of movie making history. All of these sites are recommended so check them out.
Also featured, a post from The Macguffin site: The Legacy of Star Wars. And the latest films you find featured in the Fall Film Newsletter are reviewed in 6 Degrees magazine. The Florida Project with Willem Dafoe, Mother! with Jennifer Lawrence and Michelle Pfeiffer (Pfeiffer steals the show according to Ebert.com); IT from Stephen King; the Indie film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri with Frances McDormand– (“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it”-great quote from Flannery O’Connor featured in the Ebert review)’ and Suburbicon- which, by the way, wasn’t recommended.
There’s a post about the Golden Age of Hollywood director Otto Preminger, who directed one of my favorite Film Noir movies- Laura. And another piece about the original version of what was dubbed a “modern screwball comedy”, the film The In-Laws from 1979 with Peter Falk and Alan Arkin.
There are two film festivals featured, both the Toronto Film Festival and Telluride. And one of the films I’m looking forward to seeing: The Shape of Water from director Guillermo del Toro is also reviewed. The only running controversy for this week has been the debate about the effects that the Rotten Tomatoes site has on film sales. The research says!….No, there’s no discernable correlation between the scores either good or bad and the sale of tickets to films reviewed on Rotten Tomatoes.

So glad to be home and to be online and to be with friends and family and all the film fans out there – till next time when I’ll see you at the movies!-ML

6 Degrees Fall Film Newsletter

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6 Degrees of Film

Greetings Film Lovers! Welcome to the 2017 Six Degrees Fall Film Newsletter. There’s a total of 52 Films we’ve listed for the period from September through to the Christmas and Holiday Season in December. Here’s a clue: the ones with 2 stars by them are recommended to see at the movies. A couple have 3 stars-they are the Kids films and recommended for family viewing.

The films with one star may be very good films, but they are recommended for the small screen. The Big Screen Movie Experience is something that should be a significant one for most films these days. After all, it’s getting more and more expensive to go to a movie at the movie theater. And we should demand, as moviegoers, a high quality of film on many levels, artistically and technically, to spend our money and take the time to make the trek to the theaters to see great films! This list includes action/adventure; A-list stars and directors, and intriguing storylines. Those are the types of films that will always command our attention even in the fast-paced world we live in today. Enjoy and see you each week at the movies!-ML

 **Recommended for Viewing at the Theater

*Save for the Small Screen

***Recommended for Families/Kids Movies

 

 

 

September Movie Openings

 

 September 8th

 

**IT– – Bill Skarsgard plays the shape-shifting clown Pennywise in this version of Stephen King’s IT

 

*Rebel in the Rye – with Nicholas Hoult is about J.D. Salinger, the scarred author who is depicted during his creative process in creating the classic The Catcher in the Rye.

 

 September 15th

 

*In Search of Fellini –A small town girl from Ohio discovers the delightful yet bizarre films of legendary director Federico Felline.

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 **Mother! With Jennifer Lawrence- Darren Aronofsky directs this film about a married couple whose relationship is tested when another couple-played by Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris, come to visit. Reportedly a cross between Black Swan and Rosemary’s Baby, this film is hard to pin down, but has been called a thriller.

 

September 22nd

 

* Kingsman: The Golden Circle – a sequel movie-where Colin Firth returns along with co-star Taron Egerton as the juvenile-delinquent turned master spy named Eggsy.

 

*Stronger with Jake Gyllenhaal-  Gyllenhaal plays the role of Jeff Bauman in this biopic based on the memoirs of Bauman, who had both legs blown off in the Boston Marathon bombing.

 

**Battle of the Sexes stars Steve Carell and Emma Stone in this recreation of the famous Bobby Riggs vs Billie Jean King Tennis Match in 1973.

 

*Victoria and Abdul is from Director Stephen Frears and stars Judi Dench as Queen Victoria in this drama surrounding her friendship with the handsome Indian man named Abdul.

