More Than A Million Free Movies

Posted on August 12, 2012 at 3:56 pm

CinemaBlend reports that the Internet Archive has 1.3 million movies available for free viewing, with more to come!

he introduction of the massive Internet Archive might change how you view (and collect) movies. The video vault, according to a counter at the top of its home page, currently offers 1.3 million torrent files for download using BitTorrent. The files range from movies to books, concerts to historical news broadcasts. Want to hear the audio of the Hindenberg Crash? Stream a Grateful Dead concert from 1977? Or catch up on the long-lost television movie Rescue from Gilligan’s Island? The Internet Archive has you covered.

Granted, you won’t find Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol on here. The nonprofit service seems to specialize in the obscure and the old, establishing itself as an archive for “researchers, historians and scholars,” according to their site. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1929 thriller Blackmail (pictured above) — considered the first British “talkie” – can be downloaded on the site, for example. The Avengers, however, will not be made available. The hook of the service is that it’s all totally legal (because the titles exist in the public domain) … and all totally free.

Because they are in the public domain, we can expect some very creative remixes, too.

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Internet, Gaming, Podcasts, and Apps

The Original “Sparkle”

Posted on August 12, 2012 at 8:00 am

The remake of “Sparkle” with Jordin Sparks, Derek Luke, and Whitney Houston opens this week, so it is a good time to revisit the original version with Irene Cara and Lonette McKee and especially the soundtrack: Sparkle: Music From The Warner Bros. Motion Picture, featuring Aretha Franklin singing songs by Curtis Mayfield.

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Original Version

New Deleted Scenes from the Original “Karate Kid”

Posted on August 11, 2012 at 2:18 pm

One of my favorite of the Slate “Spoiler Specials” (podcast discussions designed to be heard after you have seen the film, so they can discuss spoilers) was when Dana Stevens and John Swansburg discussed the remake of “The Karate Kid.” Swansburg’s very, very detailed assessment of the original 1984 film, which he loved as a kid. Now he has written a terrific assessment of the newly available deleted scenes posted on the YouTube channel of director John Alvidson. It is a lot of fun to get this peek behind the scenes and I hope Alvidson inspires other directors to share their extra footage as well. Here’s what he writes about this clip:

Here are the first ten minutes of “The Karate Kid” 1983 rehearsal movie. That’s Jimmy Crabe, our cameraman, being knocked down when Ralph does a karate kick to the door of the apartment complex at the beginning of our story.

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Behind the Scenes

I Miss Illustrated Movie Posters

Posted on August 11, 2012 at 8:52 am

Illustration expert Leif Peng has a gorgeous blog post about Howard Terpning, the illustrator who created many iconic movie posters, from “Gone With the Wind” to “Doctor Zhivago,” “Cleopatra,” and “The Sound of Music.” Today movie posters almost always feature photographs of the movie’s stars, and instead of being iconic, they’re just repetitious. Take a look at Terpning’s work, and enjoy.

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NPR’s List of the Best Teen Literature

Posted on August 10, 2012 at 3:59 pm

NPR has a great list of the best books for teens, from a poll conducted by the publishing trade association. YA (young adult) readers are a bigger part of the book market than ever and books like the Twilight, Hunger Games, and Harry Potter series were first popular with teens and then became worldwide phenomenons — and box office-record-breaking franchise film series. The top 100 includes those books, of course, but also classics from the 1960’s and earlier: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hobbit, Catcher in the Rye, Call of the Wild, and Fahrenheit 451. More recent authors include Sherman Alexie, John Green, and Stephen Chbosky, whose listed book, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, is the basis for a film opening later this year.

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Books Teenagers