#classic-movies

#classic-movies

If a consortium of Italian grandmothers were to put down The Ten Commandments of making pasta, then 'Thou Shalt Not Break The Spaghetti Before Boiling It' is likely to be right up there alongside 'Thou Shalt Serve The Pasta Al Dente' and 'Thou Shalt Only Add Salt To Boiling Water, Never Oil'.

The film was based on the 1974 book of the same name by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about their investigation into the Watergate imbroglio that brought down President Richard Nixon.

The inquiry was like thousands of others. Somebody had potentially cool films they thought might interest the Library of Congress. But it was brand new for Jason Evans Groth... In September, he stepped outside the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to meet Bill and Mary McFarland, who had driven from Michigan with about 40 strips of celluloid that had once belonged to Bill's great-grandfather.

Eyes Wide Shut was stranger than that: a meditative art film whose much-hyped orgy scene is more creepy than sexy, run by a cabal of rich and powerful men who prey on young women.

A source told the Times that the idea had come from deputy director Dan Bongino, a cop-turned-right-wing-podcast-yapper, whose justification for the decision was as follows: "Bongino said, You can have the best female agent take down the biggest case in our history, but if on the Ring door-camera video she's out of shape or overweight, that's going to be the story. He was worried about whether or not they'd look good on a doorbell camera. He said it's the way these times are."

If there's anything I miss in pop culture, it's the presence of ordinary movies. I don't mean blockbusters like Avatar or cultural events like Barbenheimer or Oscar contenders like One Battle After Another. I'm talking about the routine, well-made entertainments that, for nearly a century, used to open in theaters every week. You'd go see them because the story sounded good or you liked the stars or you just wanted to enjoy something as part of an audience.

During a junket interview with OutNow, Gyllenhaal explained that the punctuation mark was included to represent the "whole lot of energy" that comes out when the historically muted Bride of Frankenstein is finally allowed to speak. That's all well and good, but to viewers the titular exclamation point is less of a metaphor and more of a golden arrow saying, "This movie is going to be crazy."

George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest - it was "beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree". When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: "Maybe there's a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived."

Using the diary recollections of Coppola's wife, the late Eleanor Coppola, who was also disconsolately aboard and feeling thoroughly shut out of the alpha male chatting and joshing, Fischer shows our three dishevelled deities dizzied and stunned and even weirdly depressed by their staggering global acclaim.

The esteemed film-maker was licking his wounds: his most recent picture, Far from the Madding Crowd, which imbued its 19th-century rural characters with an anachronistic King's Road style and panache, had flopped stateside. Childers approached the date with mixed feelings. He adored Schlesinger's previous movie, the jazzy Darling, starring Julie Christie as a model on the make, and had seen it three times.

It's the first rule of romcoms that opposites attract, and you can't imagine two more different lovers than Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave), a spark plug of a dame convinced that she is in a relationship with the 19th-century composer Giacomo Puccini, and Fish (James Earl Jones), a gentle giant who spends his spare time wrestling a demon that only he can see.

Even in an era of CGI and AI, nothing is more vivid than the intimacy and imagination of radio or more direct than the connection radio has with listeners. I remember when the legendary Stan Freberg drained Lake Michigan and filled it with hot chocolate, a 700-foot mountain of whipped cream, and a 10-ton maraschino cherry. We didn't have to see it. We heard it on the radio. It was Freberg's demonstration of what radio can do better than television.

It's nice that you are asking about props, because they're not really acknowledged, says Jode Mann, a TV prop master in Los Angeles. When Mann worked on the children's comedy show Pee-wee's Playhouse in the 1980s, she got a call from its star, Paul Reubens, who said he was nominating her for an Emmy. It was only after Mann told her mother and promised to thank her if she won that Reubens called back to say he couldn't nominate her because there's no category for you.

"The film was shot in Ultra Panavision 70 with lenses that yielded an aspect ratio of 2.76 to 1, and it was breathtaking," Scorsese said. "But it wasn't just the size of the image, it was the imprint of the man behind the camera who knew how to fill that frame, how to compose it. And composer seems like the right word to describe George Stevens and the extraordinary level of artistry he reached at that point in his life and career."

The Welsh-born actor had spent much of the decade living in the United States, where he split his time between the stage and the screen, building an utterly respectable career. He had played a compassionate doctor in David Lynch's The Elephant Man, a murderous ventriloquist in the cult thriller Magic, and the real-life convicted child murderer Bruno Hauptmann in the TV movie The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, for which he had won his first Emmy.

I'm thrilled with any chance to collaborate with the Harvard Film Archive and to make use of Harvard's collection. I've taught several of Kubrick's films in different courses over the years, but never all of them together and never on the big screen. It is a unique opportunity. The HFA is one of Harvard's treasures. I'm really grateful to them for making this happen.

A quarter-century later, it's safe to say that those days have come to an end. Not only does the streaming-only Netflix of the twenty-twenties no longer transmit movies on DVD through the mail (a service its younger users have trouble even imagining), it ranks approximately nowhere as a preferred cinephile destination. That has to do with a selection much diminished since the DVD days