The Movie Weekend That Was

After a very long week, I looked forward to a solid movie-watching weekend. I didn’t get in as many as I would have liked, but I still managed to see a decent handful. Even without a trip to see Lincoln like I had expected, I squeezed in six films. This is the movie weekend that was.

How Much Wood Could a Woodcutter Cut if a Woodcutter Could Cut Movie Icons Into Wood?

I was recently contacted by Loren Kantor, a cinephile and writer living in Los Angeles who just happens to be a woodcutter in his spare time. He wanted to share some of his woodcuts, many of which are movie-themed. Several feature silent comedians and classic crime movie stars. This is a woodcutter after my own heart. His work is really cool, clearly the result of someone who cares about his craft. And when people put that kind of time into awesome movie-related stuff, I think it’s worth sharing. How much wood could a woodcutter cut if a woodcutter could cut movie icons into wood?

20 Cool Posters for Silent Movies

I get paid to be a graphic designer. Mixed together with my love of movies, it’s only natural that I’d have an appreciation for interesting movie poster art. Each year, studios produce several outstanding posters for their various movies. It’s nothing new. They’ve been doing it for years, going all the way back to the silent era. Here are 20 of my favorite posters for silent films. Much thanks to the IMP Awards website, which houses most of these:

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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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”.