Content tagged with “movies” under “The Interesting List”

“ A compilation of examples of when movies broke the fourth wall, and spoke to or looked directly at the camera. ”

“ A discussion about how car chases are staged and filmed. ”

“ In order to fulfill a contractual requirement, a movie was shown a limited number of times, at odd hours, in a single theater, prior to being released overseas. This technically made it the lowest-grossing movie ever. ”

“ For various reasons, some actors who appear to interact in the same movie, never actually meet each other. ”

“ When movies and TV shows need to do a close-up of some object, they often have the object created or printed at two or three times the size. ”

“ A fictional airline has been used in dozens of TV shows and movies, often in situations where something bad happens to one of its planes. ”

“ Julia Roberts’s parents ran a theater school in Georgia and became friends with Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King. ”

“ The Hallmark Channel filmed a story about two sisters and edited it into two movies. Each one is told from the perspective of a different sister, and they share footage where the sisters interact throughout their respective stories. ”

“ A detailed look at how movies capture human motion for CGI. ”

“ The director of The Godfather discusses the physical binder and notes he used to adapt the novel. ”

“ A very niche list of science fiction stories that were originally set in ‘the future,’ but that real time has now surpassed, meaning the stories are now set in the past. ”

“ No brand appearance is accidental. Here’s how it works. ”

“ The ‘mirror shot’ is when a movie or TV show films directly into a mirror, yet you cannot see the camera. Turns out there are multiple tricks to making this happen. ”

“ Filmmakers use some tricky techniques to make you think they had thousands of extras on the set. ”

“ A backstage view of the director of the Oscar broadcast and the decisions and pace the team has to maintain during a single award and acceptance speech. ”

“ A deep dive into The Texas Switch, which is a way of sneakily inserting an actor or stunt double into an unbroken shot. ”

“ Explosions in the movies bear virtually no resemblance to real-life explosions, by design. ”

“ An entertaining list of ‘celebrity paradoxes,’ which is where a story references a real person, and that real person has intersected with that story as a fictional character. ”

“ Marvel action movies are ‘pre-filmed’ in a kind of ‘draft mode,’ so that huge chunks of the films exist visually before any shooting starts. Sometimes this happens even before the director is hired or the script is finished. ”

“ A short scene in the 1996 movie ‘Contact’ seems physically impossible and might send your brain into somersaults trying to figure out how they did it. ”

“ Some people hate the last scene of ‘The Departed,’ to the point where they were fund-raising to digitally ‘fix’ it. (This eventually got shut down by the movie company.) ”

“ Movies will make fake money as props. To work in the world of high-def, sometimes they make it too accurate, and they get in trouble with the Secret Service. ”

“ A monologue from ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ where a high-powered fashion critic caustically explains to an intern how the economics and trickle-down trendsetting of the fashion world works. ”

“ A movie scene is broken down to show all the tricks a camera operator might use when they film a scene. ”

“ Controversy has followed this movie since it was released. Most people were unaware of the problems and are only now understanding how the movie is perceived by the black community. ”

“ There are a stunning number of records kept about the Academy Awards. ”

“ A detailed history of the NC-17 movie rating. ”

“ A short cataloging of the sometimes dated ways that filmmakers created long takes, from Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’ through the more recent ‘1917.’ ”

“ A tragic retelling of the decline of Robin Williams by his wife, as Lewy Body Dementia took its toll. ”

“ A news report from the early 70s showing how some audience members were physically traumatized after seeing ‘The Exorcist’ in theaters. ”

“ There’s a movie theater in Celebration, Florida that AMC owns but has left abandoned for almost 10 years. Celebration is the artificial town created by Disney in the 90s, which makes it even weirder. ”

“ An examination of the stylistic action scenes in the Jason Bourne trilogy, and how they changed the action movies that came after them, with particular emphasis on how Paul Greengrass structured his fight scenes and drove down the Average Shot Length. ”

“ Spoiler: no passenger has ever landed a large commercial airliner like in the movies, but it’s happened several times with smaller planes. ”

“ A heart-breaking profile of Roger Ebert, written in the middle of his battle with the cancer that killed him. ”

“ Pixar faked camera features in the last Toy Story movie. It created shots using limitations of actual cameras even though it was an animated movies and didn’t use cameras. ”

“ The guy who played Jason in the Friday the 13th movies is actually a very nice guy. ”

“ An interesting look at what happens when media franchises expand past their core source, and how to juggle what is canon and what isn’t. When you create a fake world, there’s a lot to keep track of. ”

“ It turns out, sex scenes on film are very complicated things. There is such a thing as an ‘intimacy choreographer’ that’s like a fight choreographer for sex. ”

“ Neat examination of one director’s obsession with the long take – those unbroken camera shots that go on for minutes at a time. I do, however, take exception at the condemnation of the long take that opens Spectre. I thought that was brilliant. ”

“ Someone noticed a painting in the background a scene of ‘Stuart Little,’ and it turned out to be a long-lost painting that a set decorator bought at a second-hand store. ”

“ I promise you’ve seen James Hong dozens of times on screen, but never known who he was. He has 500 credits and has been acting for 66 years. ”

“ A screenwriter breaks down how she would come up with a scene under time pressure and random feedback from the studio. ”

“ Fascinating look back at celebrity casting in animated movies (which is a more recent phenomenon than you might think) with a long look at Robin Williams’s role at the Genie in ‘Aladdin.’ ”