Dan Mecca

3 days ago | thefilmstage.com | Dan Mecca

20 years ago, 20th Century Fox began the summer-blockbuster season with a sword-and-sandals epic about the Crusades. Kingdom of Heaven‘s pedigree was impressive, if not bulletproof. Ridley Scott was only five years on from his Best Picture-winning Gladiator (not to mention immediate hit follow-ups Hannibal and Black Hawk Down, both in 2001) and newly minted movie star Orlando Bloom had plum, stand-out roles in two successful franchises (one of which had just won Best Picture itself).

6 days ago | thefilmstage.com | Dan Mecca

Welcome to The B-Side! Here we talk about movie stars! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between. It’s a day to celebrate! We discuss the legend Maggie Cheung! Our B-Sides include Lost Romance (a.k.a. Story of Rose), Full Moon in New York, Green Snake, and Sausalito. Our esteemed guest for this episode is Nick Newman, host of the Emulsion podcast for The Film Stage.

1 week ago | thefilmstage.com | Dan Mecca

WhenJames Madigan’s action picture Fight or Flight works it’s because of Josh Hartnett. The premise is fairly simple: a nefarious, black-ops government agency led by a fierce Katee Sackhoff is forced to employ the dormant skills of an exiled mercenary (Hartnett) in order to protect an asset named Isha (Charithra Chandran) on an airplane. The reasons are, of course, not altruistic. And the other twist: the majority of passengers are determined to kill the asset for a hefty bounty.

3 weeks ago | thefilmstage.com | Dan Mecca

Making movies is hard. This is not a revelatory observation, though a film like The Legend of Ochi underlines how much most of us take the art of filmmaking for granted. There is so much impossible skill involved in creating worlds and indelible stories told within those worlds. As I said in my review, “The Legend of Ochi, written and directed by Isaiah Saxon, is a lovely adventure built on imagination and skill. It certainly feels like the kind of film that will last a good long while.

3 weeks ago | thefilmstage.com | Dan Mecca

The Legend of Ochi, written and directed by Isaiah Saxon, is a lovely adventure built on imagination and skill. It certainly feels like the kind of film that will last a good long while. Short on dialogue and long on style, it tells of the small population in a village on the island of Carpathia: they live in fear of the Ochi, an apparently vicious form of primate haunting the nearby forest.