movies Tag

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Former Hollywood Denizen… Why is everyone surprised that Parasite won the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) award for “best performance by a cast in a motion picture”?Read More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Stickler for Details… The movie Race, about American hero Jesse Owens, looks terrific. The sound? Well, that could use work. Just listen to the movie trailer. Notice something odd about the cameras?Read More

by XDL, Filmmaker… Why do particular films and actors succeed when many believe they’re undeserving? You’d be surprised how many people in Tinseltown lose sleep over that question. My answer: Hollywood is a branding and marketing mechanism, and once the gears get moving, it’s there to perpetuate content. The trick is to get the gears moving, and therein lies the art of it. Every now and then the mechanism takes steps to protect itself. An example: Avatar. This was not a particularly good movie. It wasn’t horrid, but the filmRead More

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Guy Who Likes To Think He’s Cultured But Digs On Watching The Walking Dead… I blame Jane Eyre. Although it’s supposedly one of the great works of literature, having to read it for my 10th grade English class made me feel like I was locked in an attic somewhere, going totally mad as the pages plodded on, while screaming, “OH COME ON, JANE – JUST STAND UP FOR YOURSELF ALREADY AND PUNCH SOMEONE!” Who knew I was a budding feminist atRead More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Superhero Analyst… It must suck to be powerful. I’m determining what image I should use to present myself here at Atomic Tango. Since I picture myself as an action star (in a power-nerd way), I researched how Hollywood is depicting its almighty this summer. What I saw wasn’t encouraging.Read More

by Freddy J. Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango LLC & Freelance Dreamer So “Inception” is this action-packed, visually stunning film that appears real. Too real. Indeed, although the premise is based on dreams, it isn’t very… well, dreamlike. Who has linear dreams that are essentially action films? Whose dreams appear shot from a third-person perspective with scenes that don’t involve them? Dreams are usually visualized from a first-person P.O.V., with the person dreaming involved in all the action. But forget the technical side — I don’t have to tell youRead More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Marketing Demonologist… It was brilliant. Not the film, but the marketing campaign that turned a $15,000 amateur horror flick into a $100 million box office smash. The problem? Serious anticipointment…Read More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Not An Actor But A Guy Who Played One On Stage… Hollywood is experiencing a “Freaky Friday”: in the 1976 movie, a mother and daughter magically swap bodies. After a series of icky moments milked for laughs, they predictably come to understand each other. Now, unpredictably, the entire movie industry is experiencing a similar switcheroo… A-list celebrities are failing to lure fans, reports the L.A. Times, while top movies are starring relative unknowns: The stars are not twinkling bright this summer.Read More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Guy Who Enjoys Wine, Film, and Advertising — Separately… So I’m flipping through the Calendar section of the L.A. Times print edition. (Only in Hollywood is the entertainment section of the major newspaper called the “Calendar.” That’s right, we don’t do anything else in this town but entertain or be entertained.) My eye caught the full-page ad for new movie Tetro. The ad brims over with critical raves, with the first quote proclaiming “Francis Ford Coppola, 70, has returned to hisRead More

by Freddy Tran Nager, Founder of Atomic Tango + Still Member of the Living… To prep for a video I’m producing, I watched Undead or Alive, the 2007 comedy-horror flick about zombies terrorizing the old west. It’s moderately entertaining, with Chris Kattan as a cowboy wannabe and Navi Rawat as the intellectual kung-fu fighting Native-American babe. The hitch in this giddyap? The zombies themselves. Although they have more dialogue than most zombies (better agents, perhaps?), they’re still just another iteration of the lumbering brain eaters who have populated most zombieRead More