Holiday Gift Guide 2014 — For Movie Lovers and Their Families
Posted on December 3, 2014 at 3:31 pm
Happy holidays to one and all! Whatever you are celebrating at this time of year, these films will race your pulse, warm your heart, and delight any friends and family members lucky enough to receive them.
For the lover of quirky indie romances:
Musical Chairs, directed by “Desperately Seeking Susan’s” Susan Seidelman, this is the story of Armando (E.J. Bonilla) from the Bronx and Mia (Leah Pipes) from the Upper East Side, who share a passion for dance. They meet at a midtown Manhattan studio where Mia is an instructor and Armando is a part-time janitor, putting aside his duties to give cha-cha lessons. When a tragic accident leaves Mia in a wheelchair, Armando dedicates himself to helping her learn to dance again.
For the sports fan:
Get Coached by Mike Ditka If you ever wanted to know what it was like to be coached by the legendary Mike Ditka, one of only two men ever to win Super Bowls as player, assistant coach and head coach, this is your chance. Delivered in rapid-fire, tell it like it is Ditka style, 25 topics like Define Success, Own Your Actions, Adapting to Change, Yours for the Taking and Fight Another Day give you instant access to a lifetime of experience and solid strategies for success.
ESPN Films 30 for 30: Slaying the Badger You can’t go wrong with this great series from ESPN. This one is the story of Greg LeMond, who is now the first and only American to win the Tour de France.
Belle One of the best movies of the year is this whip-smart true story with a dazzling performance by Gugu Mbatha-Raw.
For the rock music fan:
Sound City Dave Grohl of Nirvana and the Foo Fighters bought the legendary custom-built Neve 8028 recording console from Sound City Studios. The board, built in 1972, is considered by many to be the crown jewel of analog recording equipment, having recorded such artists as Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Guns and Roses, Metallica, NIN, Rage Against The Machine and countless other musical legends over the past 40 years.
Muscle Shoals It’s easier to make a list of the legendary performers who did not record at tiny Muscle Shoals than those who did. This is the story — as searing as a blues song — of the recording studio used by artists from Aretha Franklin to the Rolling Stones.
Harry Potter: Complete 8-Film Collection Get all the Harry Potter movies in one gorgeous collection and marvel again at one of the greatest achievements in the history of film, a remarkably unified and consistent vision for bringing these stories to screen.
Some great books about movies:
My First Movie Kevin Smith, Ang Lee, Mira Nair, the Coen brothers, and more give us the inside story of their first movies, what went right, what went wrong, and what they learned.
Film in Five Seconds Some of the greatest movies ever made are transformed into very clever and often hilarious infographics. How many can you and your family recognize?
Edith Head: The Fifty-Year Career of Hollywood’s Greatest Costume Designer Talk about the inside story — this is the inside story of the lady who knew all the secrets of all the stars because she literally saw them in their underwear. Multiple Oscar-winner Edith Head is responsible for such iconic looks as Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief” and Charlton Heston in “The Ten Commandments.”
Vox has a very good essay on what makes scary movies so scary, illustrated by thirteen classic scenes that demonstrate different techniques: introducing the monster, building suspense, silence and noise, and looong takes.
Limited Time Offer from Amazon: Warners Best, 100 Films for About $2 Each
Posted on September 11, 2014 at 3:26 pm
This is an amazing deal. For a limited time, Amazon is offering a collection of 100 Warner Brothers classics at 75 percent off. Best of Warner Bros 100 Film Collection, including 22 Best Picture winners, a limited edition 27 x 40 poster, two Warner Bros. documentaries, and more, just $!49.99 until September 13, 2014. You’d pay more than this for just ten films. If there’s a movie-lover in your life, now’s a good time to do your holiday shopping.
