Henry Miller on New York

in Books, Film, Literature | February 28th, 2010

(NOTE: some strong lan­guage here...)

Back in 1975, film­mak­er Tom Schiller (only 20 years old at the time) made a short doc­u­men­tary on the nov­el­ist Hen­ry Miller (Trop­ic of Can­cer, Trop­ic of Capri­corn). In the scene above, Miller, then 81 years old, rem­i­nisces about his dif­fi­cult ear­ly life in New York, and it all takes place on the set used to shoot the movie Hel­lo, Dol­ly!. Schiller’s com­plete film, Hen­ry Miller Asleep and Awake, can be watched for free on Snag­films. (It’s also avail­able at Ama­zon on DVD here.) The run time is 34 min­utes. Excel­lent find by Mike.

Note: We’ve added Hen­ry Miller Asleep and Awake to our grow­ing film col­lec­tion: Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Film Noir, Doc­u­men­taries & More

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Werner Herzog Reads Curious George

in Comedy, Film | February 18th, 2010

Ok, it’s not real­ly Wern­er Her­zog. Just a lit­tle play­ful satire. A guess at how the Ger­man direc­tor might reinterpret/read the chil­dren’s clas­sic Curi­ous George. This ver­sion is dark and exis­ten­tial.

via Abe Books

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Validation, or The Magic of Free Parking

in Comedy, Film | February 15th, 2010

Kurt Kuen­ne’s short film, “Val­i­da­tion,” has played at 34 film fes­ti­vals and won 17 awards. This 16 minute indie offers a “fable about the mag­ic of free park­ing” — mean­ing they’re talk­ing about “val­i­da­tion” in a larg­er sense than park­ing per se … We’ve added the clip to our YouTube favorites.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Restored ‘Metropolis’ to Stream Live on Friday

in Film | February 11th, 2010

Clas­sic film buffs take note. Roger Ebert writes:

The eager­ly await­ed restored ver­sion of Fritz Lang’s silent clas­sic “Metrop­o­lis” will steam live on the inter­net on Fri­day Feb. 12. In Amer­i­ca, it can be see in the after­noon. It’s said that near­ly an hour of footage, long thought to be lost, has been added. The footage was dis­cov­ered in a film archive in Buenos Aires.… It will be streamed via web­sites in both Ger­man and France. The actu­al film is sched­uled to start play­ing at 1:40 PM CST, Chica­go time.”

The French site stream­ing the film can be found here, and the Ger­man site here.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

B- Classic Movies Now Online

in Film | January 14th, 2010

If you get your kicks from uber kitschy B- films, then we’ve got a lit­tle some­thing for you. AMC has launched a new site called B- Minus Clas­sics, which we have added to our grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online. (Our list now con­tains 125 free clas­sic movies, and numer­ous sites where you can watch free movies online). AMC describes its new site as:

Your new go-to site for B‑movies by the likes of John Car­pen­ter (Dark Star) and Roger Cor­man (Saga of the Viking Women). Now online and in full screen, watch unsung clas­sics like Asy­lum by Psy­cho screen­writer Robert Block or Cor­ri­dors of Blood with the inim­itable Christo­pher Lee. Want to see inter­na­tion­al icons before they made it big? Check out Raquel Welch in A Swingin’ Sum­mer or kung fu king Son­ny Chi­ba in Ter­ror Beneath the Sea. Look­ing for the unex­pect­ed? How about The Ruth­less Four, a spaghet­ti West­ern star­ring Klaus Kin­s­ki. Now updat­ed with even more B‑movies fea­tur­ing femmes fatales (The Cat Girl), jun­gle adven­tures (Curse of the Voodoo) and talk­ing ven­tril­o­quist’s dum­mies (Dev­il Doll). What­ev­er your B‑movie taste, BMC has got you cov­ered.

Thanks to @brainkpicker for flag­ging this new col­lec­tion.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Two Gentlemen of Lebowski

in Film, Literature | January 13th, 2010

Take the Coen Broth­ers’ 1998 cult film, The Big Lebows­ki, and put it in Shake­speare­an verse, and what do you get? Two Gen­tle­men of Lebowski as writ­ten by Adam Bertoc­ci. It begins:

In wayfarer’s worlds out west was once a man,
A man I come not to bury, but to praise.
His name was Geof­frey Lebows­ki called, yet
Not called, except­ing by his kin.
That which we call a knave by any oth­er name
Might bowl just as sweet. Lebows­ki, then,
Did call him­self ‘the Knave’, a name that I,
Your hum­ble cho­rus, would not self-apply
In home­lands mine; but, then, this Knave was one
From whom sense was a bur­den to extract,
And of the arid vale in which he dwelt,
Also dis­like in sen­si­bil­i­ty;
May­hap the very search for sense reveals
The rea­son that it striketh me as most
Int’resting, yea, inspir­ing me to odes.

The Wall Street Jour­nal has more on this cre­ative bit that has gone viral dur­ing the past week, and will be soon per­formed on stage in NYC. See Kottke.org for more on that.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Is Anything Real?

in Film, Life | January 11th, 2010

Wel­come to the new world of dig­i­tal film­mak­ing. Give this one a minute to get going.

Thanks Nats and Gary for send­ing this one along. Have a great link to share with us? (I know you do!) Write us at mail at open­cul­ture dot com.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Kurosawa Digital Archive

in Film | January 7th, 2010

Our col­lec­tion of Free Online Movies is the gift that keeps on giv­ing. It led us unex­pect­ed­ly to dis­cov­er the wealth of World War II pro­pa­gan­da films made by some of Amer­i­ca’s great­est direc­tors. It also turned up (among oth­er things) the Kuro­sawa Dig­i­tal Archive. Opened last year by Kyoto’s Ryukoku Uni­ver­si­ty, the archive hon­ors Aki­ra Kuro­sawa, Japan’s cel­e­brat­ed film­mak­er who brought us The Sev­en Samu­rai, Rashomon, Ikiru, etc. and won an Oscar for Life­time Achieve­ment in 1989. What will you find here? A good 20,000 items. Screen­plays, man­u­scripts, pho­tos, sketch­es, news­pa­per clip­pings, notes, etc. You won’t find a larg­er Kuro­sawa col­lec­tion on the web. The one down­side is that you’ll need to read Japan­ese to take full advan­tage of the archive. But even if you have no Japan­ese under your belt, you can still surf the site, click on ran­dom links, and expe­ri­ence a good deal of what the archive offers.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast