Examples of movie mistakes that made their scenes much better

Films are complex beasts with so many moving parts that mistakes are unavoidable. Even the blockbusters with the biggest budgets and most sets of eyes on them routinely make it to cinemas with a few errors, especially when it comes to continuity.From fluffed lines to errant extras, numerous mistakes have to be corrected on set (or, increasingly, in the editing suite) but occasionally they can bring a new and welcome quality to a scene.Here we look at some of the unplanned and unwanted events ...

Precarity and Struggle: Kafka, Roth, Kraus

We know that things in our world have gone awry when Franz Kafka resonates: "The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it cannot do otherwise, it will writhe in front of you in ecstasies." As we all anxiously await a less metaphysical unmasking, such a sentiment speaks to a current mood of tenuous anticipation, as it likely would have in the early 20th century had the text in which it appears been published along with Kafka’s more famous works. Instead, it is included now in a slim v...

Failure To Launch comes so close to working as a bizarre meta parody of rom-coms

There are good rom-coms, bad rom-coms, and so-bad-they’re-good rom-coms. And then there’s Failure To Launch, a 2006 Matthew McConaughey/Sarah Jessica Parker vehicle so inexplicably bizarre it almost feels like a meta parody of every terrible romantic comedy trope. With a slight shift in tone, Failure To Launch could’ve beaten Michael Showalter’s rom-com spoof They Came Together to the punch by almost an entire decade. The genre was certainly rife for mockery by the mid-aughts, and with their ...

New Green Lantern Series Expands Cosmic DC Universe

Geoffrey Thorne is very detail-oriented. That helps explain the density of Green Lantern #1, his new book bringing the Green Lantern Corps into the Infinite Frontier era.  "I apologized to Dexter [Soy, one of his creative partners on Green Lantern] and to Tom Raney [his art partner on Future State: Green Lantern],"  Thorne tells us in an interview about the new run, "because the first things they had to draw that I wrote had a cast of thousands." But it works: the new book launches with La...

How the Tragic Literary Woman Became a Figure of Fascination

In August 1935, Vivien Eliot, the estranged wife of poet T. S. Eliot, boarded a train bound for Oxford from London. Oxford was where she had met her husband two decades prior: he a fastidious philosophy graduate student, she a flighty, charming governess. Legend has it she caught his eye as she punted down the River Cherwell, though in reality they were probably introduced during a luncheon. This time, though, she hadn’t come as a young lady in search of a new life, but rather a psychically f...

1990s movie theaters and their outer space themed carpets

Photo: Ethan Miller (Getty Images)               American cultural aesthetics have adopted some particularly strange fads throughout the decades, but few strike that particular chord of nostalgic resonance as well as late-’90s movie theater carpets—those thousands upon thousands of square feet of garish, neon-colored cosmic bodies, squiggly lines, and splatter paint set against dingy black backdrops. As it turns out, that strain of floor fashion can be largely traced back to Pattern Patient Z...

Why Do Wes Anderson Movies Look Like That?

The dominant form of Hollywood and/or mainstream filmmaking has been realism, the sense that even in our wildest fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero films there’s still an attempt to hide the camera, the crew, and the lighting, and that what we’re seeing just *is*, that nothing has been constructed for us. Despite the tricks that editing and non-diegetic sound (music, etc.) play on us, we are still willing to believe that we are seeing a thing that happened. There’s very few filmmakers that exp...

The Awakening

Introduction of The Awakening The Awakening is a masterpiece of Kate Chopin, who was the liberal writer of her time. The book was published in 1899. The story is set in New Orleans near the Louisianan coastal area. The storyline revolves around Edna Pontellier and her anti-orthodox views about life, motherhood, marriage, and relationships that go against the societal norms prevalent in American society before the 20th century. The novel is known as the founding story supporting femininity ...

Tone

Definition of Tone Tone is a literary device that reflects the writer’s attitude toward the subject matter or audience of a literary work. By conveying this attitude through tone, the writer creates a particular relationship with the reader that, in turn, influences the intention and meaning of the written words. However, though the writer’s tone may reflect their personal attitude or opinion, this literary device may also strictly apply to conveying the attitudes and feelings of a certain...

American Onanist

Richard Benjamin in the 1972 film adaptation of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, a landmark of masturbatoralia and Random House’s best-selling novel ever. Philip Roth: The Biography by Blake Bailey "I do not think of it as writing a book. I think of it as writing a sentence," said Philip Roth, who wrote 31 books containing many, many sentences. Well, O.K. then. I do not think of this as writing a review. I think of it as contemplating a human being, one who is m...

Most Powerful Plot Construction Tool In The Film Industry – Jeff Kitchen

Film Courage: What do you believe is the most powerful plot construction tool currently in the film industry? Jeff Kitchen, Dramatist / Author / Founder / Consultant: The one that I teach is a three-step process called Sequence Proposition Plot that was invented by William Thompson Price but sat undiscovered in his book until I found it. I’ve taught that to development executives at all of the Hollywood studios and they consistently say it’s the most advanced development tool in the film i...

Literary Translations and Crossword Puzzles Are More Similar Than You Think

My journey as a literary translator began three years ago, whereas I only started constructing crosswords in the early months of quarantine. But it didn’t take me long to discover that literary translation and crossword construction share many qualities. Both are puzzles with particular rules and constraints: translators move the meaning and culture of a text from one language into another, and cruciverbalists populate grids with words that translate into a set of clues. When I translate poem...

