As you may have already heard, today the first Thursday in October, and is thus National Poetry Day. In celebration of this beloved writerly holiday, those of us over here in the film corner of your Flavorwire decided to post some of our favorite poems about our favorite subject: the movies. Join us after the jump for a few of our favorite cinematic poems, as suggested by the indispensible volume Lights, Camera, Poetry! (edited by Jason Shinder); feel free to add your own (or what the hell, make one up) after the jump.

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Occasionally, something amazing surfaces on the internet, and this week, it’s a short film about the production design on Ridley Scott’s classic Blade Runner. The video was apparently made for distribution at fantasy and sci-fi conventions, and it’s been unearthed by sci-fi film blog Future Noir, and it makes for truly interesting viewing — the film features interview with designer Syd Mead and visual effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, along with shots of concept art, models, and a serious discussion about a futuristic parking meter. You get fascinating insights into the techniques used to create the film’s inimitable atmosphere — and it’s also kind of poignant to see a young, pre-Russell Crowe, Scott talking excitedly about his new feature, especially since he’s now talking ominously about returning to the world of Blade Runner. Where did it all go wrong?

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As Flavorwire’s own Jason Bailey noted in a recent post on The Smurfs, the economy, and nostalgia, there’s no shortage of sequels, remakes, and re-boots of ’80s movies at the box office this summer. So it’s hardly surprising that, after months of rumors, there’s a new Blade Runner film in the works. What raises our eyebrows is the news, via Deadline, that Ridley Scott has committed to directing and producing a new installment (either a prequel or sequel) of his biggest cult classic for Alcon Entertainment. Before you get too excited, know that the project still has a long way to go before it’ll be showing at a theater near you — the script isn’t even written yet, and it’s still unclear whether it will even make sense for Harrison Ford to reprise his starring role.

Ah, the 1980s. They’ve got a pretty rotten musical reputation, and as far as film music goes, at least, it’s largely well deserved. This was the decade that soundtrack albums became big business – the decade when ultra-commercial songs from the likes of Footloose, St Elmo’s Fire, Top Gun, and Dirty Dancing were a constant fixture on Casey Kasem’s American Top 40, and Kenny Loggins made a tidy living. But still, there was room for some genuinely innovative and interesting scores and soundtracks to be made – as we discover in the latest installment of Flavorpill’s soundtrack series.

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1. Warner Bros. is in the final stages of acquiring the rights to produce a prequel or sequel of Ridley Scott’s cult classic Blade Runner — but the deal would not allow them to do a remake of the orignal. [via Guardian]

2. “Here is the lyric: ‘Come on now, this beat is sick. I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.’ Here is the problem: 1. There is no ideal translation for the word ‘disco’ in this circumstance. 2. The word Ison might normally sign for ‘stick’ generally refers to what would snap off of a tree branch. Thus, if the sentence is translated word-for-word from English to its corresponding signs, the resulting phrase could come across as something like, ‘I want to ride on the twig of John Travolta’s dance moves.’” – from What sign-language interpreters make of the likes of Lady Gaga and Bon Jovi

3. Courtney Love has settled the Twitter-related defamation lawsuit brought against her by fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir to the tune of $430,000. [via THR]

4. After waiting six years since the release of the last novel in the saga, the next book in George R.R. Martin’s bestselling A Song of Ice and Fire series, A Dance With Dragons, has a publication date: July 12, 2011. You might want to start working out now, because at over 900 pages long, it’s going to be a total brick to lug around. [via EW]

5. Michael Stipe has asked filmmakers like James Franco, Sophie Calle, Albert Maysles, and Sam Taylor-Wood to create video clips to accompany each track on R.E.M.’s forthcoming album Collapse Into Now. [via Paste]

Bonus link: Blockbuster Training Video, c. 1990

One of the redeeming features of the “festive” season is that it presents an excuse to watch Bad Santa again. This year, Flavorpill settled down with the director’s cut edition of Terry Zwigoff’s anti-festive masterpiece and… Wait, what? He cut all the funny bits? Sitting through two hours of a formerly awesome film reduced to mediocrity by some ill-advised and inexplicable editing got us thinking about director’s cuts that have been substantially worse than their respective theatrical releases. Here’s ten of the biggest stinkers.

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François Vautier has created an animated short using all 167,819 frames of Ridley Scott’s classic Blade Runner. “I assembled all these images to obtain one gigantic image of colossal dimensions: a square of approximately 60,000 pixels on one side alone, 3.5 gigapixels (3500 million pixels),” he explains. Vaultier then panned a virtual camera above this giant image, creating the illusion of animation. Set to a mix of the film’s galactic synth music and dialogue, the experimental short becomes all the more fitting when the camera seems to follow Deckard’s zoom instructions. Click through to check it out.

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If your film-industry knowledge is a bit on the stale side, here’s what’s happening: Lots and lots of movies are coming out in 3D. But it’s not just new releases; older movies are getting a 3D facelift too. One of the latest films to undergo this trendy makeover is Battle Royale, the 2000 cult classic from Japan about a group of school children forced to kill each other on a secluded island. Think Survivor with less democracy and more bloodshed.

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Today at Flavorpill, we channeled our childhood by watching the GI Joe trailer. We decided that if Julian Schnabel keeps dropping the price on his West Village digs, we might have to make an offer.  We worried that one day, like the late Ms. Astor, we’ll have a team of prosecutors trying to convince a jury that we were mentally unsound. Although, if we live to see 105, who cares, right? We wished we were shopping Forrest Ackerman’s Blade Runner-filled auction — although we clearly don’t have 100K to blow on a Replicant blaster. We rejected the Ferris Bueller/Fight Club Theory. Hello, what at about Jeanie?? We’re sad that the biggest scoop about Ugly Betty these days involves her braces coming off. Ah, well. We laughed at Old Jews Telling Jokes; Larry Donksy is so cute. And finally we leave with you this clip of Snowball, the incredilble dancing parrot. Watching this could change your life. Or at least make you want to headbang.

Architecture infuses our lives — subtly and not so subtly — with emotions, ideas, splendor, and stress all the time. It’s only fitting it does the same in great movies. After the jump are eight classic films where the buildings are more than a backdrop. Which ones are we forgetting? You know what to do. Read More »