Double Articulation: Deconstructing Brett Ratner’s X3: This is spot on, except a) it's too nice to Halle Berry, b) it's too nice to the ham-handed Angel plot, and c) the Hellfire Club clearly should have been in the fourth movie, because that's how I would have done it. (Spoilers abound.)
Vital flesh: the mysterious world of Pink Eiga: A Midnight Eye writer on a Japanese bad-girl sexploitation genre that I'd only vaguely heard of. (NSFW!)
Japanese Horror Movies and more: I'm not nearly as up on contemporary Asian movies as I'd like to be. (I missed "Kamikaze Girls" when it came to town and now kind of regret it.)
Crooked Timber on old movies: I've seen most of the Hollywood fare being mentioned (though I'm taking notes on the Japanese movies), but Ted's post and the subsequent comments a damn good list, putting the AFI's to shame despite the overappreciation of "Sullivan's Travels".
Name The No-Name Directors Given Some of the Films They Directed: It's like Victor Fleming's career, only with "Revenge of the Nerds II" and "Christmas with the Kranks" instead of "Gone with the WInd" and "The Wizard of Oz".
Joseph Cornell's "Rose Hobart": Cornell obviously loved old movies, given how many of his boxes use movie stills, promo photos, and the like. This sounds utterly fantastic.
Weylan-Yutani Corporation: I've got access to Mother now and I'll get my own answers, thank you.
The Vendetta Behind "V for Vendetta": Alan Moore's genius is exceeded only by his freakishness; being witness to his hectoring crazy-Druid testimony must have been a treat.
Girlhacker's annual Oscar loot list: Lilly puts this together every year, and every year I'm staggered by how much people are willing to dole out in the hopes of a celebrity endorsement.
Adventure #1: The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T: One man's quest to find the lost footage from Dr. Seuss's only live-action movie.
"Charade", a public domain film: Thanks to a "Wonderful Life"-esque clerical error, the fine 1963 Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn movie is in the public domain and available from archive.org.
Proposed Standards for Vampires: Except the guy doesn't show much familiarity with the Stoker book (or, for that matter, the Hammer Films' definitive take, or for "Buffy"). Was this legislation written by a lobbyist?
The Wrens and Kathryn Yu interview: My friend HYRNKAT and her project are totally famous.
Sextette: An Appreciation: In which an 87-year-old Mae West marries a 32-year-old Timothy Dalton, and we are to believe he's one lucky stiff. It's a musical.
Casino Royale, James Bond: An article somewhat weirdly arguing for the artistic import of the muddled David Niven/Peter Sellers/Orson Welles/Woody Allen parody.
Mostar, Bosnia, erects statue honoring Bruce Lee: Muslim or Orthodox, Serb or Croat, everyone loves to watch Bruce Lee open up a can of whup-ass. (via Hit and Run)
The Film Forum's "Summer Samurai" series: Yojimbo, Zaitoichi, four Okamoto movies. Man alive, am I jealous...
Bloodsuckers and Breasts: The Vampire Films of Leon Klimovsky: "Never before have werewolf and vampire women been merged so effectively in what is one of Spain’s most important horror films."
To the White Sea: Notes on a never-produced Coen brothers adaption of James "Deliverance" Dickey's novel of WWII meditative ultraviolence.
Debbie Rochon.com: The possessor of IMDB's funniest (PG-13 rated) filmography has a website! With trailers!
7:35 in the morning: An Oscar-nominated live action short in Spanish. Any more would spoil it. (via delicious/redfox)
Sharksploitation! - Jaws and the sad decline of the shark movie: Jeannot Szwarc, the director of "Jaws 2": "Though people kept saying, 'Don't show the shark too much,' I kept saying from the beginning, 'We must show the shark a lot.'" This is going to be my household's new catchphrase for a bad idea.
A politically correct Ethan Edwards: Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales - Retrospectives: I never thought of "The Outlaw Josey Wales" as an explict response to "The Searchers", but it's plausible.
Kroger Babb’s Roadshow: How a long-running movie walked the thin line between exploitation and education: A lengthy and -wonderful- summary of an exploitation classic: "EVERYTHING SHOWN! EVERYTHING EXPLAINED!"
The greatest IMDB entry ever: "Sometimes Credited As: Cat."
Tme's 100 best movies: A more interesting list than the AFI's; I've seen 56. Best additions to your Netflix queues: Aguirre and Man with a Camera.
The Legacy of Albert Maysles: A brief interview with America's finest living documentary filmmaker.
The end of San Francisco's Roxie Cinema?: That's terrible -- when I was in the area, I was more of a fan of the Red Vic, but it's always sad to see a great movie theater die.
