The excess of overspending on blockbusters and relying too much on audience goodwill for franchises, and not putting enough creative muscle in stories, finally caught up with Hollywood in 2023. This summer was a reckoning for studios on a number of fronts: first with the studios penny-pinching and disregard of creatives in the form of multi-month strikes by both the Writer’s Guild and Screen Actors Guild (with more potential strikes […]
In 2003, I had my first meetings with friends David Miles and Brendan Bushman about building Sonic Cinema. A year later, the first reviews went online; the year after that, hosting audio began, and my music and some of the Yahoos With a Microphone commentaries were online. This isn’t the first time I’ve been reflective about the growth of Sonic Cinema. As with the last time I wrote about Sonic […]
This is an episode that I wanted to do because it gives me a chance to discuss movies I’ve been a fan of since my early years of movie fandom. I have never read any of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels, but in particular, two film adaptations of his work- 1992’s “Patriot Games” and 1994’s “Clear and Present Danger”– were films I really loved watching. We don’t strictly stick to […]
In the latest episode of the podcast, Brian works through a long-time filmmaker blind spot. For a long time, I had not watched the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger- aka The Archers- but this discussion is a good time to do that. Joining me in talking about these great British filmmakers is film critic, and return guest, Matthew St. Clair, as we discuss “The Life and Death of […]
Last year, I decided to start a weekly blog, entitled “A Movie a Week.” Inspired by Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” series and AICN’s Quint’s “A Movie a Day” (and later, “A Movie a Week”) series, I decided to look at older movies in my collection. Some, I had wanted to write about for a while (“L.A. Confidential,” “Braveheart,” “Andrei Rublev”), some I was inspired to do as I went along […]
Last year, I was given the chance to listen to, and review, an album entitled, “Passing Through Veils,” by a good friend of mine, Darren Nelsen. A year later, I finally got around to doing so. The reasons for the delay are one part pure laziness, but also, listening to music for the purpose of review is a very different beast than reviewing movies, and I wanted to do right […]
“Brian Skutle’s passion is for storytelling, be it through music, film, or creative writing, with the story dictating the medium that best brings it to life. In his music, though, it may not be a specific story that inspires him, but a feeling. A sense of longing; of mystery; of tension; of serenity; of sensuality; of something beyond the humdrum normalcy of life, though sometimes, his goal is to just […]
Sonic Cinema Quick Thoughts
