From the People’s Cube.

From Clara Darko:

Full list of films:

00:01 – Kill Bill

00:06 – Hero

00:08 – Seven Samurai

00:09 – The Princess bride

00:11 – Hero

00:13 – Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest

00:14 – Gladiator

00:16 – Conan the Barbarian

00:17 – Troy

00:19 – Batman Begins

00:21 – Dragonslayer

00:23 – Kill Bill Vol. 2

00:26 – The Empire Strikes Back

00:29 – Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

00:33 – Zatoichi

00:35 – Hellboy 2

00:37 – The Mask of Zorro

00:40 – The Phantom Menace

00:45 – Peter Pan

00:47 – Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

00:49 – Revenge of the Sith

00:52 – The Duelists

00:54 – LadyHawke

00:55 – The Count of Montecristo

00:56 – Kingdom of Heaven

00:58 – Blade

01:03 – The 13th warrior

01:05 – Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

01:06 – The Fellowship of the Ring

01:07 – Highlander

01:12 – Cutthroat Island

01:13 – Dangerous Liaisons

01:14 – The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

01:20 – The Attack of the Clones

01:26 – Stardust

01:28 – House of Flying Daggers

01:30 – Matrix Reloaded

01:32 – The Flame and the Arrow

01:35 – Willow

01:36 – Cyrano de Bergerac

01:48 – Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves

01:49 – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

01:50 – Hamlet (1996)

01:52 – Rob Roy

02:02 – Young Sherlock Holmes

02:08 – The Crow

02:12 – Casanova

02:20 – Star Wars: A New Hope

02:29 – The Four Musketeers (1974)

02:31 – Dragonheart

02:33 – The Return of the Jedi

02:38 – Hook

02:40 – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

02:44 – Army of Darkness

02:55 – Azumi

02:57 – 300

03:01 – Excalibur

03:03 – Blind Fury

03:05 – The Curse of the Golden Flower

03:38 – Equilibrium

Hat tip to io9.

Hat tip to Ratak Monodosico.

Liam Neeson uses guns a lot in the Taken films, but he doesn’t think you should be allowed to own one.

HuffPo:

Speaking at the ‘Taken 3’ press conference in Dubai on Monday, the Irish-born star of ‘Schindler’s List’, who once again plays Bryan Mills in the final film of the trilogy, responded to a question about the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris last week, which he linked to gun violence in the US.

“There are too many fucking guns out there, especially in America,” said the 62-year-old. “I think the population is, like, 320 million? There are over 300 million guns. Privately owned, in America. I think it’s a fucking disgrace. Every week now we’re picking up a newspaper and seeing, ‘Yet another few kids have been killed in schools.’”

Reported by the Washington Post, Neeson added that there is a distinction between the violence of the movies and reality.

He said: “A character like Bryan Mills going out with guns and taking revenge: it’s fantasy. It’s in the movies, you know? I think it can give people a great release from stresses in life and all the rest of it, you know what I mean? It doesn’t mean they’re all going to go out and go, ‘Yeah, let’s get a gun!’”

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Holier-than-thou Hollywood celebrities have been making millions from portraying armed heroes in movies, then taking public stands in real life in support of gun control, and they’ve gotten away with it. Except this time.

PARA USA, the company that rented the guns used by Neeson in “Taken 3” (2014), his latest action film, has responded to the movie star’s recent anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment remarks by stating publicly that they will no longer be providing the weapons for his cinematic fantasy roles.

Matthew Continetti takes the occasion of Sony’s cringing before the tinpot dictator of North Korea to pay tribute to modern Hollywood’s only surviving non-wussy: the legendary John Milius.

The Pauline Kael story is priceless.

Everyone has a favorite John Milius story. This is mine:

It is the mid-1980s. There is a party at the house of screenwriter Paul Schrader. Milius, who wrote Dirty Harry and Apocalypse Now and directed Conan the Barbarian and Red Dawn, is there when Pauline Kael arrives. Kael is the liberal New Yorker film critic. To her, a Milius film is only slightly better than a slime mold.

Milius has had some wine. He has an intermediary tell Kael that he would like a “conference” with her. A message comes back: Kael wants to know if Milius, who in meetings with executives was fond of displaying pistols, is armed.

“Tell her I’m not armed,” Milius says. “But I myself am a weapon.”

I love this episode because it illustrates the mythic dimensions of Milius’ reputation in Hollywood, the way in which he came to resemble the charismatic and unpredictable and dangerous heroes he created for the screen. And Kael’s reluctance to confront the filmmaker whose art she did so much to degrade, her alternation between rhetorical ferocity and social cowardice, is characteristic of certain types of left-wing movie folk, as we see today in the studio reaction to threats made against The Interview.