Variety: "Grammer feels blue over 'X3'": Some amusing casting for the next installment of the Marvel film franchise.
An appreciation of Preston Sturges: Except it's an appreciation of "Sullivan's Travels", which I don't like nearly as much as "The Palm Beach Story" or "The Lady Eve".
The Big Picture: Dynamic Pricing: DVD versus CD Strategies: Or, why the MPAA is smarter than the RIAA.
The kings of DVD extras: Producing extras has become a mini-industry in itself, and directors are starting to tap the big names as personal favorites.
Peerflix: a P2P network for physical DVDs: Vaguely similar to Mark Anderson's Booklend.net, only decentralized and for-profit.
The kings of DVD extras: Producing extras has become a mini-industry in itself, and directors are starting to tap the big names as personal favorites.
Paul Greengrass makes promising noises about the Watchmen movie: I liked "Bloody Sunday", and though Greengrass isn't an -obvious- choice, he sounds like he gets it. But Alan Moore's cinematic misery will go unabated for some reason, I'm sure.
Halle Berry displays a sense of humor!: Accepting the Golden Raspberry for "Catwoman", she lugged her Oscar on stage and thanked her agent: "Next time read the script first."
Google adds a tag, special for Oscar week: Oh, this is nice.
Film Threat's 10 best urban legends about the movies: Godzilla did -not- defeat King Kong in the Japanese version (and nine more).
"Wild at Heart" teaches Christian men to reclaim their inner warrior: Russell Crowe, Christian role model.
Daniel - Der Zauberer: The worst movie in recent memory, per the IMDB and some 2000 voters.
"The combination of self-pity and self-regard in 'Sideways' makes it a 'Cathy' comic strip for middle-aged men.": Meow! A lot of weird aggresive nutsiness in Slate's year-end movie club, but that's the best one-sentence critique I've read all year.
The soundtrack to "Zabriskie Point": Don Hall's soundtrack went pear-shaped along with everything else associated with Antonioni's legendary disaster.
"He wanted them gargantuan! Gargantuan mammaries!": A brief appreciation of the late Russ Meyer and his unmistakable eye for talent.
Gregg Easterbrook on "His Dark Materials": Faith, militant atheism, and respect for authorial intent aside, Easterbrook's woeful summary is further proof that he should never again write about anything other than cheerleaders.
"Metaphors for beauty": An interview with Vincent Gallo about "Brown Bunny": He comes off as funnier and more charming here than on Howard Stern, but he seems insufficiently grateful that people are comparing his movie to "Two-Lane Blacktop"
Tool Time at Pixar: Pixar's internal OS X sketching application
Stanley Kubrick's NASA camera: One of only a few in the world; used to film candlelit scenes in "Barry Lyndon"
Top 100 Overlooked Films of the 1990s: I have seen the top 15, and they're mostly great; I have some quibbles lower down.
Essential Noir at Film Forum: I've seen about a dozen of these. I'd love to see them all.
Cinemourgue: Chronicling actresses' death scenes. Yeah, I don't know either.
Joel Schumacher's "Phantom of the Opera": If that phrase doesn't give you chills, please return to Bizarro Earth.
History's Notable Films, Reconsidered: OMG SPOILERS!!!!!!!!1 (Also, in what world is "Signs" notable?)
The restoration of "Kiss Me Deadly": The famous, jarring ending that inspired a generation of filmmakers seems to have been simply a mistake.
Olaf Unleashed: An "Unfortunate Events" movie promo that somehow fails to work in any Magnetic Fields references. (via)
Fred Kaplan on "Dr. Strangelove": Who was the real Dr. Strangelove? And where did he get that groovy slide rule?
Anti-Semitic visionary Anne Catherine Emmerich is beatified: "The pope did not mention the German mystic's controversial book of visions on Christ's final days, for which she is best known." Maybe he'll rescind Vatican II and make Mel Gibson even happier. (see also) (via)
Jack Chick makes a movie!: Perhaps one day we will get to hear what Chick imagines "HAW! HAW! HAW!" actually sounds like.
Yojimbo, Red Harvest, A Fistful of Dollars: Dashiell Hammett's novel became a samurai movie, the samurai movie became a Western, and Bruce Willis got sued.
Piracy and the screener ban: On the internal politics of the movie industry and the doomed efforts of the MPAA to keep Oscar voters from leaking screener copies.
Remembering Batman: A resource for fans of the ultra-campy Sixties show for when you really, really need to know which episode Otto Preminger appeared in.
Nickelodeon's The Third Eye: Next time someone tells me I am crazy for remembering a Nickelodeon miniseries featuring accented tots fighting disgusting sewage monsters in a lake, I'm pointing them to this site.
