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Careless Love Opening Night + Q&A
With director John Duigan ('The Year My Voice Broke') and cast Nammi Le and Peter O’Brien. THU 17 MAY – 7pm RITZ CINEMA, 45 St Pauls Street, Randwick NSW 2031 TICKETS ON-SALE – book now www.ritzcinema.com.au “Careless Love” tells the story of...
Film Producing with Metro Screen
Metro Screen, Paddington Town Hall, Sydney(NSW)
Winners of Australian Directors' Guild Awards Announced
(Nationwide)
Gold Coast Indie Film & Television Network Presents 'Getting Behind The News'
Gold Coast(QSL)
latest news
The Sapphires To Open Melbourne International Film Festival
The feel-good feature is set to kick off the Melbourne film festivities.
Screen Australia Invests in 16 Features
An eclectic set of projects have been granted funding...
De Niro & Douglas To Headline ‘Last Vegas’
The two legendary gents look to be starring in this comedy centred around a Las Vegas bachelor party.
‘Housos’ Get Big Screen Outing
Writer/director/comedian Paul Fenech is set to make his debut feature.
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The big screen online
Brian Duff looks at the world wide web of film.
While film news, gossip and announcements were once confined to the "trades" - Variety and The Hollywood Reporter - dedicated movie magazines Sight & Sound, Premiere, Cahiers du cinema, et al - and the film pages of daily newspapers, today hundreds of thousands voices shout in the chasmic darkness of the internet, each fighting for traffic and carving out a unique corner of the World Wide Web.
The most useful of these sites are broadly utilitarian, if happily user-friendly, databases like Internet Movie DataBase and AllMovie (each of which makes token attempts at breaking news and celebrity gossip) and local staple The Cinematic Intelligence Agency which offer concrete information and announcements alongside user generated content in the form of postings and discussion threads. Elsewhere, there are absorbing niche offerings available at fansites of all stripes, encompassing actors, filmmakers and genres, which range from bitterly critical to messianic devotion.
For webmasters and mistresses seeking heavy traffic and multiple hits per day, sites like Coming Soon, Movie Web, Hollywood.com and Dark Horizons tend to throw every tidbit they can gleam from the trades, wire services and individual film and filmmaker websites against the wall and see what sticks, often posting a dozen updates a day on hotly anticipated films. By their nature, these websites are blockbuster-centric with a clear bias toward genre films - sci-fi, comic book, action and franchise - that appeal to the most web-friendly demographic. Less accepting of tinseltown twaddle - at least explicitly - are the likes of eFilmCritic (which reckons that it doesn't allow a single "Hollywood movie crime slide by unpunished), Film Threat (the masthead of which proclaims "truth in entertainment"), Film School Rejects (which features a column called "What the Fuck!?") and Urban Cinefile (published by local favourites Andrew Urban and Louise Keller).
While these sites often feature exclusive content, be it in the form of set visits, interviews or even newfangled pieces like video journals and viral marketing pushes, they stand in contrast to the more staid, albeit usually better written, internet profiles of established movie magazines. Most prominent and respected amongst these remains Premiere Magazine, the US arm of which, after a 20 year run as perhaps the finest film magazine in the world, became web-exclusive in a cost cutting measure (losing much of its formerly formidable staff in the process). The aforementioned Sight & Sound, out of Britain, and eminent French mag Cahiers du cinema both have a prominent web presence to supplement their print versions, as does Filmmaker, Cineaste, Empire, Film Comment, Total Film and FILMINK magazines, alongside literally thousands of other fanzines, papers, mags and bulletins available in both print and web editions.
Taken together, this massive collection of websites is overwhelming - especially when added to the relative glut of information already available in physical form at the newsagency - which is exactly why compilation websites, headlined by Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic, exist. These one stop shops bring together as many reviews as possible to produce an aggregate score for each reviewed film. They also allow readers to link back to the original source, often through film-specific web portals for prominent publications like Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times and big time entertainment companies like AOL and CNN, all of which hope to proffer their star critic as the voice to trust in an untrustworthy sea of critics.
It is into this sticky morass that we have decided to relaunch the FILMINK website, which hopes to become a reliable, sharply written and well used portal to complement our top form publication. Herein, exclusive interviews and features will sit prominently alongside those most essential chunks of the magazine - film and DVD reviews - in what we hope will become a familiar stopover for folks interested in a page with a bit more depth than simple wire posts and anonymous celebrity sledging and a bit more wit than the dry, if terribly useful, database sites.
We hope you enjoy the site, and come back to it often to keep up to date with what's happening in film in Australia.