 

*Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of our Lives documentary opened the Tribeca Film Festival and was well received.

 

September 29th

 

*American Made with Tom Cruise, who stars as the real-life pilot Barry Seal,  a man whose flying skills and his greed led him to moonlight as a drug runner for the infamous Medellin drug cartel, and later to become an informant for the CIA.

 

*Mark Felt- The Man who Brought Down the House– with Liam Neeson playing Felt, the FBI agent who was known as Deep Throat during Watergate.

 

October Movie Openings

 

 October 6th

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**Blade Runner 2049 with Ryan Gosling- is the much- anticipated sequel of sorts to the original Ridley Scott/Harrison Ford classic. Denis Villeneuve directs and there’s an appearance from the original Rick Deckard -we’ll have to see if it’s more than a walk on by Harrison Ford. 

 

 

*Brawl in Cellblock 99 with Vince Vaughn, is about a former boxer who takes a job as a drug courier and winds up in jail where his enemies converge and force him into acts of violence.

 

 *The Florida Project with Willem Dafoe, this one is set in Orlando Florida and is about some hard living characters, as seen through the eyes of a playful and imaginative child.

 

**The Mountain Between Us with Idris Elba and Kate Winslet is based on the 2010 Charles Martin novel. The story is about two plane crash survivors, a journalist (Winslet) and a surgeon (Elba) who brave the elements and fall in love as they struggle for survival.

 

***My Little Pony: The Movie with Emily Blunt providing a voice in this animated feature along with Kristin Chenowith and Zoe Saldana.

 

*Una with Rooney Mara is about a young woman’s confrontation with a man from her past that threatens to derail the man’s new life and the woman’s stability.

 

October 13th

 

*Goodbye Christopher Robin with Domhnall Gleeson. The film follows the real-life author of Winnie the Pooh and Co., A A Milne,  after he returns home for the war, damaged and dispirited. Milne finds consolation as he re-connects with his son Christopher Robin and the now familiar group of stuffed animal friends.

**Marshall – a film about Thurgood Marshall stars Chadwick Boseman as the iconic Supreme Court Justice who broke through racial barriers. This film focuses on the earlier life of Marshall, when he worked as an NAACP lawyer in a racially-charged case.

**The Meyerowitz Stories with Adam Sandler is about estranged siblings who gather in New York to celebrate their father’s work as an artist.

 

 *Overdrive with Scott Eastwood is about a notorious crime boss who forces two legendary car thieves to steal a vehicle to win back their freedom.

 

October 26th

*Same Kind of Different as Me- with Renee Zellweger and Greg Kinnear is about an International art dealer (Kinnear) who befriends a homeless man in order to save his struggling marriage

 

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**The Snowman with Michael Fassbender playing the brilliant fictional detective Harry Hole. Norwegian author Jo Nesbe created this fast paced and popular crime series, and this particular story is about the Snowman Killer, who always strikes on the first day of winter after leaving small snow statues near the victim’s body.

 

*Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween- This is a Halloween movie with Madea/Perry, of course!

 

 October 27th

*Suburbicon with Matt Damon, directed by George Clooney-(uh-oh). This film can’t be pinned down either, as it is about a 50’s era family who are victims of a home invasion. Oscar Isaac plays the suspicious investigator on the case. Clooney says there are laughs, “but it wasn’t designed to be ha-ha funny. It starts out like a Disney film, and by the end it feels like an acid trip”

*Thank You for Your Service with Miles Teller starring in this true story about the scars of war and the difficulties a soldier has in returning to civilian life.

 

November Movie Openings

 

*Bill Nye: Science Guy -Documentary where Nye attempts to restore science to its rightful place in a world sometimes openly hostile to evidence and reason.

 

 *Last Flag Flying with Bryan Cranston, Steve Carrell and Lawrence Fishburne-We previewed this indie in Friday Flix last week, with Steve Carrell starring as a grieving father burying his son who was killed in Iraq.

