As much as I love movies and showing them at the library, I know very little about audio, but I hope someone reading this can be of assistance.
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movies
Jonathan Demme (1944-2017)
The world has lost another great creative force, director Jonathan Demme, who died yesterday from complications from cancer. He was 73. Many people will remember Demme primarily as the director of The Silence of the Lambs (1991), some erroneously thinking that was his first film. It wasn’t; at that point he’d been making films for close to two decades.
The Horror! The Horror! My Reluctance to Embrace Horror and How Scream Factory and Pure Cinema Podcast May Change My Movie-Watching Life While Sucking My Bank Account Dry
(How’s that for a title, huh?)
I have a very unusual relationship with horror movies. I own very few of them and most of the ones I do own are from Hollywood’s “classic” era, including several of the Universal monster films and later more “psychological” horror films such as The Innocents (1961) and The Haunting (1963), films that suggest more than they show. Most of the horror in those films comes from implications and a sense of dread rather than actual physical danger and mayhem. These are the elements that – at least to me – offer the best justifications for rewatchability. Yet after listening to the latest Pure Cinema Podcast, I might be picking up more horror.
In their most recent show, Episode 6: Scream Factory, I came away with at least 16 titles I absolutely must check out:
Rarefilmm Returns!
A couple of people have asked me here on the blog and in person about Rarefilmm and if I know anything about the status of the site. Thanks to a message from my friend Kristina over at Speakeasy, who saw this Tweet from @rarefilmm:
Happy new year, everybody! I will see you guys again on January 27th for the grand re-opening of rarefilmm. Salud!
This is exciting news indeed! We don’t know what the site will look like or how much it might cost to access it, but for many hard-to-find films, this is a great resource. When I know more, I’ll be sure to pass it on, so stay tuned.
Oh, and Happy New Year!
UPDATE: It would seem that Rarefilmm is now RareFilm.net. There’s not much information there (no “About Us”), but there seems to be many films that apparently available to download and not to stream. I have not used the new service. If you have, please let us know your thoughts in the comment section.
The Best of 2016 Lists
This time of year you can count on holiday shopping madness, eating too much and a proliferation of “Best of the Year” lists. I try to limit myself on the first two items (usually without success with either) but go nuts with my “Best of” lists.
During the next few weeks, I’ll be posting sporadically with several “Best of” lists that I hope you’ll enjoy. My first list should be a Best Books on Movies list. These won’t be books to movies, but rather books about movies, some new, some old. (I also look forward to reading your “Best of” lists.) See you then…
Photos: Lisa Renee Jones, Stumptown Blogger
The Request Line is Still Open
Thank you to those of you who have made streaming suggestions based on my current no-physical-media dilemma (described in yesterday’s post). Although no one commented here on the blog, several of you commented via Twitter (@awolverton77) and Facebook. I took a serious look at two of those suggestions:
If a Movie Plays in an Empty Theater…
Recently on the podcast Maltin on Movies, Leonard Maltin had Paul Scheer as a guest on the show. One of the many things they talked about was the eternal question: If no one shows up for a movie theater screening, do they still run the projector? If the projectionist kills the movie after 10 minutes, what happens if someone walks in 15 minutes late?
