A Snapshot: TDYLF’s First Birthday Party

I had a little party last night to celebrate my blog’s first birthday. I also invited some friends. Left to right:

Buster Keaton, Radiohead Style

To celebrate the release of Radiohead’s new album, The King of Limbs, here’s one of my all-time favorite videos from Youtube. I’m not responsible for this, but I wish I was. The choreography between the music and the clips is spot-on. And it’s a great intro to Keaton for the uninitiated. I’ve shown it to a few friends and I love the look on their faces when they realize just how much peril Keaton put himself in all for the sake of making people laugh. Oh, and also, Radiohead is neat too.

Great Scenes in Major League Baseball Stadiums

It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
-A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind”

I’ve always loved that quote from former Major League Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti (as a movie fan, you probably know his son, Paul). The quote rings so very true. From April through the end of October, baseball is with us every single day. For more than half of the year, it is your most loyal, most reliable friend. You can always count on it to be there. And then, just when everything turns cold and gray, it’s gone. The other night, I watched The Town, which features a really excellent heist scene in Boston’s Fenway Park. It made me miss baseball most of all, but it also made me think of all of the great scenes that have happened at Major League Baseball stadiums in non-baseball movies. The full complement:

Takin’ Hollywood Down to South Park

You’ve no doubt seen the results of the various South Park character generators on the internet. I spent some time monkeying around with one of them the other day and had a blast. While it’s not necessarily anything new, it was still a lot of fun. The generator I used to create these can be found at www.sp-studio.de. Feel free to visit and play around with it. Here’s what I created:

The Boardwalk Empire Collection
Nucky Thompson, Jimmy Darmody, Chalky White

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A Movie Geek’s Letter to Santa

‘Tis the season for letters to the North Pole. Why should little kids have all the fun? Here’s what one movie fan wants.

100 Things I Love About the Movies

I passed a milestone recently here at TDYLF. Thanks to the help of the editors over at IMDB, I passed the 100,000 Hits milestone on Sunday (with a whopping 80,000+ of those hits coming just since September 30th). To celebrate, I’m beginning a brand new series called “100 Things I Love About the Movies”. To be sure, there a LOT more than 100 things that I love about the movies. As such, this has the potential to become a series- 100 Things I Love About Horror Movies, 100 Things I Love About Foreign Movies, and on and on. I present to you the first edition of “100 Things I Love About the Movies”.

Ten Killer Bits from The Great Stoneface, Buster Keaton

I won't pull any punches here. Buster's comedy is timeless.

More Fake Criterion Covers

Here are some more “What if Criterion released…” fake covers that I’ve created.

Bride of Frankenstein is probably my favorite. Three of the  four Keaton films were intended as part of a fictional Keaton Box Set. Sleepaway Camp is obviously a lark (and I hope that someone, anyone gets it). The intention on the two Night of the Iguana versions would be to have the pink printed as a metallic pink with a spot gloss on the  iguana. The Spirit of the Beehive is already a Criterion release (with great artwork, I might add). Enjoy! 

Five Scenes That Made Me Laugh ‘Til I Peed (almost)

You know how this goes. You’re watching a comedy and it slowly builds up the humor to the point that you just can’t take it anymore, and your sides start to hurt.

Just to clarify, no movie has ever actually made me piss my pants. Hooray, bladder control!

The Damfino Addendum

Last night while enjoying a couple of beverages in my local watering hole, I realized that I’d neglected to mention a few more reasons that Buster Keaton is dripping with awesomenocity in my previous entry. Thaaaaat’s right, I sit around in bars thinking about movies. Big whoop, wanna fight about it?

Here are three more keys to the Keaton charm.