**LBJ with Woody Harrelson -Director Rob Reiner has created this biopic of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

 

**The Man who Invented Christmas with Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) as Charles Dickens during the time he created the classic tale A Christmas Carol. Christopher Plummer plays Scrooge for the play within the play theme.

**Roman Israel, Esq with Denzel Washington in this crime thriller set in LA.

 

*Thor: Ragnorak with Chris Hemsworth- The Hulk is along for the ride, along with Valkyrie and Loki as they strive to stop the Goddess of Death-played by Cate Blanchett, from destroying Asgard (and the galaxy too).

 

November 10th 

 

*Daddy’s Home 2 with Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg returning with a new round of sparring partners-their respective fathers, played by John Lithgow and Mel Gibson. The comedy hijinks play out when the Dads visit for the holidays.

*Lady Bird with Saoirse Ronan in a coming-of-age story directed by actress Greta Gerwig.

 

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**Murder on the Orient Express with Kenneth Branagh, also directing with the star-studded cast including Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe, Penelope Cruz, Daisy Ridley, Michelle Pfeiffer and Judi Dench. Agatha Christie wrote the original in 1934, and Branagh directs this revamped version as well as taking on the lead role of Hercule Poirot,  the master detective determined to sleuth out who killed who on the mystery train.

 

**Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri with Frances McDormand is an Indie film about a woman named Mildred, who is angry and working to avenge her daughter’s murder in this dark comedy from the same director who brought us In Bruges – Martin McDonagh.

 

November 17th

**Justice League with Ben Affleck returning as Batman as he unites an entire team of super humans- Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Flash, and Cyborg as they defend the Earth from a cosmic threat.

 

 *Wonder with Julia Roberts is based on the 2012 novel by R.J. Palacio. It’s about a 5th grade boy with Treacher Collins syndrome, and his parents who decide to send him to a mainstream school for the first time.

 

 

November 22nd

***Coco is the animated Pixar offering,  about a 12 year old aspiring singer named Miguel who is accidently transported to the Land of the Dead, this vibrant posthumous place populated with Skeletal ancestors and all kinds of whimsical stops along the way. The director says it’s a bit like Monsters, Inc, in that there’s a fantastic world of monsters, but “it’s rooted in a world we know” Coco, by the way, is the great-grandma of Miguel, who is one of his living family members that we meet as Miguel traverses between the two worlds.

 

**Darkest Hour with Gary Oldman starring as Winston Churchill. This film focuses on the period when England had refused to give in to Hitler’s relentless war machine.

 

 *Death Wish with Bruce Willis in the title role made famous by tough guy Charles Bronson. Eli Roth directs the remake.

**Molly’s Game with Jessica Chastain, based on the story of Molly Bloom, is about a competitive skier who decides to move to LA and run the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker game. Molly ends up being indicted, and the twists in this tale led director Aaron Sorkin to direct this fascinating story.

 

 November 24th

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**The Current War with Benedict Cumberbatch as Thomas Edison in this story about Edison’s race with George Washington to create a sustainable electrical system.

 

 December Movie Offerings: The Holiday Season

 

 

December 1st

*The Disaster Artist with James Franco explores the depths that lead to the creation of how a truly awful movie is made. Franco plays the “auteur-actor” Tommy Wiseau, who created the original 2003 cult film, The Room, which garnered a huge following based on it’s “entertaining awfulness”.

December 8th

 

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**The Shape of Water with Sally Hawkins in this Cold War era imaginary tale from director Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) about a mute woman, (Hawkins), who discovers a top secret government experiment.

 

December 15th

 

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**Star Wars: The Last Jedi with Daisy Ridley returning as Rey with the saga picking up where we left the characters hanging. Luke Skywalker is there on a mountaintop, and we’ll see Carrie Fisher’s final screen appearance as Princess Leia. John Boyega and Adam Driver return respectively as Finn and the villainous Kylo Ren.

