Content tagged with “movies”

“The Eiger Sanction is sort of a spy movie, but mostly a mountain-climbing movie. First off, the title — The Eiger is a mountain peak in Switzerland. It’s probably the most common image of The Alps, and its northern face is one of the most difficult ascents to climb (‘Eiger’ means ‘Ogre’ in German)….”

“Back in the mid-80s, I would see the VHS cover for The Osterman Weekend and it seemed very exotic. It had a enigmatic name and a woman with a crossbow on the cover. Forty years later, I finally watched it. …and it was awful. It was Sam Peckinpaw’s final film, and it has a cast of recognizable…”

“Cloak and Dagger is (supposedly; see below) a kids movie — it’s kind of a crossover into fantasy. Henry Thomas (yes, the kid from E.T. ) plays Davey, a kid who loves role-playing games, especially those starring his hero, Jack Flack. He also has a vidid fantasy life, imagining Jack in real-life….”

“Three Days of the Condor is commonly cited as one of the best spy films ever made. I watched on a flight back from Germany, and I’ll concede that the reputation is well-deserved. Robert Redford plays Joe Turner. He works for the CIA in New York under the cover of a ‘literary historical society’…”

“This is a comedy, but not a spoof. Spy , that I watched last week, was a spoof. It was character-driven — really just an excuse for Melissa McCarthy to be (very) funny. You could have dropped her into anything else and it would have worked the same. But The Man with One Red Shoe is a comedy, driven…”

“Here’s the fun things about spoofs: they can embrace cliches. If a ‘serious’ movie tries to be too much like something else, then it’s considered derivative. But a spoof has license to do exactly that — that’s the actual point. Such is the case with the reductively named Spy . This is a Melissa…”

“I’ve long-felt that No Way Out is one of the great overlooked spy films. Released in 1987, it was was early starring role for Kevin Costner. Costner is Tom Farrell, a Navy officer working in the Pentagon. He’s sleeping with Susan, who also happens to be sleeping with the Secretary of Defense. One…”

“I read somewhere that 1955’s To Catch a Thief was fairly spy-adjacent. I watched it this morning. It’s got about everything you need: a very debonair hero in Cary Grant (he was 51 at the time), a beautiful girl in Grace Kelly (she was just 26), amazing locations on the French Rivera, elegant galas,…”

“I watched Code Name: Emperor on Netflix. (That’s the English title, anyway — it’s a Spanish film. I watched it with English subtitles.) It stars Luis Tosar, who is apparently one of the most popular actors in Spain (the only other thing I’ve seen him in is as the Big Boss in the Miami Vice movie)….”

“I was reminded of the bit player from three consecutive James Bond movies who witnesses something surreal and subsequently questions his sobriety. He was uncredited, but IMDb lists him as ‘Man with Bottle’ twice and ‘Man with Wine Glass’ once. The official YouTube channel compiled all three clips…”

“True Lies came to the historic theater in our local downtown. I last watched it in the theater fully 32 years ago when it originally released. I still remember seeing ‘Tom Arnold’ in the opening credits and thinking, ‘Aw, this is going to suck…’ But his character turned out to be one of the best…”

“I watched The Ipcress File from 1965. It was based on Len Deighton’s first novel and was released at the height of mid-60s ‘Bond-mania’ as kind of an anti-Bond. Michael Caine is Harry Palmer, an Army officer working for the Ministry of Defence. He’s insolent and insubordinate and has some criminal…”

“I’ve always loved the opening scene of the original Mission Impossible . It was set in Prague, and it was the perfect mix of action and intrigue. As luck would have it, I found myself in Prague a couple years ago, and I spent an entire day tracking down all the shooting locations I could find. (I…”

“I watched The 39 Steps , which is a Hitchcock movie from 1935. It’s considered one of the classic spy thrillers. A man in London runs into a woman who claims to be a spy who has uncovered an intelligence network in Scotland. She’s on the run from assassins. Before long, the man is accused of her…”

“Syriana from 2005 is my favorite kind of movie: it has lots of plot threads that overlap and come together in different ways. I learned that this style has name: hyperlink cinema . Unfortunately, a side effect of this style is that the film was wildly complex and hard to understand. While I was…”

“Chases are all over the place in spy movies, but the second car chase in Ronin is one of the best on film. It’s a BMW and a Peugeot through the streets of Paris. It’s very realistic (except maybe for a weird amount of sparks). There’s no musical soundtrack for most of it, just more than seven full…”

“6 Underground is a guilty pleasure. It combines Michael Bay with Ryan Reynolds — maybe the two most un-subtle people in Hollywood. The movie is unapologetically ridiculous, but I always thought it did a great job with exposition. There’s a lot of backstory to get through, and it nicely weaves that…”

