Thursday 5 July 2007

Filmmaker Phil Grabsky's July 2007 blog

July 4th 2007

'Beautifully lensed' - 'lensed'?? I don't believe that word exists - and that from a reviewer in Variety. Oh dear. Anyway, he more or less liked the Mozart film which is still rating 90% on the Rotten Tomatoes site. The world of blogs, internet sites, MySpaces, etc, is bottomless…. Whenever I 'Google' In Search of Mozart, I am amazed at the scope of who's talking about it and where. My favourite so far though are the Singles' dates that met at screenings in LA. Excellent. I'm off to screenings in 2 weeks in New York, Newport, Chicago and Boston - I'll keep an eye out for singles on blind dates… I'm sure Mozart would have thoroughly approved. I'm certainly looking forward to those screenings - especially, I have to say, the Opening Night at Cinema Village in New York. It's a special cinema at one of the true hearts of cinema anywhere in the world - and so to have a documentary on a classical composer play there is, for me, a thrill. Hopefully, I won't be sitting on my own - but, if I am, I'll still be humming along.

Meanwhile, the whole distribution juggernaut is beginning to kick into gear for ESCAPE FROM LUANDA - it was only finished days ago but already we have festivals chasing us for copies. I'm very level-headed about all that. We'll see how it does and then go from there. Interestingly enough, only today, Angola have refused to allow BA to fly into Luanda any more in retaliation for the British banning Tagg airlines (due to an EC report that concluded they were too dangerous for the European air corridors). What a mess. And just as we were planning how to show the film to the school and students.

Talking of students, I ran the gauntlet of thousands of screaming kids last night when I went to the European premiere of the latest Harry Potter. The film is tremendous - each graphic wonder costing more than my entire annual film budget! You have to hand it to them - they do what they do supremely well. I wouldn't know where to start. It too, by the way, was 'beautifully lensed'….