 

December 20th

 

*Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle with Dwayne Johnson in the reworked version of the Robin Williams film where four teenagers play an old videogame and find themselves trapped in the bodies of their avatars.

 

December 22nd

 

*Downsizing with Matt Damon in what is being described as a “dramedy” about an overpopulated world where scientists can now shrink humans to pocket size.

**The Papers with Meryl Streep & Tom Hanks – Spielberg directs this story centered around the real-life events that ensued when The Washington Post and the Nixon administration went to battle in the front pages of the news over the release of Daniel Ellsburg’s Pentagon Papers.

*Pitch Perfect 3 with Anna Kendrick-The Barden Bellas are back for a third round

 

December 25th: Christmas Day Openings

**The Greatest Showman with Hugh Jackman starring in this musical version about the life of master showman P.T. Barnum and the creation of his traveling circus.

 

*Wes Anderson film with retiring Daniel Day-Lewis – Not much has been released about this one other than the fact actor Daniel Day Lewis has announced his impending retirement from acting!

****

We are living in a kind of post Golden Age of Blockbusters and trying to feel our way into the 21st Century Cinematic Film Experience that includes more than just a cheap thrill with a pair of 3D Glasses. We may end up nostalgic and waxing lyrical for the type of Blockbuster films and the Advent of each new film “season” that is prefaced with talk of the Possible Award winners and the big losers.

The recent interview with Director Steven Soderbergh was telling in that he spoke of the cavalier attitude towards “Markdowns” that ended the careers for directors such as Heaven’s Gate Director Michael Cimino. Now, in his words, “You don’t get punished for your mistakes the way you used to back then. There have been a couple of films in the last year to 18 months that are 200 million dollar write downs! It used to be people would get fired for that, and now they don’t….And I think that’s part of the problem, there’s no new oxygen in the system”.

These types of eye-opening and direct confessions occur rather infrequently. The last time I recall was when Spielberg spilled the beans about his Lincoln production, and predicted the continual rise of the small screen, after confessing he almost made Lincoln for HBO instead of as a theatrical release. These are the forerunners for the changing world that has been the standard in film for the past century. Who would have predicted “Talkies” at the beginning of the silent film era? And during the Golden Age of Film, who could have known that Television would create such a huge thunderclap in the entire film industry? Or who could have known that one lawsuit in 1949 could have ended the Golden Age with the decree that gave films and their theater chain counterparts the Kiss of Death by declaring the entire operation a type of monopoly that could not stand the scrutiny? Then, the sixties and the ratings codes gave films another kind of upheaval, creating the independent film industry and the Age of Aquarius with Sex and the Free Love Generation changing the way people watched films and thought about them.

Film critics rose and fell with this standard. The long-time New York film critic Bosley Crowther saw his career end after he panned Bonnie and Clyde. And critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert rose to prominence. Ebert was able to cross over into the newer era of online film criticism, and his website, Ebert.com, continues to dominate long after his death.

Star Wars created another explosion, with the advent of the Art of Special Effects and the age of Science Fiction and the Juvenilization of Movies. The Blockbuster era began in the seventies, and has continued to this day. We have always known that the real artistic center of the Universe for all Hollywood producers is the Almighty Dollar. And politics and current events figure more than we would be comfortable in acknowledging, if we are going to make an honest assessment. That has been the norm from the very early days, when the Supreme Court ruled in the early 1900’s that film was NOT considered Art. That paved the way to monolithic control for Thomas Edison and his film studio.

And the story has been the same to this day….The film world exists and thrives on changes within our culture and society. And it has adapted from the earliest days of the Penny Arcades through the last century and into the 21st Century. And so it goes…

One More Thing: This Fall, sign up for the Friday Flix at the 6 Degrees website, and you’ll find the links to the latest film reviews and the in-depth articles that we scan to look for the best of the web. Save yourself the trouble and go straight to the source! We take the time to ask the questions about films that are on your mind….Not simply, what should I see this week? What are the top reviews on the film I’m interested in seeing? But also….

