Is it possible to cram the 100 best movie lines of all time into just 200 seconds? The video below, which we came across on Cinematical, comes pretty close, but we’d like to argue that they left out some classics. (That said, we’re amazed by how much they managed to cram in.) Watch it, and then click through for our list of the biggest omissions; feel free to add your own favorites that didn’t make the cut in the comments!
According to The Daily Telegraph, The Dark Knight has grossed $1 billion at the worldwide box office, which makes it the world’s best performing film in 2008 and Warner Brothers’ best performing film ever. (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone which brought in 976 million back in 2001 formerly held the record.)
Because normal people care a lot less about box office gold and more about gold statues, there’s more talk of whether Heath Ledger should win a posthumous Academy Award for his role as the Joker than how much money the film’s raking in. Apparently people winning Oscars from the Great Beyond is nothing novel, but from what we can tell, Ledger might stand a better chance if he was a film composer or going up in the Art Direction category. A Best Supporting Actor nominee has never posthumously won an Oscar and while nominated in consecutively for East of Eden and Giant, James Dean was passed over for a Best Actor award twice.
After the jump find a chronological list of the posthumous Academy Award winners; let us know if you think Ledger deserves a trophy for his work in the comments.
Harold Pinter takes his final pause: The famed British playwright died yesterday at 78 after suffering from cancer. As the Guardian reports, when Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2005, the committee claimed he was “generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century.” On the 40th anniversary of our favorite of Pinter’s works, The Homecoming, New Yorker critic John Lahr once wrote: “The Homecoming changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defense. Before, I thought theatre was about the spoken; after, I understood the eloquence of the unspoken. The position of a chair, the length of a pause, the choice of a gesture, I realized, could convey volumes.” [Guardian]
In order to wind up as one of Stephen King’s favorite films of the year, all a movie needs to do is be seen by Stephen King. The legendary horror author recently revealed his top ten to Entertainment Weekly, and his choices are bound to scare any serious movie lover into, well, deciding against ever going to the movies with Stephen King. EW should hobble the novelist for handing in something like this and make him start all over again.
His top choices seem appropriate (if only a smidge fanboy-ish), as King picked The Dark Knight for his number one spot (calling it “the best superhero movie ever”). From there he strings together three more fan favorites – Slumdog Millionaire, WALL-E and Tropic Thunder — before launching a Hail Mary at the 2008 movie slate to see what sticks (or should we say, sucks?).
The American Film Institute just announced their top ten movies of 2008 — a year that in spite of the economic apocalypse that plagued certain industries (can we get a “Big 3″?) seemed recession-proof for Hollywood, proving that it is in fact a magical place. After the jump we decided to break down AFI’s list by the numbers (production budgets vs. award nods) in an effort to uncover the most wallet-friendly critical successes for producers this year. What did we discover? Spending $200 million is definitely the way to go if you’re interested in scoring an MTV Movie Award.
The latest “Batman 3″ rumor floating around the Internet is the news that Christopher Nolan has officially signed on for the third film and is plugging away on the script, while Rachel Weisz, who broke our heart in The Constant Gardener, is in talks to take on the coveted role of Catwoman. That’s a far cry from previous murmurs of Cher or Angelina Jolie, but in a good way.
Google released its annual Zeitgeist report this week, giving the world a chance to view 2008 through the lens of our search habits. Data geeks that they are, they’ve formatted their version of a year-end report not as an easy to read (read: easy to ignore) list, but rather as a collection of numbers, charts, regional segmentations and other showy stuff that we don’t know how to do in Excel.
While we know that the point of the Zeitgeist is to help us understand the state of the Internet world — and be extension, society at large — our first reaction to it was a resounding “Huh? What does this all mean? What’s a ‘nasza klasa’? Where are we? We’re scared.” After the jump, we try our best to sort it all out for you.
Books: “The Pulitzer Prize Board will now permit online entries for all 14 categories of Journalism entries, a change that will permit web-based submissions in Investigative Reporting, Criticism, Feature Writing, and eleven other categories.” [GalleyCat]
Dance/Opera: “New York’s Metropolitan Opera, with ticket sales lagging and the economy in recession, said it will offer some of its priciest seats for weekend evening performances at $25 each for the rest of the season.” [Bloomberg]
Design: “The New York Times Co. says it will borrow as much as $225 million against its sparkling Midtown Manhattan headquarters to prevent a possible cash flow jam as the media behemoth struggles to come to terms with credit and profit worries.” [CBS Marketwatch]
Film: “My sources say the Motion Picture Academy has reversed its decision to disqualify the score for The Dark Knight. Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, who collaborated on the music, will now be able to compete in the best original score category.” [LAT]
Music: “U.S. universities are getting a glimpse at a plan that would build a small music-royalty fee into the tuition payments they receive from students.” [Wired]
Television: “The network has signed the popular Tonight Show host to a new agreement whereby Leno will have a show airing weeknights at 10 p.m.” [The Live Feed]
Theatre: “Try to remember the kind of December when you were watching the finale of the CBS reality series The Amazing Race, and thought one of its champions looked familiar: sure enough, Nick Spangler, who was a winner of the show’s $1 million prize on Sunday night, is a star of the current Off-Broadway production of The Fantasticks, in which he plays Matt.” [NYT]
Visual Arts: “A group of Spanish architects and art world types has savagely denounced the continuing work to complete Gaudí’s religious masterpiece the Sagrada Familia.” [Guardian]
Web: “U.K. Internet users have been blocked from editing Wikipedia, and they’re unable to access an article about an album by the German rock group, the Scorpions.” [IW]
Hadid, Foster on list to renovate Mecca: Mecca, aka Islam’s holiest city is seeking a face lift, and authorities are considering hot-right-now architects Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster for the job. They are among 16 contenders to create a new structure surrounding the Al Haram mosque, taking its capacity from 900,000 to 3 million, which would make it the highest capacity building in the world. Hadid has also been asked for input on upgrading “the whole area of the central district” of the city. [The National]
Hollywood, as we all know, is full of godless liberals who are intentionally trying to disintegrate America’s moral fiber through their bloody, sacrilegious movies about sex and breaking the Sabbath. At least according to the Anti-Defamation League, which released a poll today called “American Attitudes on Religion, Moral Values, and Hollywood” that found that “43% of Americans believe there is an organized campaign by Hollywood and the national media to weaken the influence of religious values in this country.”
But we think there’s a distinction to be made between attacking religion and attacking “religious values.” It’s one thing to pull a Bill Maher and trash every creed and church, and quite another to blame mainstream movies for picking on religious values — values that are actually quite present in many films’ moralistic undertones.
Looking back at the year’s top-grossing films, it’s hard to ignore that this year’s Hollywood heroes were mostly law-abiding, trash-collecting, world-saving individuals who might as well have been sporting W.W.J.D. bracelets.
See for yourself after the jump.
“ "What we have here,is a failure to Communicate" COOL HAND LUKE,,,i LOVED that movie,,,I'm... ” posted on 15 of the Most Memorable Final Lines in Film on
“ "And like that, he's gone" No Usual Suspect? Shame. ” posted on 15 of the Most Memorable Final Lines in Film on
“ Estacion Central en Santiago de Chile, este país tuvo hermosas estaciones y magnificos trenes... ” posted on Beautiful Abandoned Train Stations From All Over the World on
“ [last lines] Alice Harford: I do love you and you know there is something very important we... ” posted on 15 of the Most Memorable Final Lines in Film on
“ I just wrote a very similar post! However, my selections were more traditional (Ginsberg, Plath... ” posted on 10 Contemporary Poets You Should Know on