Read the whole thing.

Drew Millard believes he can predict the ways in which J.J. Abrams is going to ruin the recently-announced new Star Wars movie.

1. Given that the film is being directed by Abrams, it’s tempting to say that the director will treat his source material about as gently as he treated Star Trek when he rebooted the franchise. In that case, the dude literally ripped a hole in the space-time continuum and created an alternate timeline that he could fuck around in. Still, the presence of the original cast suggests this probably won’t happen, unless Abrams has brought them back as a red herring to appease fans, giving them cameo appearances (he did this with Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek) before veering wildly off in his own direction, creating an effective but ultimately bland sci-fi action movie that happens to contain elements of the Star Wars universe. The plot to this nonexistent movie would feature a Jedi academy helmed by all of the characters from the original movies and resemble the Harry Potter books crossed with Die Hard 7 or whatever, but in space, with an unnecessary Ewok scene. That would fucking suck and be the final nail in the coffin of a franchise whose coffin already has a healthy number of nails in it. In this version of the new Star Wars, the dude from Girls personally kills every original cast member in the first scene.

2. It’s possible, if not probable, that Abrams will choose to adapt some of the reams of available source material from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, such as The New Jedi Order or Legacy of the Force novels—which are dense, convoluted, and not very fun to read. While pleasing fans nerdy enough to have powered through these books, if Abrams chooses this path Star Wars: Episode VII won’t make much money, as most people are not going to be all “Hell fucking yes! Give me some Ganner Rhysode!” The plot would resemble one of the Star Trek movies that they let William Shatner direct crossed with one of the episodes of The Wire that is devoted to union politics, and will feature a 30-minute scene in which Luke Skywalker, now head of the Jedi Council, debates Bantha domestication policy with Han Solo as well as a character played by the boyfriend on Girls. I would watch the shit out of this movie.

3. The dream scenario: Abrams miraculously doesn’t fuck it up and comes up with an original story that pays homage to the truly great things the Star Wars movies have accomplished and the good parts of Lucas’s legacy while not getting bogged down in the minutiae that tends to plague well-loved franchises with annoying, protective fan bases. This movie would allow each original cast member to have a significant role in the film while also managing a seamless torch-passing between them and the next generation of Star Wars actors. The plot of this film would resemble that of a Kurosawa movie, there would be zero Ewoks or Jedi academies, and the dude from Girls would die in, like, the third scene.

Since this world is deeply unfair, the new Star Wars will probably somehow manage to combine the most disappointing elements of scenarios one and two, causing sadness. Good luck, J. J. Abrams!

Enter the Ringo Kid.

Scott Eyman, in his new biography, John Wayne, The Life the Legend, describes the historic source of the iconic gesture in the opening scene of John Ford‘s “Stagecoach” (1939), which ignited Wayne’s career and made him a major star.

The scene had a problem, and the problem was the gun.

Dudley Nichol’s script was specific. “There is the sharp report of a rifle and Curly jerks up his gun as Buck saws wildly at the ribbons.

“The stagecoach comes to a lurching stop before a young man who stands in the road beside his unsaddled horse. He has a saddle over one arm and a rifle carelessly swung in the other hand… It is Ringo…

“RINGO? You might need me and this Winchester, I saw a couple ranches burnin’ last night.’

“CURLY? I guess you don’t understand, kid. You’re under arrest.

“RINGO?(with charm) I ain’t arguing about that, Curly. I just hate to part with a gun like this.

“Holding it by the lever, he gives it a jerk and it cocks with a click…”

John Ford loved the dialogue, which was in and of itself unusual, but the introduction of the Ringo Kid needed to be emphasized. Ford decided that the shot would begin with the actor doing something with the gun, then the camera would rapidly track in from a full-length shot to an extreme close-up — an unusually emphatic camera movement for Ford, who had grown to prefer a stable camera.

Since the actor was already coping with two large props, Ford decided to lose the horse. He told his young star what he was planning to do: “work out something with the rifle,” Ford sais. “Or maybe just a pistol.” He wasn’t sure.

And just like that the problem was dropped in the lap of his star, a young — but not all that young — actor named John Wayne., better known to Ford and everyone else as Duke.

Wayne ran through the possibilities. every actor in in westerns could twirl a pistol, so that was out. Besides, the script specified a rifle cocked quickly with one hand, but later in the scene than what Ford was planning. In addition, Ford wanted him to do something flashy, but it couldn’t happen too quickly for the audience to take it in. All the possibilities seemed to cancel each other out.