Behold the Elaborate Writing Desks of 18th Century Aristocrats

Sitting or standing before an esteemed writer’s desk can make us feel closer to their process. Virginia Woolf’s desks — plywood boards she held on her lap and sloped standing desks — show a kind of austere rigor in her posture. "Throughout her life as a writer," James Barrett points out, Woolf "paid attention to the physical act of writing," just as she paid attention to the creative act of walking. The bareness of her implements tells us a lot about her as an artist, but it tells us nothing ...

Horror Icons in Quarantine: One Year In

Jason Voorhees Mr. Voorhees has long been a proponent of masking and is considered a public health folk hero. When not taking long, contemplative walks in the woods, he can be found at nearby summer camps, rigorously enforcing social distancing among the teens. Norman Bates Norman is still running the Bates Motel, which he deep-cleans regularly. While it’s been a tough year for the hospitality industry, his #1 priority is keeping guests away from his elderly mother. Leatherface ...

Film Review: Robocop (dir by Paul Verhoeven)

[link VIDEO] Last week, I watched the original Robocop (along with Robocop 2 and Robocop 3) and I have to say that the first film holds up far better than I was expecting. Made and released way back in 1987, Robocop may be one of the most prophetic films ever made. Consider the plot: America is torn apart by crime and a growing gap between the rich and the poor. That was probably true in 1987 and it’s certainly true in 2021. Throughout the film, we see news repo...

'Fighting for Space': Author Amy Shira Teitel talks the history of women in spaceflight

You may have heard of the "Mercury 13," but what really happened with the women who wanted to be the first female astronauts?  In her new book, "Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight" (Grand Central Publishing, 2021), author and spaceflight historian Amy Shira Teitel delivers a dual biography that peels back decades of history to reveal the true stories of Jerrie Cobb and Jacqueline "Jackie" Cochran, two women ...

Seaspiracy: 5 more documentaries that changed the way we see the world

Seaspiracy is the latest documentary to change viewers’ minds about important topics in the world. Released on Netflix last week, the documentary explores the damage being done to marine life such as sharks, dolphins and whales by the global fishing industry. Many viewers said that the film had persuaded them to stop eating fish altogether as a means of helping the environment, with The Independent’s Charlotte Cripps writing in her four-star review that Seaspiracy "exposes the corru...

The Night review – eerie check-in at an LA hotel

The fundamental creepiness of hotels is the driving force behind this very potent supernatural mystery-thriller from Iranian-American film-maker Kourosh Ahari: the creepiness of their deserted corridors, their stately or shabby lobbies, and their anonymous rooms, whose blankness keeps the secret of their previous occupants. It’s a creepiness that predates and is independent of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, though that’s admittedly an influence here. In modern-day Los Angeles, a young Ir...

And It Was All Yellow: The Color Theory of TV Graphics

Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video essay about why the color yellow dominates TV graphics. One of the finer comforts in life is settling in to binge-watch some old sitcoms. Maybe you’ve got some tea. Maybe you’re panini-pressed under a weighted blanket. But one thing’s for sure (or at least, it’s very likely): the title card of your binge-du-jour is probably yellow. Gilligan’s Island? Yellow....

The Flight Attendant, Sky One review - first-class entertainment - The Arts Desk

"I get to see all these beautiful places and look passengers right in the eye and say the word trash." Meet Cassie Bowden (the excellent Kaley Cuoco), flight attendant on Imperial Atlantic Airways. In firm denial about her alcohol problem, she knocks back myriads of vodka miniatures onboard, parties hard in cities the world over, has one-night stands after black-out benders ("Thank you for the effort. Good job," she says to one man, unclear as to who he is or what he’s doing in bed in her New...

Bernd Herzogenrath (ed.) (2017) Film as Philosophy

With Film as Philosophy, Bernd Herzogenrath sets out to "bring film studies and philosophy into a productive dialogue" that explores the ability of film to "think" and to enable thought (pp. xiii–xiv). In his introduction, he traces a tradition of philosophical engagement with film that informs cognitive film studies, academic philosophy on film, and an understanding of film as philosophy following the leads of Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze. Noting the new perspectives offered by the infl...

SXSW Review: Dear Mr. Brody Entertainingly Sheds Light on a Counterculture Footnote

Long before the days of going viral with a scam to share wealth with whomever retweets a comment, there was Michael J. Brody Jr., an Oleomargarine heir and alleged hippie millionaire who pledged to give away his wealth without thinking through an orderly process. Surrounding himself by "yes" men, he becomes a subject of fascination on news programs in the New York City area, eventually capturing the attention of producer Ed Pressman, who takes ownership of the letters as research for a future...

The Revolution of View master and User Experience Review

The very first designs of the view-master were introduced in 1939. These stereoscopic toys revolutionized the sound and feel of the snapping motion of the iconic camera. They made most people extremely excited when they viewed their personal, vivid images in a slideshow. This gadget was a famous attraction to most children worldwide and made it possible to view beautiful landscapes. Currently, the view master viewer has undergone several improvements and enhancements that flicker the same awe...

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