Many of us who do not often visit New York City are still intimately familiar with its iconic buildings and streets mainly because of its over-representation in film and television. Every other sitcom takes place in Manhattan, and aliens have destroyed the New York skylines more times than we can count. This keeps NYC’s film […]
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DC’s West End Cinema is back!
Great news, DC film fans! The Washington Post reports that West End Cinema, which shuttered back in March, is reopening later this month! West End was one of the area’s most beloved limited-run independent theaters, and its closure earlier in the year left a hole in the DC film market only partly filled by E […]
Continue readingRoot around for something good in this fridge shot supercut
We had been looking for an occasion to post this supercut of refrigerators in films, and the post-Fourth of July leftover glut seems like a good occasion to do so. The classic point-of-view shot of a character look for food in a fridge has become almost background noise at this point. When previously groundbreaking cinematography […]
Continue readingHow did movie trailers evolve into tiny blockbusters?
Internet nerd-dom had an outrage flashpoint recently when trailers for the upcoming movie Terminator: Genisys revealed multiple major plot twists, effectively spoiling what may have been the most interesting (or only interesting?) parts of the movie. Contrast that with the ominous trailer for the first Terminator movie. How did we go from brief teasers to […]
Continue readingWatching all of Star Wars at once is a surrealist nightmare
We understand that the Star Wars movies have exciting stories, loveable characters, and terrific sound editing. Forgive us if, for the remainder of the day, we remember it as a video art provocation that almost gave us a headache. Archer animator Marcus Rosentrater created Star Wars Wars (embedded above), a mashup of all six of […]
Continue readingEven in booming China, independent filmmakers struggle for funding and attention
Last month, we posted about the iffy state of film and television production credits in the United States. You might assume that the recent boom of China’s film industry has created a new market for incentives overseas, but evidently, the purse strings are tight there as well. Although major Hollywood “co-productions” like Iron Man 3 […]
Continue readingOregon Goonies fans never say die, but they’re getting on in years
Beloved 80s adventure movie The Goonies turned 30 last week. That’s a milestone you probably didn’t know or really care about, much like how you missed the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie‘s 25th anniversary in March. But it was a big deal in Astoria, Oregon, the small northwest town where The Goonies was filmed. Over […]
Continue readingThe unexpected new life of Black Angel
Two years ago, we first told you about Black Angel, a recently unearthed lost film from 1980. Black Angel was an influential fantasy short film that played before The Empire Strikes Back during its first theatrical run; its practical effects and “step-printed” slow-motion paved the way for movies including Legend and Excalibur. But copies of […]
Continue readingPretentious-O-Meter picks out films on the critical-popular divide
Independent and art films are often unfairly criticized as “pretentious.” We’ve all slung that word around to attack a movie at some point, even though we probably enjoy some arty cinema ourselves. But the roots of that insult deserve some additional dissection: is a film really better or worse because critics and film buffs enjoy […]
Continue readingUnearthed transcript reveals the origins of Indiana Jones
The National Geographic Museum downtown recently opened an exhibit about Indiana Jones and the films’ connections to actual history. This had us thinking about our favorite tenured action hero. Coincidentally, a link has been making the rounds revealing how Indy got his start – and what he might have been in an early draft. In […]
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