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What It’s Like to Read ‘The Great Gatsby’ for the First Time at 37

By Jason Bailey on

With Baz Luhrmann’s splashy adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel contender hitting theaters Friday, Flavorwire is devoting this week to all things Great Gatsby. Click here to follow our coverage.

I’m still not sure how I’d made it to age 37 without reading The Great Gatsby, but this much was for sure: I was going to have to. It’s never a bad idea to read the source material when gearing up to review the film adaptation of a highly regarded literary property (though the finite number of hours in the day certainly prevent that notion’s translation from theory to practice), but my editor’s suggestion for a “Gatsby Week” piece on the difficulty of adapting Fitzgerald’s classic to celluloid sort of cinched it. “Ha, ha, funny story, I’ve never read it,” I chortled, and her nonverbal response to that ill-timed bit of mirth made it clear that I’d be doing so sooner rather than later. … Read More

Film

Flavorwire’s Guide to Movies You Need to Stream This Week

By Jason Bailey on

Welcome to Flavorwire’s streaming movie guide, in which we help you sift through the scores of movies streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and other services to find the best of the recently available, freshly relevant, or soon to expire. This week, we’ve got films from Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Michael Shannon, Anna Kendrick, Elisabeth Moss, Will Smith, and Martin Lawrence; check them out after the jump, and follow the title links to watch them right now. … Read More

Film

Artwork Inspired by the Films of Martin Scorsese

By Jason Bailey on

From Taxi Driver to Raging Bull to GoodFellas, few filmmakers have turned out as many influential movies as the great Martin Scorsese — and, come to find out, he’s also inspired plenty of artists from other disciplines. This weekend, San Francisco’s Spoke Art Gallery is presenting Scorsese: An Art Show Tribute, and since they’re honoring the quintessential New York artist, they’ve come east for the occasion. The show, running this weekend only at Chelsea’s Bold Hype Gallery, features work from over 75 painters, sculptors, and screen print artists. But if you can’t make it, don’t worry; Spoke Art has shared a few highlights from the show, including a couple of Flavorwire exclusives. Check them out after the jump. … Read More

Film

30 Behind-the-Scenes Monster Movie Photos That Will Blow Your Mind

By Jason Bailey on

Because it came out in the ‘90s and now people old enough to remember it are running websites, a lot of Internet ink has been spilled recently over the 20th anniversary of The Sandlot, writer/director David Mikey Evans’s 1993 remembrance of baseball, boyhood friends, and the summer of ’62. But the most interesting discovery of all of this nostalgia bathing was the unveiling of three photos (by Mr. Evans himself) of the elaborate puppets they used to create “The Beast,” the giant English mastiff that terrifies that neighborhood kids. Looking at those images (and you can check them out after the jump), we get a little nostalgic ourselves — for a time when computers weren’t the solution for scaring an audience, leaving artists and puppeteers to create the horrifying creatures of moviedom. Let’s take a look at how it used to be done. … Read More

Film

10 Impossible-to-See Movies Starring A-List Actors

By Jason Bailey on

Hey, Game of Thrones/Community/True Blood/Firefly fans: how’d you like to see a major motion picture starring Peter Dinklage, Danny Pudi, Ryan Kwanten, and Summer Glau? So would we! Would you be surprised to learn that such a motion picture not only exists, but has been sitting on a shelf for two years? So would we! Such is the strange tale of The Knights of Badassdom, director Joe Lynch’s horror comedy that’s been the subject of much discussion and confusion this week. Badassdom, which was previewed at the San Diego Comic-Con clear back in 2011, is hardly the first film that sounded like a good bet, only to sputter in post-production and after due to unforeseen difficulties in financing, distribution, or rights. After the jump, we’ll take a look at ten movies that you’d think you would have heard of, and be able to see, based on the personnel involved — but you can’t, for all sorts of strange reasons. … Read More

Film

From Bin Laden to Miranda Priestly: Famous Actors’ Reflections on Their Most Villainous Roles

By Chloe Pantazi on

Hollywood has always had a flair for creating compelling villains, so it’s only natural that the actors conveying them would covet – or disdain – the experience of being bad. Some actors lose sleep over playing the baddie, carrying their character’s guilt, while others enjoy getting into character perhaps a little too much, and revel in their ability to frighten.

For Ricky S. Sekhon, the actor cast as one of the world’s most hated real-life villains in Zero Dark Thirty – and who wrote about his experience in a recent Times Op-Ed piece – the eight weeks before he took up his role as Osama bin Laden were spent having heart palpitations. Sekhon’s pithy Times piece inspired us to look at other actors’ reflections on playing some of cinema’s most notoriously evil characters. Here’s what we found. … Read More

Film

Flavorwire's Flick of the Week: 'Django Unchained' Is Top-Shelf Tarantino

By Jason Bailey on

Sergio Cobucci’s 1966 Spaghetti Western Django was such a phenomenal hit that it begat dozens of unofficial sequels — only one involving the personnel of the original film, which means that Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained falls well within the tradition of filmmakers reconfiguring the character for their own means. Though he’s endlessly respectful of his picture’s namesake, adopting its distinctive theme song and casting (with a lovely “friendly participation of” credit) original Django Franco Nero, he is, as usual, up to more than friendly borrowing, or creating in-jokes for his fellow cinephiles. The Spaghetti Western, as a subgenre, wasn’t immune from occasional silliness. But these were big, extravagant, and often emotional vehicles — they dealt in mythology and iconography, and Django Unchained finds Tarantino digging in to that element of the form with relish. … Read More

Photography

Unexpected and Hilarious Behind-the-Scenes Horror Film Photos

By Alison Nastasi on

We’re never ones to turn down the opportunity to take a peek behind the scenes of our favorite films. Sometimes the images mess with your mind, but we wouldn’t want it any other way. When we spotted these awesome stills from various horror films on website theager, we had to share them with you. It even inspired us to go digging for a few of our own picks. Check out some hilarious shots of terrifying movie baddies goofing around and other photos that reveal how directors made the spooky magic happen. Skip past the break for more unexpected moments on horror film sets. … Read More

Film

Exclusive Supercut: Big Hollywood Stars in Their Early Horror Roles

By Jason Bailey on

Many a young actor has come to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune, only to discover that the road to success is a long and difficult one, with plenty of detours and diversions along the way. And many have found that, in their early, hungry days of trying to make it as a working actor, the horror genre always has a (meager, but cashable) paycheck for a rising young talent with stars in their eyes. And as a salute to those young, starving artists, we give you this week’s special, Halloween-tinged supercut, in which we’ve tracked down and collected some of the more entertaining and surprising of those early roles. Check it out after the jump. … Read More

Film

Flavorpill’s 10 Most Anticipated Fall Movies

By Jason Bailey on

As we close in on Labor Day — you can do it, c’mon, four short days, and you know you can get away with sneaking out early on Friday — the summer movie season is winding down, so you know what that means: the fall movie season is winding up! (Can’t not be in a movie season, ya know.) It’s something of a changing of the guard at the multiplexes; the superheroes, action heroes, and animated animals march off, replaced by (mostly) serious actors and prestige projects. It’s that special time of year when Hollywood pretends like they make intelligent, grown-up movies all the time, so let’s play along! Our ten most anticipated fall flick are collected here, organized by release date; agree, disagree, and add your own in the… Read More