Low in Europe: Concert footage of Duluth's saddest band
Errol Morris' MoveOn ads: "'If you’re doing an ad for Quaker Oats or Tylenol or whatever, there's a set of boundaries that you work within, but you're not really worried about offending anyone,' Eric Korsh, one of Morris's producers, told me." (see also)
Jude Law outs himself as comics geek: He's highly interested in playing Ozymandius in the "Watchmen" movie... and he has a Rorschach tattoo.
Contemporary Tod Browning promotional material: Posters and lobby cards for "Freaks", "Dracula", and less celebrated fare from Tim Burton's spiritual ancestor. (via)
The zombies of Chernobyl: "The zombie-free Chernobyl scenes are for the opening, in which a rogue ex-CIA agent is seen stealing the world's last five canisters of Trioxyn gas, the lifeblood of the living dead."
The Numbers: Box Office Data, Movie Stars, Idle Speculation: A cheat sheet for the business of movies: box office speculation, weekly theater counts, daily box office drops, and more.
British Horror Movies: From classy productions like "Witchfinder General" to unclassy productions like "Dr Phibes Rises Again", death and blood sounds better in a British accent (especially spoken by Missourian Vincent Price).
Coppola's Dracula: A film never made. And then some. (It will be extra fun for Dracula fans who have seen "Hearts of Darkness", the documentary about the making of "Apocalypse Now".)
Films never made: Who knew that Hitchcock wanted to make "Peeping Tom"? (via)
Hammer's Dracula: I saw "Horror of Dracula" this weekend (cheesy good fun, weird sexual charge between the protagonists, Peter Cushing was excellent) and couldn't get over how -young- Christopher Lee was.
Battlefield Baseball, a Japanese kung-fu zombie movie: "Unfortunately, their rivals at Gedo High have already died doing so, and the ranks of the team are now swelled with zombies armed to the teeth with an assortment of hard-edged implements." I hated "Versus", though. (trailer here)
The Amazon kneejerk contrarian game: Find a classic that someone dissed. "I think about Kenny G., for instance. His rythmic session is much more regular, whereas Coltrane's session seems sometimes to loose the beat."
Project Little Quill: a documentary about the Wrens: Blogger Kathryn Yu and friends are working on a documentary about New Jersey's very fine indie band the Wrens, and they're looking for support.
IMDB and Yahoo chatter predicts commercial success: But what about whiny fans on Usenet? And Ain't It Cool News? If Harry Knowles likes it, it must be box office gold! (via)
How widescreen won: And if I never have to watch a John Ford movie butchered by pan-and-scan again, it'll be too soon.
Point Blank, Parker, Payback: Two and a half movie takes on Richard Stark's "The Hunter": "I want my money."
Deconstructing Ira: Ira Glass, Steven Berlin Johnson, Todd Haynes, and the Brown semiotics mafia
Kung Fu Cinema: Kill Bill has gotten me interested in seeing some chopsocky classics -- pre-Tsui Hark ones that I've never seen -- and Kung Fu Cinema has -excellent- reviews of the '70s and '80s masterpieces.
Jawdropping Tank Girl outtakes: "Complete [Let's Do It] dance number including original lyrics and punk sequence." Oh mercy.
30 Great Westerns: I might have picked "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" instead of "Unforgiven", but it's a good list of the first great American popular film genre. Props for "Vera Cruz". (via)
10.5: Every generation gets the "Towering Inferno" it deserves.
The Lord of the Rings Research Project: Some academics want to get a sense of how the world reacted to the movie.
5 Minutes to Live video: Probably a bit dodgy if they're offering Todd Haynes' "Superstar", but still. "Bunny Lake is Missing"! "The Collector"! "I Walked With a Zombie"!! (see also) (via)
"Laurence Olivier is immense!": Kempa's been on fire lately -- this covers Otto Preminger, Harry Nilsson, Saul Bass, and the Zombies. Free novelty MP3s inside! (via)
Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle": The wonderful children's book by Diana Wynne Jones gets the Studio Ghibli treatment.
High concepts (part 2): The movie Hollywood is afraid to make. (via)
High concepts (part 1): If it featured Wallace Shawn and Andre in a tag-team match, I'd be there.
Historical nuclear weapon test films: Home movies of big, big booms.
Notes from the Kubrick Archive: "As I hold it up by its blood-matted hair, Christiane, Kubrick's widow, walks past the window. 'I found a head!' I say."
PreReview: 'Don't you hate reviews by writers with fancy degrees who have seen the movie and have informed opinions?' (via)
Scholars at the American Academy of Religion Discuss "Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter": I love academics so much. So very very much. (see also)
Casting Arthur Dent: Tim from 'The Office' is a brilliant choice for the 'Hitchhiker's' movie (via)