The films are:
1. The Jazz Singer (1927)
2. Broadway Melody of 1929 (1929)
3. The Public Enemy (1931)
4. Cimarron (1931)
5. Grand Hotel (1932)
6. 42nd Street (1933)
7. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
8. A Night at the Opera (1935)
9. The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
10. The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
11. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
12. Dark Victory (1939)
13. Gone with The Wind (1939)
14. Wizard of Oz (1939)
15. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
16. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
17. Citizen Kane (1941)
18. Mrs. Miniver (1942)
19. Casablanca (1943)
20. Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
21. Gaslight (1944)
22. Anchors Aweigh (1944)
23. Mildred Pierce (1945)
24. Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
25. The Big Sleep (1946)
26. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
27. An American in Paris (1951)
28. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
29. Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
30. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954)
31. A Star Is Born (1954)
32. East of Eden (1955)
33. Rebel Without A Cause (1955)
34. Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
35. Giant (1956)
36. The Searchers (1956)
37. A Face in the Crowd (1957)
38. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
39. Gigi (1958)
40. Ben-Hur (1959)
41. North By Northwest (1959)
42. How the West Was Won (1962)
43. What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962)
44. Viva Las Vegas (1964)
45. Doctor Zhivago (1965)
46. Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
47. Cool Hand Luke (1967)
48. The Dirty Dozen (1967)
49. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
50. Bullitt (1968)
51. The Wild Bunch (1969)
52. Dirty Harry (1971)
53. Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971)
54. Cabaret (1972)
55. A Clockwork Orange (1972)
56. Enter the Dragon (1973)
57. The Exorcist (1973)
58. Blazing Saddles (1974)
59. Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
60. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
61. All The President’s Men (1976)
62. Superman, The Movie (1977)
63. Caddyshack (1980)
64. The Shining (1980)
65. Clash of the Titans (1981)
66. Chariots of Fire (1981)
67. National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)
68. The Outsiders (1983)
69. The Right Stuff (1983)
70. Risky Business (1983)
71. Amadeus (1984)
72. The Color Purple (1985)
73. The Goonies (1985)
74. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
75. Lethal Weapon (1987)
76. Batman (1989)
77. Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
78. Goodfellas (1990)
79. The Bodyguard (1992)
80. Unforgiven (1992)
81. The Fugitive (1993)
82. Interview with the Vampire (1994)
83. Natural Born Killers (Director’s Cut) (1994)
84. Shawshank Redemption (1994)
85. Seven (1995)
86. L.A. Confidential (1997)
87. The Matrix (1999)
88. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)
89. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
90. Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
91. Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
92. The Notebook (2004)
93. Million Dollar Baby (2005)
94. The Departed (2006)
95. 300 (2007)
96. The Dark Knight (2008)
97. The Blind Side (2009)
98. The Hangover (2009)
99. Sherlock Holmes (2009)
100. Inception (2010)
Tuesdays in September on Turner Classic Movies: The Jewish Experience on Film
Posted on September 1, 2014 at 9:21 pm
This month, TCM has an excellent series of films about the Jewish experience, every Tuesday.
TCM proudly presents The Projected Image: The Jewish Experience on Film, a weekly showcase of movies focusing on Jewish history and heritage as portrayed onscreen. Co-hosting the films each Tuesday is Dr. Eric Goldman, an expert on Yiddish, Israeli and Jewish cinema, and founder and president of Ergo Media, a video publishing company specializing in Jewish and Israeli video. Goldman is also the author of The American Jewish Story Through Cinema (2013) and Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present (2011).
The screenings are divided into themes, which air each Tuesday beginning on September 2 at 8pm with The Evolving Jew, featuring two versions of The Jazz Singer, the story of a young American performer who defies the traditions of his devout Jewish family. Al Jolson starred in the revolutionary early sound version from 1927, and Danny Thomas took over the role in the lesser-known 1953 remake. That same night, The Immigrant Experience focuses on Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street (1965) and Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990), telling of Jewish families from Europe and Russia who settle in, respectively, the Lower East Side of New York City and a neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland.
Among films dealing with The Holocaust on September 9 are two powerful classics from the 1960s: Stanley Kramer’s all-star Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), about the trial of war criminals in 1945-46; and Sidney LumetÕs The Pawnbroker (1965), starring Rod Steiger as a concentration-camp survivor. Also screening are Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946), in which he plays a Nazi fugitive, and Edward Dmytryk’s The Juggler (1953), with Kirk Douglas as a Holocaust survivor.
September 16 sees Israeli Classics including two TCM premieres, Thorold Dickinson’s Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), the first feature film produced in Israel; and Ephraim Kishon’s Sallah (1964), a satire that became the most successful film in Israeli history. Also showing are a pair of films focusing on The Jewish Homeland: George Sherman’s A Sword in the Desert (1949, TCM premiere), which deals with the immigration into Mandatory Palestine during the mid-1940s; and Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), which concerns the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.
Tackling Prejudice on September 23 are three absorbing films based on novels about anti-Semitism: Laura Z. Hobson’s GentlemanÕs Agreement (1947); Crossfire (1947), based on John Paxton’s 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole; and Arthur Miller’s Focus (2001, TCM premiere). A fourth film, The House of Rothschild (1934), was taken from George Hembert Westley’s play about the celebrated Jewish banking family and its struggles for dignity and equality in the European financial world.
Among Coming-of-Age stories on September 30 are The Young Lions (1958), with Montgomery Clift as a soldier coming to grips with anti-Semitism during World War II; The Way We Were (1973) with Barbra Streisand as a Marxist Jew who shares a bittersweet romance with a handsome Gentile (Robert Redford); and Hearts of the West (1975), with Jeff Bridges and Alan Arkin in a comedy about a young writer who stumbles into a career as a cowboy star.
My friend Michael Mirasol has put together a wonderful supercut of movie robots in honor of this week’s release of the new Transformers movie. How many can you identify?
, including 22 Best Picture winners, a limited edition 27 x 40 poster, two Warner Bros. documentaries, and more, just $!49.99 until September 13, 2014. You’d pay more than this for just ten films. If there’s a movie-lover in your life, now’s a good time to do your holiday shopping.