Henry & Eleanor, Frank & Bram, and The Breakfast Club

On this day in movie related history... 

1152 King Henry II marries Eleanor of Aquitaine. Their romance is later fictionalized in the ever popular play/movie The Lion in Winter which we've written about several times

1897 Frank Capra is born in Italy. He'll immigrate to the US at five years old and become one of the most famous film directors of all time.  Across the ocean in London a public reading of Bram Stoker's new novel "Dracula, or, The Un-dead" is staged. Frank Capra never makes a movie influenced by Dracula but everyone else does.

Meredith Wilson writing music1902 There's trouble right here in River City Mason City when Meredith Wilson is born. He'll later write The Music Man but not before accruing Oscar nominations for film scoring (The Little Foxes, The Great Dictator)

1912 The first Indian film Shree Pundalik is released in Mumbai. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of movies will follow in its wake from the ever prolific Indian film industry, better known as "Bollywood". Over in the US, Richard Brooks is born and will go on to become a famous screenwriter and director. Four must-sees from his filmography: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Elmer Gantry (1960), In Cold Blood (1967), and Looking for Mr Goodbar (1977)

1931 Robert Morse is born, becomes darling cross media actor winning 2 Tonys and 1 Emmy.

...Unfortunately Emmy, given the opportunity to reward him with a career capping statue, robs him blind decades later for his unforgettable farewell on Mad Men. 

1970 Tina Fey is born so that we might have 30 Rock and Mean Girls.

1985 Simple Minds hits #1 with Don't You Forget About Me" the theme song from teen classic The Breakfast Club. Oscar forgets about it in the Best Original Song category. Do you think it deserved to knock one of these songs out? Let's readjudicate the race in the comments.

Oh come on you know you want to!

Illustration to the right by Johanna The Mad

2003 Musical sensation Les Misérables closes on Broadway after 16 years and 6,680 performances. Becomes super-divisive big-grossing Oscar-winning movie 9 years later. Is nominated for Best Original Song

Women's Pictures - Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Let's be honest: as of 2014, the vampire sucked. Over its 150+ year history, the vampire has evolved from the exotic, erotic monster of Le Fanu's Carmilla and Stoker's Dracula, to Lugosi's low budget lothario, to the dangerously sexy rebels of The Lost Boys, to the brooding romantics of Anne Rice and Joss Whedon, to the defanged teenage fantasies of American preteen girls.While I don't begrudge girls their sexual fantasies, the fact remains that the vampire, in its current glittery form, is a far cry from the symbol of sexuality and otherness that it had been at its inception. With notable exceptions like Thirst and Let the Right One In, vampires have spent the last 30 years getting weaker, whiter, more often male, and very American. With A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Iranian American writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour is here to change all that.

It's difficult to define A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night as just one movie: it's a vampire flick, a spaghetti western, a love story, a feminist fantasy, and an allegory about Iran. The plot is fairly simple to describe: a young man named Arash (Arash Marandi) living in a corrupt city in Iran (known only as Bad City) falls in love with The Girl (Sheila Vand), a streetwalking vampire who preys on drugdealers and beggars. But don't dismiss this as a weak narrative film.

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Q&A: Sexy Vampires & Dolled-Up Monsters

For this week's Q&A we asked for questions that would get us in the Halloween spirit. So let's talk sexual vampires, scary monsters, queer horror, and unsettling auteurs.

Let's jump right in to nine creepy spooky occasionally queer questions, shall we? 

Ryan T: What are your favorite vampire performances onscreen, film and TV?

The glut of bad vampire movies over the past couple of decades may have killed my former passion for bloodsuckers but nothing can kill the love of great acting so this must be answered. With due respect to the Lugosis, Schrecks and Lees who pioneered, let's fast forward to contemporary-ish cinema and television after the jump...

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Women's Pictures: Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark

Welcome, guys and ghouls, to our special October edition of Anne Marie's "Women's Pictures!"

 This month, rather than focusing on 5 films by 1 female director, we will be watching 5 films by 5 female directors with 1 thing in common: horror. Because what's the one thing scarier than working in a boy's club industry? I reached out on social media to ask the internet what it wanted to see, and got an overwhelming response for these five films. Going chronologically, the first film on our list is a vampire flick by beloved Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow.

In true 80s Bigelow fashion, Near Dark is a grim action thriller; part Western, part gang movie, part family drama, with enough explosions and gruesome special effects that you might miss the moralistic AIDS allegory underneath. Whenever the mainstream heaps praise on Kathryn Bigelow, their focus is usually on the fact that Bigelow does not work in "women's genres," which is to say films with "feminine" themes or plot lines. However, beneath the edgy synth soundtrack, the sex, violence, and hair gel, Near Dark is a surprisingly conservative film about the redemptive power of family. More...

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Women's Pictures - Amy Heckerling's Vamps

How does it feel to be a relic in the new millenium? No shade intended towards Amy Heckerling. Her most recent film was obsessed with just that question. In Vamps, Heckerling attempted to take a bite (sorry) out of youth culture using 2012's movie monster of the moment, the vampire. But in her latest foray into social satire, the genre-defining writer/director who gave a voice to two generations of teens seemed drained (sorry) of the empathy that had made her previous work enjoyable. To put it bluntly: Vamps sucks.*

*If you dislike puns, don't B negative. They only get worse from here.

For a film about youth, Vamps has a surprising number of well-preserved throwbacks. Alicia Silverstone stars as Goody, a 300 year old vampire. She's joined by a colorful-though-pale cast including Sigourney Weaver, Wallace Shawn, Malcolm MacDowell, Richard Lewis, Marilu Henner and Krysten Ritter, who plays Goody's sister vampire, Stacy. Goody's hundreds of years of un-life as a 20-something have given her pesrpective on the fashions and follies of humanity, though she thinks the latest generation's slang and smartphones are a pain in the neck (sorry). Stacy, who was turned in the 1980s, acts as Goody's ambassador to modern youth culture, at least until Stacy falls for a human (Dan Stevens) in her night film class at NYU. Stacy's relationship, and the return of a past beau, suddenly makes Goody's world a bloody (sorry) mess. More...

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