Many movies take place in DC to make use of its proximity to politics and major cultural institutions like the Smithsonian. Others just happen to take place in the city. It’s fun to see DC represented on the screen in a variety of ways, but the question remains: which is really the DC movie? It’s […]
Continue readingMonthly Archives: February 2015
Happy Fair Use Week!
By the declaration of the Association of Research Libraries, this week is Fair Use Week! “Fair use” is one of the most important exemptions in copyright law that allows educators, artists, and journalists to create new works from copyrighted content. Fair use provisions have allowed everything from students editing films for academic assignments to supercuts […]
Continue readingMeet Chuck Workman, the Oscar montage man
There’s really nothing else we have to say about the Oscars last night apart from congratulating Birdman for its big win. Instead, let’s direct your attention to one of the most important people behind the scenes at the biggest award show of the year. He’s Chuck Workman, and he creates the clips played during the […]
Continue readingDid you miss Whiplash? Have a bladder of steel? See every Best Picture nominee in a row on Saturday
via icanhasgif.com You hear the same refrain every year about Oscar nominations: if only those movies had been in theaters for longer. You might not have gone to see The Imitation Game on its own accord, but now that it’s in contention for some major awards, it would be nice to see it in the […]
Continue readingA radical proposal: what if the Oscars removed nominations?
The Oscars are this Sunday, and although we’re as excited as every year, there’s a certain level of predictability in every ceremony. A few months ago, the current Oscar race was considered one of the most competitive of all time, but the past weeks of tertiary award shows have made it clear who will win […]
Continue readingRevisit SNL for its fortieth anniversary
Saturday Night Live doesn’t really turn 40 until next October, but the folks at NBC decided that now was the right time to celebrate four decades on the air. SNL is indisputably one of the biggest and most important comedy programs of all time, having weathered constant changes in style and quality and producing some […]
Continue readingVulture reflects on Ousmane Sembène, father of African cinema
This year’s Sundance film festival hosted the premiere of Sembène!, a documentary about African filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. You might not know that name, but Sembène is one of the most important figures in the birth of African cinema. He arguably started the entire African film movement with, as Vulture describes, “no film equipment, no professional […]
Continue readingCheck out the amazing art on Criterion’s Zatoichi box set
When we purchase new films for our collection, we always try to buy their definitive version. This means that the films we get often come in extravagant cases with all sorts of bonuses. We’ve basically seen at all at this point: Futurama in a giant life-sized Bender head, Six Feet Under in a block covered […]
Continue readingMaking sense of Birth of a Nation, 100 years later
Today is the 100th anniversary of D. W. Griffith’s Civil War epic Birth of a Nation, perhaps one of the most troubling films in the history of the medium. On the one hand, Birth of a Nation is one of the most significant visual works of all time; it was perhaps the first feature-length movie […]
Continue readingToday in unexpected fandom: David Cronenberg loves Dilbert
Director David Cronenberg has made a name for himself as a purveyor of dark psychological films, from self-contained thriller experiments like Cosmopolis to the extra-gory body horror that made him famous in Scanners and The Fly. As befits his style, you might expect his tastes to skew towards the terrifying or distressing. But surprisingly, Cronenberg […]
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