“Here’s a short video about Daniel Craig’s screen test for Bond (it says 2006, but Casino Royale was released in 2006, so it had to be earlier than that). There’s a voiceover from Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson about how much they wanted Craig for the role. Then, towards the end, you see and…”

“M’s speech to Bond in GoldenEye has to go down as one of the great monologues in the Bond movies. Pierce Brosnan was the new Bond, and we had a female M in Judi Dench, which people weren’t so sure about, but this one scene likely laid every concern to rest. I especially love it when Bond says…”

“Chief of Station was a bit of a miss. It’s well-filmed, on-location in Budapest, and even has a bit part for a former Bond girl (Olga Kurylenko was Camilla Montes in Quantum of Solace ). It opens with a nice scene of tradecraft, which makes up for a particularly uncomfortable torture scene later on…”

“ Doug DeMuro reviews the Jaguar XKR from Die Another Day , currently on display in the Petersen Museum. Better yet, he drives it on Los Angeles city streets, complete with a mounted gatling gun in the back. (Spoiler: other than the body shell, it’s not a Jaguar at all…) ”

“ Though not technically a ‘spy,’ The Thomas Crown Affair does lurk on the periphery. I loved the Pierce Brosnan version from 1999, and it looks like we’re getting a new one from Michael B. Jordan. ”

“Letterboxd has published its Top 100 Spy Films . It’s a pretty good list. Happy to see two of Daniel Craig’s Bond films quite high (before any Connery film, notably), along with Rogue One (if it included TV, then Andor would no-doubt be up there too). Thunderbolts seems like a really odd choice,…”

“Haywire is fully 15 years old, back when Gina Carano was known only for MMA , hadn’t done Star Wars, and hadn’t made the tweets that got her canceled. It’s not a bad movie at all. It’s directed by Steven Soderberg, and it shows. It’s very moody, very stylized. And the soundtrack is by the same guy…”

“Argylle was not a ‘good’ film, but it was inventive and amusing. It’s basically a big spy parody, with a pretty decent twist in the middle that I didn’t see coming. But it’s way, way too long, at two-and-a-half hours. Also, it absolutely bombed at the box office. Made less than $100 million when it…”

“Jack Ryan, Ghost War was very paint-by-numbers. I enjoy John Krasinski in the role, but there was nothing in this film that was interesting. Even the action sequences were tired. I liked the prior series format, because a plot could develop over eight full hours of story. This is only about 90…”

“There are 19 branches of this organization (listed below). Each branch has its own Executive Committee. You can become a member by (1) applying and being sponsored by two existing members, or (2) receiving an invitation from the Academy (issued by the Executive Committees during each spring). These…”

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

“This is the precise placing of actors in a film scene. It’s a rehearsal process where actors decide and plan where they will be at each point in the scene, and where they will move during the scene, in relation to the camera. It’s important because an actor has to be in frame, usually facing the…”

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

“Broadly speaking, this is an artist who applies or manipulates the color of media. In comic books, the original drawings were done in black-and-white, and a colorist then applied color to them. So the lines of the drawing and the color were done by two separate artists. (See a good example on the…”

“In narrative story-telling, diegesis refers to things that are experienced by the characters within the story. Non-diegesis refers to things that are experienced by the audience, not the characters. Example, if watching a movie: Background music coming from a band playing in a bar as part of the…”

“ 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. ”

“When an actor appears at the end of the credits prefixed by ‘and’ or ‘with,’ this is called ‘end billing.’ It’s usually reserved for bigger name actors who have smaller parts. For example, in beginning of the movie True Lies , Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis are the main stars of the…”

“ 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. ”

“ It’s Italian for ‘the good life’ or ‘the sweet life.’ However, it most often refers to a 1960 Italian movie about a photographer living among high society in Rome. ”

“Yes, this is a type of rose. It’s deep pink in color. It was bred in France in the late 1800s then introduced (and renamed) in America. It was very popular during the Gilded Age of the early 1900s. Roses were a recurring motif in the movie American Beauty , though I feel like the color was…”

“A grip is responsible for setting up the camera equipment, especially when the camera is doing something odd, like traveling on a track or elevating. The ‘key grip’ is – as the name would indicate – the manager of the grips. A ‘best boy’ is the assistant to the key grip. A gaffer is responsible for…”

“A ‘bucket list’ is a list of things you want to do before you die (‘kick the bucket’). It’s become an ingrained American idiom, and I’ve also heard it in other parts of the world. I became aware of the term because of the 2007 movie The Bucket List . But surely that film didn’t invent the phrase,…”

“ This was a character in the Woody Allen film of the same name. Leonard Zelig is an average man who has the ability to take on the appearance and characteristics of people around him. The character gave birth to a general definition: a chameleonlike person who is unusually ubiquitous ”

“ 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.’ ”