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Cary Elwes Writing a Memoir About the Making of ‘The Princess Bride’

By Alison Nastasi on

The Princess Bride just celebrated its 25th anniversary, but the festivities aren’t over yet. Cary Elwes will be writing… Read More

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Books

Our Favorite Pop Culture Librarians

By Alison Nastasi on

The librarian is one of the most misunderstood figures in pop culture history. The patronizing character John Rothman played in Sophie’s Choice and the “old maid” Donna Reed portrayed in It’s a Wonderful Life are just a few of the negative, unflattering, and downright laughable images of librarians that our society has been inundated with. There are, however, several fine examples of realistic, intelligent, competent, and yes, even sexy librarians in cinema, television, and beyond. We’ve detailed 15 of our favorite fictional librarians, below. … Read More

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Pop Culture

13 of the Unluckiest Pop Culture Characters

By Alison Nastasi on

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, when superstition meets a 1980′s film series about a madman in a hockey mask. If you’re reading this, you survived Friday the 13th yesterday — but for the uber paranoid, the lingering effects of the spooky occasion will hang over us like a black cloud all weekend. We’re celebrating the unluckiest time of the year with 13 of pop culture’s jinxed, ill-fated characters from film and television. Some of them deserved what they got, others are plain luckless, but we love (and love to hate) them all for one reason or another. … Read More

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Art

Rare Photos and Ephemera Documenting the No Wave Cinema Movement

By Alison Nastasi on

Gallery 98, an online gallery that specializes in the art and ephemera of the 1970s and 1980s, is currently hosting a fantastic exhibition featuring photos and more from the No Wave cinema movement. Most of the images were intended to be advertisements for the indie film projects, which are rarely screened today. Still, they encapsulate the downtown New York scene that emphasized experimental techniques, guerrilla-style shoots, hybrid art forms, and the underground figures at the heart of it all. We feature several of the works on display past the jump, including a photo of Debbie Harry on the set of Amos Poe’s The Foreigner; a publicity photo of East Village fixture Patti Astor with famous b-boy Crazy Legs in Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style — the first hip hop feature film; and materials from the MWF Video Club, affiliated with indie art collective Colab, whose members included Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, and Eric Mitchell. … Read More

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Art

Hypnotic GIF Art Made From Archival Film and Photos

By Alison Nastasi on

San Francisco-based artist and filmmaker Bill Domonkos creates hypnotic GIF art, combining archival footage and photographs to create surreal moments in time. The black-and-white images have an inherent cinematic quality that is heightened when transformed into looped GIFs. We spotted Domonkos’ dreamlike work on Robot Mafia this week and selected several of our favorites for our gallery, below. … Read More

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Los Angeles

Flavorpill’s Guide to the Week’s Top 10 LA Events

By Tanja M. Laden on

There’s so much going on in the City of Angels, it can be hard to keep track of it all. Thanks to the new Flavorpill, we’re inviting the entire community to make suggestions with its gorgeous city-based culture guide — an open platform where our very own editors and curators meet and mingle with artists, gadabouts, and other tipsters for a limitless variety of both ongoing and one-off recommendations. With this in mind, please enjoy our weekly list of hand-picked event suggestions here on Flavorwire, and in the meantime, be sure to check out the new Flavorpill. We’ll see you there. … Read More

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Architecture

20 Works of Architecture That Belong in a Sci-Fi Film

By Alison Nastasi on

District 9 director Neill Blomkamp is back with another political sci-fi thriller, Elysium, which opened in theaters this weekend. This time the class wars rage between the residents of ravaged planet earth and a luxurious space station. The space utopia frequently appears throughout science fiction — a symbol of progress, hope, and human curiosity. We don’t have to travel to the stars to enjoy futuristic architecture. There are plenty of bold, bizarre, contemporary buildings right here on earth that look like they belong on the set of a sci-fi movie. Here are 20 of them. … Read More

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Pop Culture

Fascinating Composite Portraits of Every Face in a Movie

By Alison Nastasi on

Seoul-based artist group Shinseungback Kimyonghun — creative duo Shin Seung Back and Kim Yong Hun, who we learned about on Booooooom — created custom software that configures a composite image reflecting the average face in a movie. The program tracks a person’s face every 24 frames. The final portrait is fascinating, because it resembles a ghostly version of each movie’s biggest stars. Avatar is particularly weird due to the movie’s humanoid characters. After the jump, check out the faces from Taxi Driver, Black Swan, and more. We’ve also included a video so you can watch Shinseungback Kimyonghun’s process in action. … Read More

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Partner Buzz

Our Favorite Films Shot in NOLA

By Leah Taylor on

Presented by NOLA

New Orleans serves as a vibrant backdrop for some of our favorite movies — and it’s really no wonder. The city is not only full of historical architecture, but also boasts a thriving cultural scene that all but becomes a character itself in the following flicks. NOLA has been an inspiration to filmmakers for decades; read on for our top picks, and then follow your NOLA to get inspired by the Crescent City.  … Read More

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