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The Best Songs That Are Inspired By Movies
Filed under: Music & Musicals, Fandom, Lists
Usually when I talk about music around these parts, it's with an eye on the movies. But even though most of my inspirations come from movies -- with the music as a vital, but supporting player -- today I thought I would try to do things a little differently. Which is why today is all about music that was inspired by the movies.
Pop music is littered with movie references, and sometimes the references are a little more obscure, as is the case with the genesis of Bob Seger's classic Night Moves. Legend has it that the idea for the song was born as Seger walked out of the theater for George Lucas' American Graffiti and he realized that he had his own stories of a misspent youth to share. But other inspirations can be a little more obvious, like with Jay Z's tribute to Frank Lucas and American Gangster with his album of the same name.
We all know inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of places (yes, even from within darkened movie theaters), and so here are five songs that could never have existed without a little inspiration from the silver screen.
From 'Inception' to 'The American' -- 10 'Last Job' Flicks
George Clooney as a hit man planning his exit strategy in 'The American' follows a long line of assassins (and bank robbers and jewel thieves) who decide to pull that legendary "last job" before retiring to a hard-earned life of luxury.
Of course, everything always goes wrong as a lifetime of bad choices catch up with our antiheroes, who find that quitting is harder than it looks and that their last gig is usually final in more ways than one.
YouTube Pushes Free Full-Length Movie Section - Here's What to Watch
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Lists
After becoming a mecca for everything from fan sobbing to music videos and pirated films, YouTube finally decided to get into the legit film rental business. Sundance films were offered up for a small fee, but it was deemed a flop, having less than 1500 rentals for five films. They followed that up with allowing filmmakers to put up their own films and charge a rental fee. Now, after the money aspects seem lackluster at best -- especially in a world with unlimited Netflix streaming "rentals" -- YouTube has jumped into the free market, fueling films with commercial interruptions.Though, as The New York Times pointed out earlier this year, there has been some free, older titles on the site for a while, YouTube is now primed to battle Hulu and other free-film sites with their own selections. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of B and C schlock on the list, and many movies already available on free platforms, which we've detailed in our on-going Free Flick of the Day (Open Your Eyes, Smiley Face). But there are some gems to check out as well. Hit the jump and dig in.
Can One Scene Destroy a Franchise?
Filed under: Lists, Best/Worst, Fan Rant
One of the most interesting entertainment phenomenons of the past few years is the concept of "jumping the shark" -- the moment where a film, franchise, television series, or other form of popular entertainment does something so ridiculous that audiences know it's all downhill from there. It's the moment where the creative people behind a movie or program basically throw in the towel, saying "This is it, we've got nothing left to give so you're stuck with this outlandish crap from here forward." The phrase's history is well documented, tying back to season five episode of Happy Days where Fonzi water ski-jumps over a real live shark. Fans point out this moment as essentially the "beginning of the end" for Happy Days -- and now the event is cited to signal similar moments in other shows and films.
So, with that in mind, AskMen.com came up with a list of the top ten movie franchise destroying moments -- or moments where a film or film franchise jumped the shark. There are no shortage of potential titles for the list, but they've done a nice job of picking out ten that are particularly annoying -- even if they're from films that aren't really part of a franchise (Wolverine and Doomsday, I'm looking at you).
Hit the jump to check out some of the titles that made the list.
Five Flicks to Avoid If You're Afraid of Being Eaten By Aquatic Creatures
Over the weekend there was a new Piranha remake, and (against all odds) it was good. Not good enough for the distributor to share the film with the press -- or good enough to crack double digits at the box office -- but certainly good enough to get the horror fans gnashing their teeth in surprised appreciation. It's not too often that a 3-D remake of a Jaws ripoff is cause for celebration, but Alex Aja's rendition of Piranha works resoundingly well ... aside from the truly terrible editing in the flick.
And just last night I was invited to blather on the Film School Rejects movie nerd podcast, and one of the topics was this: movies in which people get eaten by animals. And since I'm considerably lazy, I thought I'd turn that conversation into a brief article that you should read starting .... now!
(Note: I'm omitting the original Jaws and the original Piranha for obvious reasons. Anyone reading this list should have seen those movies by now.)
Orca (1977) -- When Dino De Laurentiis does a ripoff, he does it large. Here we find Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling and Bo Derek being forced to contend with a vengeance-minded killer whale. Some of the flick (the special effects and the score, particularly) is actually pretty solid, but overall this is a wonderfully cheesy movie.
What Are The Cheesiest Movies Ever Made?
Filed under: Drama, Horror, Mystery & Suspense, Fandom, Lists
Just before we begin I want to make very clear that at no point will I be making any jokes about movies that are 'no Gouda' or any other cheese related puns (if I can help it.) -- and now that I got that off my chest I can get on with the business at hand. In honor of Piranha's glorious return to theaters, Alexandre Aja's remake of Joe Dante's 1978 comedy-horror about a swarm of killer piranha has inspired the folks over at Wired to compile the 24 Cheesiest Sci-fi films of all time. It's a comprehensive list that showcases the best of the worst in sci-fi -- even if I disagree with their inclusion of Cloverfield among chessy classics like The Creeping Terror and Troll 2 (you can read the entire list here). But one of the advantages of my job is that I don't have to rant and rave about someone else's list, I can just make my own.
So what makes a move go from downright un-watchable to the elevated status of 'cheese'? Well, it's a personal choice, but for me the calling card of any cheesy classic is the feeling that everyone involved really seems to be trying to make great cinema, but either through a lack of budget or talent, you wind up with a movie that is so laughably awful or over the top that it becomes more than bad -- it's entered the great tradition of 'Cinema Cheese'
Unless you're new to these parts, you have probably noticed that I never like to play by the rules of a movie list, so I'm not going to confine myself to the world of sci-fi, because as we all know, cheesy movies come in all shapes and sizes. So let's get started...
