The 100 Best Movies of 2008 - Times Online
If You Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That – NY Times
This article, by the fantastic Clive Thompson, discusses the Netflix contest, where programmers try to improve the movie recommendation formula that Netflix uses. Netflix is the popular American DVD-by-mail subscription company (in
While the top researchers keep getting better at making movie suggestions, one of the things that stumps them is the “Napoleon Dynamite problem”.
rogerebert.com The year's ten best films
Esteemed film critic, Roger Ebert, checks in with his list of the best movies of 2007. The list contains his top 20 favorite movies, along with his favourite documentaries, animated movies and foreign films.
Culturite : The Best ‘Best of’ Lists of 2007
Here are 25 different lists with the "Best Of 2007":
10 Brilliant Complete Movies Online- The List Universe
The List Universe blog has 10 streaming old time movies that have had their copyright expire.
1. M 1931, Fritz Lang
2. The Passion of Joan of Arc 1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer
3. Nosferatu 1922, F.W. Murnau
4. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 1939, Frank Capra
5. It Happened One Night 1934, Frank Capra
6. The General 1929, Clyde Bruckman & Buster Keaton
7. Begotten 1991, E. Elias Merhige
8. The Gold Rush 1925, Charles Chaplin
9. It’s a Wonderful Life 1946, Frank Capra
10. All Quiet on the Western Front 1930, Lewis Milestone
My Bumble Bee with Paper
Alright, so there's this guy in Shanghai, China that loves Transformers. He has loved them for such a long time, that he decided to build a model of the new Bumblebee character from the Transformers movie using old cardboard boxes, including a KFC bucket.
Oh, and it looks REALLY good!
Today's Link source: Metafilter
Telus has movie listings and showtimes for BC, Alberta and Ontario,
along with great reviews, star ratings by the critics and the public.
They also have some of the Hollywood gossip news, and reviews of the art
house and foreign films showing around town.
SF PaperCraftGallery
In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars movie, today's link is a site that features templates for detailed Star Wars paper models that you can download, print and make at home for free. Build your own paper model versions of a TIE-Fighter, AT-AT, StarDestroyer, Millennium Falcon, or Sand crawler. Even if you're not a Star Wars fan, it's worth a look!
Today's Link source: Boing Boing
The Long Take- The Greatest Long Tracking Shots in Cinema
One of the ways that film directors can show their prowess with the camera is to shoot a complicated scene using just one take of the camera, and to keep it rolling for several minutes.
Daily Film Dose has complied a list of the greatest long tracking shots. The usual suspects are here, such as Touch of Evil , Raging Bull and Godard's Week End. There are also a lot of obscure, foreign and new listings too, such as: Old Boy, Children of Men, Russian Ark and I Am Cuba.
Even better, there are links for most of these movies so you can watch these awesome shots in Youtube.
Today's Link source: Metafilter
rogerebert.com: Overlooked Film Festival: Ebertfest '07
America's most famous art critic, Roger Ebert, is recovering from cancer of the salivary gland. As part of the surgery to remove the cancer, he had part of his jaw removed and a tracheostomy. He can't speak, his mouth droops and he's wearing bandages.
But like Robocop, Terminator and John McLean, he can't be stopped. Roger Ebert is still going to attend his Ninth Annual Overlooked Film Festival (aka Ebertfest '07), which runs April 24 -29, 2007, despite suggestions that he will be mocked in the press. Kudos to him for having the courage and the passion to continue to support what he believes in, despite what others might think.
And what are the overlooked movies? Here's the list of films at Ebertfest '07:
Gattaca
The Weather Man
Moolaade
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Sadie Thompson
Come Early Morning
La Dolce Vita
Freddie Mercury: Lover of Life, Singer of Songs: The Untold Story
Holes
Man of Flowers
Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Before The Music Dies is a new documentary about the state of music and the music industry in
Focusing on grassroots, word-of-mouth advertising, the filmmakers are promoting their movie by encouraging people to host a screening party. By giving away dvds to people wanting to host a screening party, the want to get hardcore music fans and their friends together to discuss the music, the industry, and the politics of it all, and hopefully, to inspire them to get involved.
Go to a screening of Before The Music Dies in your area, or host one yourself. Or send me an email, and watch Before The Music Dies with me this weekend.
Pop Goes My Heart video
I saw the new Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore movie on the weekend, Music and Lyrics. It's a pretty good romantic date movie, but the highlight of the movie was the opening scene.
Hugh Grant's character was in an eighties pop band, PoP!, that's reminiscent of Wham! Today's link is Pop!'s steaming turd of a video on YouTube that was featured at the beginning of the movie.
Apple - Movie Trailers - 79th Academy Awards
After watching the Academy Awards last night, I've heard about some new films that I'd never heard of before, that might be worth checking out. There are also some "maybes".
Here's a list of the winners, and here's the Oscar's environmental web page they talked about.
Today's link is part of Apple's gallery of movie trailers. Apple's site is THE best site to visit to watch the official movie trailers for every film that's out, or is coming out. Yes, the Oscars ant the trailers, it's all just PR for Hollywood, but it looks like they need the help right now.
The LA Times has an article saying that the movie industry might have peaked, which is amazing since it's the most influential and dominant art form of our times.
Akira Kurosawa, is currently the #67 ranked movie of all time on the Internet Movie Database. Apparently, the copyright protection for Rashomon has expired and it is now in the public domain and is available in a number of streaming and downloadable versions.
The format of Rashomon uses a format that retells the same story four times, using the perspective of four different people. This narrative style has been the inspiration for many recent movies, including Jet Li's Hero and Little Red Riding Hood's Hoodwinked.
I also look forward to looking into the Internet Archive a little more.
Try not to read too much into the double-Japan linking whammy.
TheForce.Net - Fan Films
Just because they've stopped making Star Wars movies doesn't mean that fans have lost their interest in the characters or the plots. In fact, Star Wars has some of the most passionate fans, and they've been dreaming up creative new stories about The Force, and filming them on their own.
TheForce.Net has a huge archive of these fan films for you to download for free. You will not believe how many there are!
Get your geek on!
Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Gallactica beat broadcast TV
Want to know where broadcast TV is heading?
This hour-long talk by Mark Pesce in Australia discusses tons and tons of opportunities for advertisers; TV, film and video producers and media companies created because of the explosion of Bit Torrent (peer-to-peer) video downloads. There are just so many new opportunites for marketing companies, advertisers, media producers, broadcasters, and new ways to distribute video (not just Youtube, either).
Once again, it looks like the huge media companies have it all backwards. Instead of trying to reinforce and tightly control the current system with increasingly strict copyright restrictions; they could be trying out all these new opportunities.
Oh yeah, did I mention that VideoSift is a pretty good online video aggregator?
Acadamy Award Nominations - 2007
The nominees for the Academy Awards were announced this morning.
The best movie site, IMDB.com, has the complete list of nominees, with everything as clickable links. No speculation. No picks, predictions or oversights from the pundits; IMDB's simple, elegant, functional design lets you dive as deeply into each nominee’s resume as you wish to go.
And because this is the Tuesday music post, I want to mention that the nominees for Best Song and Best Score are included in the list of nominees.
Why is it that one ninja can defeat an army of adversaries, but struggles against a single, weaker opponent? Because of the Inverse Ninja Law, that's why!
Wikipedia has a full scientific explanation of the Inverse Ninja Law. It also has an explanation of why minor characters are unrealistically ineffective in combat against more important characters; the Stormtrooper Effect.
