Last month we promised more regular updates about our new acquisitions, and… well, we didn’t have a whole lot coming in for a few weeks. But we do now! We got a motley assortment of new titles in July, and to avoid going for the obvious bigger names (nothing against Thor), let’s spotlight a few […]
Continue reading75 years later, celebrating Bugs Bunny – and looking at his contentious history
Today marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Bugs Bunny, Warner Bros.’s de facto cartoon mascot and a symbol of the golden age of animation (and maybe LeBron James’s future co-star?). Though Bugs is an immediately recognizable icon today, it took hundreds of theatrical animated shorts and countless years of Saturday morning television shows to get there. […]
Continue readingWatch the suddenly-very-relevant Soy Cuba on the big screen
The normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba this week opens some obvious doors – some are surely counting down the days until legal cigar imports – but it also offers an appropriate moment to revisit cultural history we may have ignored intentionally or otherwise. Post-revolutionary Cuban films are sometimes left out of […]
Continue readingHow Hollywood’s color correctors are playing with your emotions
We’ve talked about the color correction process in the past and how a once-cosmetic technique has become a fundamental part of the film production process. Total control of a film’s color range and palette allows filmmakers to tailor create visually resplendent works and sometimes to ignore other steps in the process. But the colors their […]
Continue readingWhat happened to the makers of Sky Captain?
The 2004 retro sci-fi caper Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was the first major film to shoot entirely on greenscreen. In an era when blockbuster movies eschew physical sets and use CGI wizardry as a crutch rather than a tool, that doesn’t seem like a groundbreaking or even welcome accomplishment. But no movie […]
Continue readingSee which rejected films survive an audience gauntlet tonight at Cheers and Sneers
The annual DC Shorts festival showcases some of the best short films from local talent, but not all submissions make the cut. And every so often, presumably and hopefully with their creators’ blessings, DC Shorts celebrates these rejections at Cheers and Sneers, an audience-driven showcase of the DC film scene’s near misses, secret triumphs, and […]
Continue readingComing soon: the most epic slapstick of the silent era
Dr. Strangelove nearly ended with an extended war room pie fight, but Kubrick eventually deemed the idea as too ridiculous for his otherwise subtler satire. The footage was never released, but it might have been one of the greatest on-screen pie fights in history. Pie tossing has been a staple of vaudevillian slapstick since the […]
Continue readingWhy should you care about Ennio Morricone?
San Diego Comic-Con wraps up today, and amid all the Batman and Star Wars news, you might have missed a little announcement that has classic film fans in a tizzy. During a panel on Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming The Hateful Eight, the director announced that film composition icon Ennio Morricone would score the movie, his first […]
Continue readingA glimpse behind the Library of Congress’s film preservation vaults
You may be familiar with the National Film Registry, the Library of Congress group that annually selects significant American films to maintain in perpetuity. That’s only a fraction of the over one million video recordings held by the Library of Congress, but all undergo a rigorous preservation process. For the first time that we’ve seen, […]
Continue readingFilming permit map reveals NYC’s hotspots in film
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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