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Film

Movie-Inspired Bars We’d Like to Drink At

By Jason Bailey on

Hey there, giallo fans! Planning a trip to Japan anytime soon? If so, you’re gonna want to put the Cambiare Italian Bar & Grill at the top of your to-do list; this recently opened establishment (brought to our attention by the fine folks at Bloody Disgusting) is a tribute to Suspiria, Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic. But it’s just one of the many cinema-inspired bars around the globe; a boozy world tour is waiting after the jump. … Read More

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Design

Film- and TV-Inspired “Hipster Kits” for Your Beard-Scratching Amusement

By Jason Bailey on

The word “hipster” continues to raise as much ire as confusion (and, seemingly, a never-ending supply of New York Times pieces), but some good can certainly come from the classification. Take, for example, French filmmaker and graphic artist Alizée Lafon, who has crafted a clever and eye-catching series of “hipster kits” for classic film and television. Check them out after the jump, and buy your own prints here. … Read More

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Film

Gorgeous Artwork Inspired by Your Favorite Modern-Classic Movies

By Jason Bailey on

Alice X. Zhang is a designer and illustrator with a love for movies, and that affection is clearly displayed in Moments, her upcoming solo show at the Bottleneck Gallery in Brooklyn. Zhang’s gorgeous images masterfully capture the essence of such modern classics as Pulp Fiction, There Will Be Blood, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Moonrise Kingdom; here’s a few highlights from the show, which opens Friday and runs through the month. … Read More

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Film

Surprising Early, Alternate Versions of Iconic Movie Posters

By Jason Bailey on

Movie posters, as we’ve discussed before, are a tricky business, and a great movie poster must serve many functions: it must capture the essence of a movie, it must be aesthetically pleasing or interesting in itself, and it must sell the product in question. Unsurprisingly, the quest for that balance can result in reworking, re-imagining, and revisions galore, which is why the new Daybees online exhibit The Iconic Movie Posters That Never Were is so fascinating. In it, the designers behind some of Hollywood’s most memorable posters share their early drafts and alternate versions of classic posters; check them out after the jump, alongside the final drafts that became part of movie history, and visit Daybees to learn more about their creators. … Read More

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Film

Handwritten Screenplay Pages From Film and Television

By Jason Bailey on

“You can’t write poetry on a computer,” says Quentin Tarantino, and he can’t write his screenplays on one either — he does it old school, longhand, in a notebook, putting his words in typewritten form at the last possible second. It may make him sound like a Luddite, but he’s far from the only one; plenty of Hollywood’s most successful scribes prefer to work by hand, at least in the early stages. This week, we found out that Lawrence Kasdan wrote The Empire Strikes Back in longhand as well, and a trip down the Internet rabbit hole turned up several more popular films that were worked out by hand before they made it to the screen. … Read More

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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’re recovering from the big Netflix “Streamageddon” — but, to their credit, the service did make a healthy chunk of titles newly available (or re-available) for streaming at the end of last week. Included is good stuff from Robert Downey Jr., Reese Witherspoon, Robert Redford, Samuel L. Jackson, Chris Hemsworth, Woody Allen, John Travolta, Michael Keaton, James Woods, Uma Thurman, Joss Whedon, and Quentin Tarantino; check them out after the jump, and follow the title links to watch them right now. … Read More

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Film

Behind-the-Scenes Photos of Iconic Filmmakers Directing Their Stars

By Alison Nastasi on

There’s nothing more exciting to a film lover than learning how their favorite movies were developed and executed. When we saw some fantastic behind-the-scenes photos from famous films on Every Day I Show, by way of Cinephilia and Beyond, we were blown away. The snapshots of iconic filmmakers directing their equally popular stars offers a peek at the history of cinema in the making. Head to our gallery for a look at directors in action and actors preparing their characters, collaborating on some of film’s greatest stories ever told. … Read More

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Film

Great Movies With Embarrassingly Bad DVD Art

By Jason Bailey on

You can’t judge a book by its cover, as we’ve recently discovered with not only books, but also music. That holds true with film as well — not just with movie posters, which have their own problematic elements, but when it comes time to sell you the movie in physical form. For years, DVD distributors have uglified some of our favorite movies — often even eschewing the classy and striking movie posters for Photoshopped, Frankensteined monstrosities of their own making, designed to move units at all costs. We’ve assembled some of the ugliest and most terrifying DVD images for movies we actually like — and provided their original posters as well, just so you can see how far they can fall. … Read More

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Pop Culture

Wonderfully Geeky Pop Culture-Inspired Posters for NASA Expeditions

By Jason Bailey on

Points of primary interest aside, pop culture geeks and science geeks have a lot in common (let’s admit it: we all spent a lot of high school-era Saturday nights not on dates), so it’s nice to see that our interests can occasionally intersect. You see, whenever NASA sends an expedition to the International Space Station, they make a poster for said mission as part of their “Space Flight Awareness” program. On the early expeditions, these posters were pretty much what you’d expect: space-suited astronauts looking heroic, against a backdrop of a launching Space Shuttle or Planet Earth, with maybe a waving American flag thrown in for good measure. But about 16 missions in, they started getting inventive — making posters in the mold of famous movie advertising or aping pop culture imagery. Check out our favorites after the jump, and enjoy all of their posters to date (and some fascinating facts about the expeditions) on NASA’s site. … Read More

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Film

A Beginner’s Guide to Spaghetti Westerns

By Jason Bailey on

Next week marks the DVD and Blu-ray debut of Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-winning tribute to his favorite of all cinematic subgenres, the Spaghetti Western. Ah yes, you might nod, unafraid to ask the follow-up question: And what, exactly, is a Spaghetti Western? The short answer — if you’re willing to allow the use of the term, which some of those who made these films take as a slam — is an Italian-made western made roughly between 1964-1973 (there were about 500 of them, give or take a few). But if you’d care to sound a little more informed than that at your next film-geek gathering (shut up, we occasionally gather), or if you’d like to use Django as a jumping-off point for a deeper exploration of these popular works, we offer another of our helpful Beginner’s Guides, this one giving you a brief overview of the practitioners and practices of the Spaghetti Western. … Read More

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