Publisher Quirk Books and author Seth Grahame-Smith have come up with the best way to make a literary work more accessible since the creation of Classics Illustrated comic books: they’ve added “all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action” to Jane Austen’s 19th century novel Pride and Prejudice. This new version, out in stores this May, is titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now With Ultraviolent Mayhem! And if you didn’t think it was a masterpiece before, chances are you will now.
Avoiding the majority of public domain movies already consisting of horror and science fiction elements, we’ve come up with ten great classic films that would be even greater with the addition of zombies. …Read more
It’s our 100th episode! To celebrate, we look at what’s changed in the movie world since we’ve been watching from the couch. And, we look at how things have changed in that 100 years of movies. Surprisingly, there are a number parallels between 1908 and today, namely innovative artists grappling with new technologies.
Karina checks in with some disappointing movies of ‘08, Heather Locklear cheers up lonely women on cable, and The Reader asks the pressing question, what’s worse, sleeping with a 15 year-old, or sleeping with a Nazi?
The fanboys are so serious about The Dark Knight being the best film of 2008 that if the Academy snubs the comic-book adaptation for a Best Picture nomination, they’re liable to storm the Kodak Theatre on February 22 in protest. But why should anyone be worried that it won’t get the nomination? It wouldn’t be much of a coup for the year’s top-grossing blockbuster to be named one of the five Best Picture candidates. In fact, since the very first Academy Awards, the top award has often been handed out to films that were #1 at the box office in their respective year. And the last time it happened was as recent as 2003, with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
Thanks to popular and talented filmmakers like D.W. Griffith, Walt Disney, David Lean and Steven Spielberg, it’s hardly uncommon for films to make money and earn critical respect. But this isn’t an opportunity to spotlight overrated top-grossing Best Pictures like Titanic, Rain Man and Rocky, which were decidedly not their year’s best films. Rather, this is a chance to ease the minds of fanboys just in case The Dark Knight doesn’t get the nod. Some of these blockbusters were indeed nominated for Best Picture, and a few even won the award, but some of them were both their year’s biggest moneymaker (in the U.S.) and best film (from the U.S.) without gaining proper Academy recognition.
At various turns, Abraham Lincoln(1930), D.W. Griffith’s first and most notorious sound film, comes off as the legendary director’s W.– the story of a simple, silly good ole boy’s rise to the U.S. Presidency. Walter Huston portrays young Abe as a tough but bumbling doof, romantic daydreamer and idle underachiever. Even his bride-to-be, Mary Todd, curses him as a “country baboon” at one point. But the rest of the film illustrates every last Honest Abe tall tale. Well, in that sense, it’s a lot like W., too: When in presidential mode, Huston’s Lincoln is as uncanny a reproduction of a national myth as Josh Brolin’s George W. Bush is of a national disgrace.
We’d like to extend a hearty, totally sincere “welcome to the blogosphere, dude!” to Variety editor-in-chief/known blog skeptic Peter Bart, who has launchedhis own bloggy shingle. The first person to send in a Photoshop mockup of Bart wearing typing whilst pajamas and/or in bed and/or in a basement wins a free Spout t-shirt. Via Anne Thompson.
Attendees of the Book Expo of America were greeted with a giant banner bearing a picture of Michael Moore and the phrase, “He’s Back!” According to FishbowlLA, Michael Moore didn’t actually show up.
This headline on a story about the Universal Studios fire at The Playlist sent us to YouTube, looking for the Public Enemy video for “Burn, Hollywood, Burn,” which we’ve always like a lot. Instead, we found the above clip, described as “A music video for D.W. Griffith’s repellently racist 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, set to Public Enemy’s “Burn, Hollywood, Burn!”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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