background preloader

10 Famous Films That Surprisingly Fail The Bechdel Test

10 Famous Films That Surprisingly Fail The Bechdel Test
All this week, Film School Rejects presents a daily dose of our favorite articles from the archive. Originally published in September 2011, Ashe Cantrell applies the simple, ever-relevant Bechdel Test to a number of high profile movies… The Bechdel Test, if you’re not familiar with it, is a benchmark for movies developed by Alison Bechdel in 1985. Sounds simple, right? But it’s still surprising to find out that some of the most popular films of all time fail the test, and often for reasons you may have never considered. 10.

15 Film Production Credits Explained Ever wonder what all those strange credits are when they roll by at the end of a film? I used to, until I moved to LA, where I started meeting Best Boys and Dolly Grips with their kids when I took my son to the playground—yes, Hollywood, where you meet Gaffers and Armourers at your average Saturday night house party. So I started asking questions, and here's what I've learned: 1. No, this job has nothing to do with explosives or pyrotechnics. 2. Now this job does deal with explosives, of a sort. 3. Though the gaffer manages the entire electrical department, all the guys who run cables and hang lights, his main responsibility is mounting and positioning lights and lighting rigs. 4. Grips are sort of like worker bees. 5. This guy runs the Grips dept and assists the Gaffer. 6. This guy has nothing at all to do with a wedding, unless we're talking something like Wedding Crashers . 7. A dolly grip operates the movie camera dolly. 8. 9. 10. This guy oversees the painting dept. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Martin Scorsese's Film School: The 85 Films You Need To See To Know Anything About Film Interviewing Martin Scorsese is like taking a master class in film. Fast Company’s four-hour interview with the director for the December-January cover story was ostensibly about his career, and how he had been able to stay so creative through years of battling studios. But the Hugo director punctuated everything he said with references to movies: 85 of them, in fact, all listed below. Some of the movies he discussed (note: the descriptions for these are below in quotes, denoting his own words). Others he just mentioned (noted below with short plot descriptions and no quotes). But the cumulative total reflects a life lived entirely within the confines of movie making, from his days as a young asthmatic child watching a tiny screen in Queens, New York to today, when Scorsese is as productive as he’s ever been in his career–and more revered than ever by the industry that once regarded him as a troublesome outsider. The Band Wagon: “It’s my favorite of the Vincente Minnelli musicals. Mr.

25 Spectacular Movies You (Probably) Haven’t Seen Midnight in Paris Woody Allen’s latest places starving writer Owen Wilson in Paris with his fiancée, Rachel McAdams. Searching for inspiration for his incomplete novel, Owen begins taking strolls around the city at night where he discovers an unexpected group of people. I wish I could be more specific, but it would ruin the surprise. Know that it is brilliant, witty and full of mystique. 92% on Rotten Tomatoes (RT). Let the Right One In The best vampire movie ever made in my opinion. Watch Let the Right One In for FREE on Amazon Instant Video The Man From Earth Holy &#%@ this film’s plot is fascinating! Garden State This is my absolute favorite film. Waking Life It’s impossible for you to grasp Waking Life without actually watching it, but I’ll do my best to explain it. Watch Waking Life for FREE on Amazon Instant Video Closer This film is a rather dark, yet comedic story about the twisted relationships between Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. Sin Nombre Snatch The Descent

THE TERRY GILLIAM SCHOOL OF FILM: 10 LESSONS FOR DIRECTORS TODAY “Billy Wilder once said that there are only two things aging directors can’t avoid…awards and haemorroids [sic]. I’ll stick with just the awards for the moment, please.” So says a recent Facebook post from the brain behind some of the greatest films of the last century, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to Brazil to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Yes, Terry Gilliam has joined Facebook, as an experiment to promote his latest venture, the short film The Wholly Family, about Italian Pulcinella figurines coming to life inside a small boy’s imagination. Wearing a Filipino-print shirt he purchased at his favorite craft shop in Los Angeles, and socks covered with cows sporting sunglasses, Gilliam showed up the night after his award ceremony to the Palais des Congrès to teach a Master Class to an audience full of Moroccan film students. 1. As a child, I always drew funny creatures, funny characters. 2. Live and learn how to make films. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration Over the course of 45 years in the film business, Francis Ford Coppola has refined a singular code of ethics that govern his filmmaking. There are three rules: 1) Write and direct original screenplays, 2) make them with the most modern technology available, and 3) self-finance them. But Coppola didn’t develop this formula overnight. Thanks in no small part to his booming wine business, Coppola now does just that. I sat down with Mr. Why did you choose not to teach a master class? For me in cinema there are few masters. I just finished a film a few days ago, and I came home and said I learned so much today. Even in the early days of the movies, they didn’t know how to make movies. The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do. The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do. An essential element of any art is risk. Gene Hackman in The Conversation. Do you feel like you’re more of a risk-taker now? Yes, I think.