And then Yakima Canutt, Wayne’s friend and the stunt coordinator on the film offered an idea. When Canutt was a boy he had seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. As the overland stage raced around the arena, a messenger trailing behind the stagecoach had carried a rifle with a large ring loop which allowed him to spin the rifle in the air, cocking it with one hand. The crowd went wild. Canutt said that it had been done thirty years ago and he still remembered the moment. More to the point, he had never seen anybody else do it.

Wayne sparked to the idea, as did Ford, so they had to make it work. Ford instructed the prop department to manufacture a ring loop and install it on a standard issue 1892 Winchester carbine. After the rifle was modified, Wayne began experimenting with the twirl move as Canutt remembered it, but there was a problem — the barrel of the rifle was too long — it wouldn’t pass cleanly beneath Wayne’s arm.

The Winchester went back to the prop department, where they sawed an inch or so off the end, then soldered the sight back on the shortened barrel.

With that minor adjustment, the move was suddenly effortless. Wayne began rehearsing the twirling movement that would mark his appearance in the movie he had been waiting more than ten years to make — a film for John Ford, his friend, his mentor, his idol, the man he called “Coach” or, alternately — and more tellingly — “Pappy.”

With any luck at all, he’d never have to go back to B westerns as long as he lived.

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Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.

(sample)

Flowing data

Hat tip to Emmy Chang.

Cracked.com

Hat tip to Randy Barnett.

Smithsonian magazine explains how popcorn conquered the movie theater industry.

in 1885, the first steam-powered popcorn maker hit the streets, invented by Charles Cretor. The mobile nature of the machine made it the perfect production machine for serving patrons attending outdoor sporting events, or circuses and fairs. Not only was popcorn mobile, but it could be mass-produced without a kitchen, an advantage that another crunchy snack–the potato chip–lacked (the earliest potato chips were made in small batches in kitchens, not ideal for mass snack appeal). Another reason for its dominance over other snacks was its appealing aroma when popped, something that street vendors used to their advantage when selling popcorn. Still, movie theaters wouldn’t allow the popular street snack into their auditoriums.

“Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn,” Smith says, “because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn’t want popcorn being ground into it.” Movie theaters were trying to appeal to a highbrow clientele, and didn’t want to deal with the distracting trash of concessions–or the distracting noise that snacking during a film would create.

When films added sound in 1927, the movie theater industry opened itself up to a much wider clientele, since literacy was no longer required to attend films (the titles used early silent films restricted their audience). By 1930, attendance to movie theaters had reached 90 million per week. Such a huge patronage created larger possibilities for profits–especially since the sound pictures now muffled snacks–but movie theater owners were still hesitant to bring snacks inside of their theaters.

The Great Depression presented an excellent opportunity for both movies and popcorn. Looking for a cheap diversion, audiences flocked to the movies. And at 5 to 10 cents a bag, popcorn was a luxury that most people were able to afford. Popcorn kernels themselves were a cheap investment for purveyors, and a $10 bag could last for years. If those inside the theaters couldn’t see the financial lure of popcorn, enterprising street vendors didn’t miss a beat: they bought their own popping machines and sold popcorn outside the theaters to moviegoers before they entered the theater. As Smith explains, early movie theaters literally had signs hung outside their coatrooms, requesting that patrons check their popcorn with their coats. Popcorn, it seems, was the original clandestine movie snack.

Beyond wanting to maintain appearances, early movie theaters weren’t built to accommodate the first popcorn machines; the theaters lacked proper ventilation. But as more and more customers came to the theater with popcorn in hand, owners couldn’t ignore the financial appeal of selling the snack. So they leased “lobby privileges” to vendors, allowing them to sell their popcorn in the lobby of their theater (or more likely on a bit of street in front of the theater) for a daily fee.

Eventually, movie theater owners realized that if they cut out the middleman, their profits would skyrocket. For many theaters, the transition to selling snacks helped save them from the crippling Depression. In the mid-1930s, the movie theater business started to go under. “But those that began serving popcorn and other snacks,” Smith explains, “survived.” Take, for example, a Dallas movie theater chain that installed popcorn machines in 80 theaters, but refused to install machines in their five best theaters, which they considered too high class to sell popcorn. In two years, the theaters with popcorn saw their profits soar; the five theaters without popcorn watched their profits go into the red. Eventually, movie theater owners came to understand that concessions were their ticket to higher profits, and installed concession stands in their theaters.

World War II further solidified the marriage between popcorn and the movie theaters. Competing snacks like candy and soda suffered from sugar shortages and in turn, rationing, as traditional sugar exporters like the Philippines were cut off from the United States.

By 1945, popcorn and the movies were inextricably bound: over half of the popcorn consumed in America was eaten at the movie theaters.

Read the whole thing.

Via the Dish.

Seriously over-the-top parody trailer with loads of major stars making cameos.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Link