TCM Classic Film Festival 2017 Starts Today!

Greetings, classic Hollywood fans! Anne Marie, here, returning to the blog! The sun is shining, the stars on Hollywood Blvd are gleaming, and there's been an uptick of tourists taking pictures of Bette Davis's handprints outside the TCL Chinese Theatre, all of which mean just one thing: it's time for the TCM Classic Film Festival! 

This year, the most explosive news of the festival is the screening of several movies on nitrate film. TCM has always prided itself on screening 35mm at its festival side by side with new digital restorations. However, projecting nitrate prints requires a retrofit of the projection booths that handle the infamously flammable film stock. Fortunately, the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood recently underwent just such a renovation thanks the Hollywood Foreign Press, The Film Foundation, and Turner Classic Movies. As a result, movies ranging from Laura to Black Narcissus and the original The Man Who Knew Too Much will once again get the chance to light the screen ablaze - metaphorically, of course...

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'a good Samaritan'

The Furniture: Thoroughly Modern Millie

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber...

Thoroughly Modern Millie opened 50 years ago this week, in the spring between San Francisco’s Human Be-In and the Summer of Love. None of 1967’s Best Picture nominees, immortalized as the birth of the New Hollywood in Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, had yet opened, but there was already something in the air.

Director George Roy Hill capitalized on this countercultural moment with an extravagant show of concentrated nostalgia. Thoroughly Modern Millie leaps back to the Roaring 20s, America’s last moment of liberated sexuality and conspicuous consumption before the Great Depression. Its flamboyant, frenetic ode to the flappers and their world was a big hit, making more than $34 million and landing 10th at the yearly box office. The film was nominated for seven Oscars including Art Direction-Set Decoration.

Yet its portrayal is not without contradictions...

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Pfandom: "Falling in Love Again" and "...Dragon Queen"

Pfeiffer instantly sentimentalized, with a halo no less, in her first scene in "Falling in Love Again"P F A N D O M  
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Episode 7 
by Nathaniel R 

There are an infinite number of worse people to grow up to look like than British star Susannah York but somehow it's hard to buy that that's who Michelle Pfeiffer would become. Pfeiffer was still a pre-teen when Susannah York hit her career peak, most notably in a string of erotically charged and sometimes controversial 1960s movies like Tom Jones, The Killing of Sister George, X Y and Zee, and They Shoot Horses Don't They (the latter brought her her only, but well deserved, Oscar nomination). By the time Pfeiffer was hitting the movies and cast to play York as a young girl, York's star was fading. York had recently been reduced to a merely decorative alien maternal presence in Superman (1978) and now a young actress was playing the idealized version of her. Hollywood can be cruel that way.

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New to Prime: Dressmaker, What We Do in the Shadows, Etcetera

March isn't a big month for either Netflix (previously discussed) or Amazon Prime. But there are still new titles to view if streaming if your main movie outlet. Here's what's new for late February and early March on Prime. We've freeze framed titles at totally random places and sharing whatever came up.

 

I hit the main artery so it's a real mess in there. On the upside I think she had a really good time.

What We Do in the Shadows
Bless Taika Waititi. This movie is so funny. And I saw it on a plane and still laughed so that's quite a recommendation because who can enjoy a movie fully on a plane? The Thor movies are definitely the superhero franchise I'm least interested in but with him behind Thor: Ragnarok I'm curious.

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