Category Archives: Movies

by Rochelle Sara Miller | June 23, 2022 · 11:12 am

My Five Top Pics from Tribeca ’22

Still spinning from this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, where I watched 50 movies in 2 weeks.
Here are my 5 top pics:

ATTACHMENT (Gabriel Bier Gislason, 2022) – Genre bending Danish, Jewish-Queer-Romance-Horror-Comedy (set partly in Stamford Hill!)

BLAZE (Del Kathryn Barton, 2022) – Brutal, astonishing, and “unapologetically handmade” coming-of-age drama from Australia.

A LOVE SONG (Max Walker-Silverman, 2022) – At a Colorado campsite a woman awaits a visitor from her past. Beautifully shot story with a lot of charm. Dale Dickey’s performance is captivating.

FAMILY DINNER (Peter Hengl, 2022) – Tightly crafted, clever horror from Austria. Strong all round performances.

LIQUOR STORE DREAMS (So Yun Um, 2022) – Informative and intimate Doc on Korean owned liquor stores in LA and their changing role in local communities.

Bonus mention: SOMEWHERE IN QUEENS (Ray Romano, 2022) – Sweet family dramedy with spritely cast. Each character feels fully realized (and recognizable). Queens finally gets its movie!

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by Rochelle Sara Miller | March 1, 2018 · 10:33 pm

HBO: Aesthetics, Narratives, and Business Practices

Stoked to be teaching my HBO course at NYU in the fall. [taught fall ’18, and ’19]

Over the past few decades the premium cable and satellite network, Home Box Office Inc. has developed American audience tastes and raised expectations for quality television programming. A long-term proponent of the “prestige show,” HBO repeatedly made the case that premium television was worth its monthly subscription fee; in doing so HBO laid the foundations for subscription streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, all of which now also produce their own exclusive, original content. Responding recently to the growing competition from these sites, HBO restated its familiar rhetoric announcing it would focus even more on quality and exercise a greater selective content strategy.

What is a HBO show? And, why have HBO’s shows mattered so much in American cultural life? This course asserts that HBO produces a distinctive and recognizable brand. Beyond the boasted high production value evident in their often auteur controlled aesthetic, HBO’s shows share specific thematic concerns, narratives, and philosophy as they build a complex picture of US life, telling in long-form serials, stories from America’s past and present. Screenings will include some of the network’s most popular shows from a variety of genres, such as: The Wire, Girls, Entourage, Westworld, Game of Thrones, and Last Week Tonight. The class will also address the company’s changing corporate model and operating structure, along with its position in the global media market.

HBO Syllabus -Miller

Around the World in 16 Weeks

Currently teaching at NYU my survey course: International Cinema: 1960 to Present

(Screenshots taken from three movies I adore: Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima, 1960, Japan), Touki Bouki (Djibril diop Mambéty, 1973, Senegal), Close Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990, Iran)

Film scholar James Tweedie observes that in our “tendency to catalog films within familiar geographical, industrial, or linguistic boundaries,” we overlook “their most innovative and revelatory dimensions: their repetition and simultaneity in various locations and their resistance to the habitual attribution of local place-name.”

This course will oscillate between the national and the transnational to provide an overview of networks, trends, connections, and interactions within global cinema from 1960 onwards. The course will introduce key concepts and methods for approaching the study of world cinema. We will trace prominent national and transnational post-war movements that challenged Hollywood’s aesthetics and values. Many of the films we will watch in this course share similar thematic and aesthetic concerns. Concerns that cross borders include: postwar trauma and historical revisionism, the relationship between politics and aesthetics, intergenerational conflict and youth culture, post-colonialism and growing national consciousness, gender oppression and degrees of liberation, and the ambivalence towards or embrace of global capitalism. We will also consider the growing prestige of art cinema and film festival circuits.

By the end of this course you will have the knowledge and vocabulary required to analyze and write about international films within their broader cultural, historical, and aesthetic contexts, while remaining ever-mindful of the complexities and problematic nature of what it means to discuss “global cinema.”

Syllabus: NYU International Cinema 1960 to Present – Miller

Welcome!

I am a film industry researcher based in Santa Monica, CA. I hold a PhD from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts/Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies.

I’ve taught television and film courses at New York University, Seton Hall University, Brooklyn College, and CUNY Hunter. I’m also a video editor (Avid, Premiere). Prior to relocating to the US I worked as a project manager in the video games industry.

When I’m not watching or writing about movies, I like to read film industry trade journals, novels, and historical non-fiction. I love cats and travel.

You can reach me here: LinkedIn. Please feel free to connect.

Category Archives: Movies

My Five Top Pics from Tribeca ’22

HBO: Aesthetics, Narratives, and Business Practices

Around the World in 16 Weeks

Welcome!

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