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.

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List: Movies About Chefs

Posted on August 7, 2014 at 3:59 pm

In honor of this week’s release about competing chefs, “The Hundred Foot Journey,” I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite movies about cooks and chefs.

Julie & Julia Meryl Streep plays legendary chef Julia Child and Amy Adams plays the real-life amateur chef who decided to make every recipe in Child’s Child’s formidable French cookbook., which revolutionized American cooking (and television).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIvOLOOlU7g

Big Night Stanley Tucci and Tony Shaloub play brothers whose Italian restaurant is a little too authentic for its customers and its era.

Babette’s Feast A French servant in a small Danish village has a secret. She was once a top chef. When she wins the lottery she asks for permission to cook a meal for her employers, two spinster sisters who have spent their lives in severe simplicity and have never experienced anything like the luxury and sumptuousness of the meal she prepares.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvNifgj_dv4

No Reservations In this remake of the German film Mostly Martha, Catherine Zeta Jones plays a brilliant but temperamental chef whose life is turned upside down when she becomes the guardian for her young niece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZVuqx9LRBA

Simply Irresistible Sarah Michelle Geller is a chef with a magical touch in the kitchen in this delicious romance.

Summer Movie Catch-Up: Lists for Kids, Couples, and Hipsters

Posted on July 2, 2014 at 12:00 pm

Summer is a great time to catch up on some classic and even not-so-classic films, the movie version of beach books. The nice folks at Entertainment Weekly have come up with a terrific list of films all children should see before they get to high school. This is a good chance for parents to share some of their own childhood favorites with their children, like “The Princess Bride” and “Babe” and perhaps discover some they missed like “The Red Balloon” and “Duck Soup.” These are the movies that should inspire the scheduling of a monthly family movie night where we re-invent the idea that everyone sits down with a bowl of popcorn and enjoys the same movie at the same time in the same room.

And for couples, Esquire has helpfully put together a list of romantic comedies that men will enjoy. No Katherine Heigl, Jennifer Aniston, or Adam Sandler in the bunch, and some very well-chosen black and white classics like “Trouble in Paradise” and “Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.”

In case you’ve been waiting for some suggestions from perennial polymath James Franco, Vibe has published his list of some favorites. I was especially glad to see “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” one of my favorite documentaries, about a group of kids who transformed skateboarding and helped invent the idea of extreme sports.

Our Second Pre-Code Series Starts Tomorrow with Barbara Stanwyck’s “Ladies They Talk About”

Posted on June 26, 2014 at 8:00 am

Margaret Talbot and I will kick off our second series of Pre-Code films at Washington, D.C.’s Hill Center tomorrow night with “The Ladies They Talk About.” As Margaret says, it’s Depression-era “Orange is the New Black,” much of it set in a women’s prison with a colorful group of inmates. It is based on a play written by an actress who herself served time in prison.

Pre-Code films were made in the brief time between the beginning of the Sound Era (1927) and the enforcement of the Hays Code, which strictly limited the content of films, in 1934. Pre-Code films are frank and remarkably spicy. Tomorrow’s film, which stars Barbara Stanwyck and Margaret’s father, Lyle Talbot, may have a loopy plot, but portions of it feel very modern, including the treatment of a lesbian prisoner. I hope those of you in the area will join us!