Tagged: movies

LANSING, Mich. (AP) - The Republican-led state House is looking to do away with tax incentives that lure moviemakers to Michigan so the money instead goes toward road maintenance.

The House on Tuesday stripped $25 million in tax credits it planned to set aside for the film industry.

The funding would go to the state and local governments for road repairs.

The House also cut $25 million from an economic-development fund and allocated it for roads.

The full House is expected to vote on its budget Wednesday, setting the stage for negotiations with the Senate and Gov. Rick Snyder next month.

So far the GOP-controlled Senate and governor are looking to designate at least $25 million in incentives for Hollywood - half the amount in the current budget.

Filmmaker Ken Burns is hands-down one of the world's leading creators of documentaries.

He has helped modern-day audiences understand and appreciate The Civil War, World War II, the jazz age, prohibition, baseball, the Shakers, America's national parks and many more aspects of American life.

Now, he is returning to Ann Arbor, the town of his boyhood.

He'll be here to talk about race and inequality as part of the Penny W. Stamps lecture series but more importantly to present his film, "The Central Park Five" at the Ann Arbor Film Festival.

Come gather round ArtPod this week, as we rip off Bob Dylan for a cute headline.

Today, ArtPod is talking about change. All kinds of change: political, cultural, even technological change. 

We’ll talk with a storyteller, actors, students and even the operators of a small town movie theater about how they deal with bad changes (the end of an era for mom-and-pop cinemas), weird change (so you've got an emergency manager! Now what?), and cultural change (the tricky, tricky task of talking about race).  

Their projects are radically different, but they each help us talk about or understand a difficult change – which may be what all art is supposed to do. 

The film, Middle of Nowhere tells the story of a young woman caught between loyalty to her incarcerated husband, and possibilities she finds outside the walls of the prison. Jennifer White interviews actor Omari Hardwick who portrays Derek, the incarcerated husband. Hardwick has also appeared in the films Sparkle and For Colored Girls, to name a few. Ava DuVernay won the Best Director Award for the film at the 2012 Sundance film festival, the first time that award has been won by an African American woman. The film is showing in Southfield.

People are making a lot of movies about Detroit these days. More than 60 of those films will be screened this weekend at an outdoor film festival in Detroit's Perrien Park.

Organizers hope to spark conversation about how Detroit is seen by Michiganders, and the rest of the world. 

25 hours, 15 minutes and 45 seconds of film, documentaries and music videos - all about Detroit.

“It’s kind of wild how many [films] have been made in the last 3 or 4 years...I wasn’t aware it was on this scale,” said filmmaker Nicole Macdonald.