High Heels on Wet Pavement: Film Noir and the Femme Fatale Femme fatale—is defined as “an irresistibly attractive woman, especially one who leads men into danger or disaster”. To me the most engaging semblance of a “femme fatale” is the stunning image of Lana Turner, as the camera pans from her ankles upward in that breathtaking shot from The Postman Always Rings Twice 1946. Extremes The most consistent aspect of film noir, apart from its visual style, is its protagonists. The overtly Freudian aspects of such relationships function as a foundation on which to construct a sequence of narrative events that typify the noir vision. Detour Edgar Ulmer’s Poverty Row cult-classic, Detour, 1945, is fraught with outrageous coincidences that in most accounts would be far too absurd to confront, but in Ulmer’s skilled hands are accepted as legitimate premises. Ultimate Femme Fatale Out of the Past, 1947, while not a perfect example of the best of the noir cycle, contains many of the elements of the genre. Later Femme Fatales What Happened Michael Mills

Top 10 Websites To Watch Movies Online For Free Without Downloading It is easy to watch FREE movies online from China here, since there are many video websites for you to do that, but outside China, there may be not many video websites to watch movies online for free, because of the Copyright thing. However, God likes free. There are always some great people who do the great things and let us watch full movies online for free. Below 10 websites will let you watch the full online movies (even the latest ones) for free. 1. On LetMeWatchThis, you can watch nearly all the latest movies online for free via different movie resources, such as novamov, fairyshare, megavideo, and so on. Go to LetMeWatchThis (PrimeWire.ag) Update: Since the website has been moved to 1channel.ch and letmewatchthis.ch, the letmewatchthis.com site is just a copycat now. 2. Similar to LetMeWatchThis, you can find out most of the latest movies on The Pirate City and watch them from other video websites. Go to The Pirate City (Not workable any more.) Update: 3. 10StarMovies Go to 10StarMovies

Sound Design of Star Wars compiled by Sven E Carlsson Sounddesigner Ben Burtt's responsibility on Star Wars was to create specifically unusual sounds - weapons, vehicles, character and key backgrounds. Ben Burtt was a film sound buff as a child (he recorded and replayed the sound tracks of his favorite movies) Burtt enrolled at the university of Southern California's film school with the intention of becoming a director. He received a student job cataloguing the Columbia sound library, which had been donated to the University. A call by Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz to U.S.C. led to a successful interview for Burtt. He spent a year recording anything that could be turned upside down and backwards to make Lucas world come alive. "In my first discussion with George Lucas about the film, he - and I concurred with him - that he wanted an 'organic', as opposed to the electronic and artificial soundtrack.

Glossary of Motion Picture Terms (A-G) 1D LUT: A 1-dimensional lookup table is a static color translation table that converts one input value to one output value. There is a 1-to-1 correspondence in the input and output values in a 1D LUT. 16 mm: The frame is one-fourth the size of a 35 mm frame and has a 1.33:1 television aspect ratio. 2K: A digital image 2048 pixels wide. 3:2 Pull-down: The telecine transfer relationship of film frames to video fields. 3D LUT: A 3-dimensional lookup table is a static color translation table that converts a set of three input color values to another set of three output color values. 35 mm: The standard gauge for professional filmmakers, and the standard mainstream film format used for theatrical releases. 4K: A digital image 4096 pixels wide. 65 mm: The camera film format (size) for wide-screen formats such as IMAX. 70 mm: The release print format (size) for wide-screen formats such as IMAX. Acetate: Actually cellulose triacetate, the base material frequently used for motion picture films. Next

Related: