from Rio de Janeiro: Urban Future The 2016 Rio Olympics start tomorrow, and this year seems particularly fraught. Every Olympic event has some enormous, costly, potentially negative impact on its host – remember the broken hotels in Sochi and the wasted construction in Athens? – but Rio has it worst in recent memory. The Zika […]
Continue readingNew Acquisitions – August 2016
One month left in summer! Everyone panic! Well, don’t actually panic. We’re getting everything set for the fall semester, and we’re stocking up on more new acquisitions. As before, we’re in the process of replacing as many of our VHSes with DVDs as possible. But we’re also plugging other holes in our collection. We’ve added […]
Continue readingMatt Damon in The Great Wall sadly isn’t unprecedented
Boris Karloff in The Mask of Fu Manchu Last week, a trailer debuted for Matt Damon’s new film, The Great Wall, set during the Song dynasty in China. Matt Damon basically has no business being in that movie, and the fact that he’s the star at all sadly capitalizes on how international audiences associate white […]
Continue readingDirector Edgar Wright names is favorite 1000 movies (Yes, 1000)
Edgar Wright is one of the most distinctive, stylized directors working in film right now. If you’ve seen Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, you’ll recognize his unmistakable, kinetic energy. We’re all ears when he wants to share his thoughts on the art of filmmaking. As it turns out, Wright was happy to […]
Continue readingGet a DC Library card to get InstantFlix for free!
DC Public Library’s Tenley-Friendship branch is just down the road from us, so we get excited when we can promote their services too. Like audiobooks! AU doesn’t have a collection, but the Tenley-Friendship library is just a few blocks away. Now DC Public is expanding its streaming video collection, which we’re happy to promote too! […]
Continue readingWould you work for a fictional company? (Don’t mind us, we’re very tired.)
Alright, listen, we’re drained. The weather has been hovering near 100 degrees all week, and after a few weeks of inescapable political talk, we just need something fun and not-heady today. Maybe you do too. So here’s a silly infographic from Euroffice, a British office supply company, rating fictional corporations by how great they’d be […]
Continue readingChecking your perspective on making a documentary
SOC’s great film program often has AU students creating their own documentaries and heading out into the local community to capture a slice of life (take the Community Documentary class!). We love that AU students get to collaborate with DC to tell their stories, but there’s a potentially fraught dynamic with having college students marching […]
Continue readingThe end of the VHS, and what it means for the library
Well, we’ve been dreading this moment for years now: the VHS is officially obsolete. Funai, the last company that still manufactures VHS players, will end their production at the end of the month. This comes less than a year after Betamax tapes were also discontinued. As of August 1st, the VHS will be a format […]
Continue readingSee where Hollywood films around DC
DC pops up in the movies for good reason: if you want to show the halls of power, you go to Washington. And sometimes, when you’re showing the halls of power, your characters have to go for a walk or get a drink. This is how places like Adams Morgan ended up in movies like […]
Continue readingIt’s okay: Scorsese has guilty pleasures, too
Ingmar Bergman apparently loved Ghostbusters. He’s not alone among great directors. Even some of the most storied names in film loved popcorn junk once in a while; Film Comment magazine has been collecting lists of directors’ favorite guilty pleasure movies for years now, and The A.V. Club rounded up some of their favorite examples. John […]
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