The Most Dangerous Celebrities to Google
Filed under: Lists
According to a report from PC World, the security gurus over at McAfee have determined that of all celebrity names typed into Google, Cameron Diaz is the one most likely to infect your computer with malicious viruses. Approximately 10% of all searches for the My Sister's Keeper star land internet surfers on sites riddled with nasty code, and the risk rises dramatically whenever you add the words "naked," "nude," or "hot mangled foot in The Box." After spending the morning exploring all 5,650,000 hits that turn up after Googling Ms. Diaz's name (it's all in the name of journalism, folks), I've isolated the deadliest of them all. Click at your own peril. Or you could save yourself the trouble and I could just tell you that it's a link to the IMDb page for that movie The Sweetest Thing. Get it? Because that movie is terrible? Hilarious, I know. But seriously, I saw that movie with my grandparents and now they're dead. Now, I'm not suggesting that The Sweetest Thing killed my grandparents, but ... yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting.
Diaz, of course, is not the only celebrity whose name is linked to a number of sites with untoward intentions. McAfee -- as they're perennially accustomed -- have provided the complete top ten list of stars who are most likely to put your computer at risk as you use the web -- the assimilated networks of all human knowledge and accomplishment, past and present -- to find blurry pictures of their nipples. So follow the jump to see who you should consider Googling only from the iMac tucked away in the darkest corner of your local Apple Store.
Cinematical Seven: Movie Menaces More Terrifying Than Piranha
Filed under: Action, Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, New Releases, Cinematical Seven, Remakes and Sequels, Lists
Alexandre Aja's remake of Joe Dante's killer fish cult classic, Piranha, hits theaters this weekend. While the plastic looking fish in Dante's film have low-fi appeal, Aja's remake brings the gory fish-capades to audiences in blood-thirsty 3D. Expect lots of boobalicious bikinis, blood, and B-movie appeal in this horror flick update.
While Piranha are nasty looking creatures by themselves, the thing that makes them so terrifying is that they work in groups. There can be more than a thousand fish in a single school of Piranha. Suddenly an attack by Jaws doesn't seem so agonizing. This got me thinking -- what kind of film would be more terrifying than one featuring a school of carnivorous fish? Are there groups, packs, and gangs of other kinds that could upstage the fiendish fish?
There have been dozens of films made about viruses -- essentially groups of infectious agents working together to kill a host -- like 1995's Outbreak or the zombie-esque 28 Days Later. We've seen packs of killer children in films like Children of the Corn and Village of the Damned, but where should filmmakers set their sights next? Find out who or what should really be ganging up on audiences after the jump.
Your Complete Guide to Upcoming Alien Invasion Movies
Filed under: Action, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Lists
I'm not sure what recent film announcement it was that triggered Cinematical Editor-in-Chief Erik Davis to note that there seemed to be a growing number of movies about aliens getting the green light from Hollywood, but until he asked me to make a guide compiling them all together, I hadn't quite taken note of the trend. But now that I have assembled the whole batch in one place, it's pretty clear that Hollywood has been sitting on a fear that our little blue planet is going to be overtaken by little green men. I guess making a bunch of movies about the hypothetical is the only catharsis they can get.
That, or, and this is the more likely scenario, alien invasions are always a great excuse to blow things up and film it. I just hope one of the below films does contain a UFO dishing out a bigger blast than the one that topples NYC in Independence Day. I think such a sight has been a long time overdue.
Anyways, I present to you Cinematical's Complete Guide to Upcoming Alien Invasion Movies.
5 Foreign Actresses Undervalued in Hollywood
Filed under: Foreign Language, Casting, The Weinstein Co., Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Lists, Cinematical Indie
I'm not going to salander Rooney Mara or anything, but I would have preferred for original Lisbeth Salander, Noomi Rapace, to come out to America to reprise the role in David Fincher's English-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and sequels). But rather than do as Penelope Cruz did for Vanilla Sky, Rapace declined to be considered for the remake and instead is looking for other ways to break into Hollywood.
Will she be successful? Throughout the 20th century we saw so many foreign actresses rocket to stardom in Hollywood, but in the past decade there have been a number of surprising disappointments. Occasional industry conquerors like Cruz and maybe Marion Cotillard (we'll see) break the modern mold, but for the most part Hollywood miscasts and undervalues imported starlets. So, I don't foresee Rapace being the next Lena Olin let alone the next Ingrid Bergman. More likely she'll join the group of women below, for better or worse:
Audrey Tautou
Foreign breakthrough: Amelie (2001)
Hollywood movie: The Da Vinci Code (2006)
She was allegedly warned against doing the Hollywood thing by Amelie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who had his own failure with Alien: Resurrection) and even seemed to obey him for a while there. But five years after winning the hearts of film geeks the world over, she cashed in big time by starring opposite none other than Tom Hanks in one of the most anticipated films of the decade, The Da Vinci Code (kind of the Dragon Tattoo of its time, only bigger). The mainstream audiences didn't fall as hard for her in that, but she doesn't seem to mind, preferring to maintain permanent residence in Paris while at least being a member of the Academy. And she's done well enough in the international spotlight with films like Priceless and Coco Before Chanel, as well as appearing in Chanel ads, to keep her face circulating in the U.S. for whenever another studio comes calling for some other paycheck role that's beneath her.
Why You're Not a "Moron" If You Enjoyed 'Machete'
Can a Sex-Free Movie Like 'Twilight' Sell Sex?
Trailers and Clips: Buried, Due Date, and Let Me In
James McAvoy and Tom Cruise Consider Trip to 'Mountains of Madness'
How Important is a Film Title to International Audiences?
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