What are the best films made so far in the 21st Century? What types of films do millennials want to see? And what is going to happen to the vast network of Hollywood studios and theatre chains that have thrived over the past decades on an expanding American audience? What do film buffs really want to know? These are the questions we try to address and to respond to each week in “Friday Flix” and in the 6 Degrees of online Film Magazine.

Hope you enjoyed checking out the films and don’t forget to visit us online at the 6 Degrees Blog and our 6 Degrees Magazine for weekly updates. See you next week at the movies!-ML

 

 

6 Degrees: Friday Flix Labor Day Edition

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6 Degrees of Film

 

Happy Labor Day to all the Film Fans out there! We are very excited as we are ready to release the Fall Film Newsletter this weekend. There are about 52 films on the list, but much less in the final recommended pool of films to see this Fall. It’s always fun to see what’s coming around the bend. And after what can only be described as a lackluster Summer Season, there’s lots of room for improvement when it comes to Big Box Office releases. Some of the questions that we are hearing, and are asking, are part of the mix of articles and posts that we try to respond to on a weekly basis.

Just to name a few: What are the best films made to date in the 21st Century? What types of films do millennials want to see? And what is going to happen to the vast network of Hollywood studios and theatre chains that have thrived over the past decades on an expanding American audience? What do film buffs really want to know? These are the questions we try to address and to respond to each week in “Friday Flix” and in the 6 Degrees of  Film online Magazine.

This Fall, sign up for the Friday Flix at our 6 Degrees website, and you’ll find the links to the latest film reviews and the in-depth articles that we scan weekly as we look for the best of the web. Save yourself the trouble and go straight to the source!

What’s the Hollywood Buzz? Labor Day is here and the buzz is about the poor attendance at the box office and the sluggish sales. Of course, the answer always occurs to us that there is no problem when good movies abound. But the latest batch has been lackluster at best. The Films that are coming out this Fall hold some promising specimens.

The Shape of Water, Kenneth Branagh’s version of Murder on the Orient Express, the Justice League film for those who can’t get enough super-hero doses, and the big Kahuna: Star Wars- the Last Jedi are coming, just to name a few. There’s Blade Runner 2049 for geeks like me who remember the original 1983 Ridley Scott/Harrison Ford version. And some other movies are dropping that may or may not pan out.

So, depending on your taste, for Independent features, for action/adventure or comedy and romance (always lagging behind these days), there is something for everyone.

This week in 6 Degrees Magazine: Check out the TCM blog on The Wages of Fear, a great film based on a novel from 1953 called The Salary of Fear, the film is directed by Henri-George Clouzot and stars a young Yves Montand. There’s film reviews for The Hitman’s Bodyguard and Ingrid Goes West from the Macguffin film site.

A book on the wonderful actress Anne Bancroft is reviewed on the Film Comment site. Film Comment also remembers the late horror director Tobe Hooper who gave us the- if not immortal, at least the memorable “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” films. There are previews for 2017 Fall films from the Ebert site, and also previews of the Telluride Film Festival.

An interesting piece from Vox is entitled: Rotten Tomatoes, explained. There’s been some controversy of late over the RT scores having an adverse effect on box office returns. So there’s that.

And finally, we are set to prepare ourselves for the slowest Labor Day at the box office in 25 years. Just another sign of the growing influence of overseas sales, too many competing events and the drift of millennials away from the traditional theatrical experience, and, oh yes, the fact that Hollywood keeps making crappy films don’t help matters either!

The Fall Film Newsletter is coming out this weekend with a list that includes some of the more intriguing films opening this Fall. There’s the usual suspects: The sequels, some comic book genres, the kids films, the biopics, the adaptations of best-sellers and some that look like duds. There’s always one or two surprises in every batch of films that are unleashed on the public. Here’s hoping for some good surprises coming soon to a theater near you….Have fun with the Fall Film Newsletter and See you at the Movies!-ML