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 […]
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A 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 readingDC’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 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 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 readingWhat do we lose when we revive a TV series?
The next year will see new seasons of Heroes, The X-Files, Coach, Twin Peaks, Prison Break, Full House, and possibly Arrested Development or 24. Television shows long since canceled have found a second life in the increasingly diversified, well-funded world of digital programming. Surely TV fans of a certain generation looks forward to catching up […]
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 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 […]
Continue readingTCM’s ‘Summer of Darkness” offers free online noir course – and a noir movie marathon!
Turner Classic Movies is preparing for “Summer of Darkness,” a slate of over 100 noir films a commentary that will air throughout June and July. Two months of nearly century-old, dark, black-and-white movies is a hard sell during warm weather and peak movie theater season, but Turner clearly isn’t aiming for a general audience. Their […]
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