SchindlersList Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I wasn't much of a collector when I was a kid. I could never keep a toy in it's package perched high on a shelf. In fact, usually the packaging would last about as long as it could take me to wrench my new She-Ra, Jem, or Barbie from their cardboard cage. But the one thing I did collect were trading cards, E.T. trading cards to be exact. But that was a long time ago, and those cards have long been misplaced (and I won't even dwell on the fact I had the complete set), so you can imagine the overload of nostalgia I experienced when I saw The Improbably Movie Cards over at Automatic Lifestyle Dispenser. Because, what these fine folks have done is made movie collector cards in that classic 80's style, but the catch is that these cards are for films that no person in their right mind would want to collect, and the results are pretty funny -- if not a little bizarre.

So how bad it could it be? Well, if you thought a Silkwood card might be in 'dubious' taste, wait till you get a look at the Schindler's List "Nazi's on The Move" card. Dispenser also made collector cards for good old Alvy and Annie, Sara Goldfarb, and even Charlie Meadows. But no trading card pack would be complete without the stickers, and luckily they have thought of that too, and we get collectible stickers of Colonel "The Horror" Kurtz, and Anton "Friendo" Chigurh. Unfortunately, these cards only exist online, but I don't think I would be the only one out there who would kill for their very own set of Annie Hall trading cards.

I'm almost positive this post will elicit comments like "Way to go Cinematical -- I'm never coming back here again!", or "If I wanted to watch this type of filth, I'd take a shower in front of the mirror!" -- but there's just something sorta mesmerizing and moronic about these videos that I just had to write about them. Essentially, the folks from Secret Sauce TV came up with a concept called Hot Chicks in Black & White Flicks.

The idea here is that these black and white films are instantly more watchable when they feature hot girls in bikinis reciting the dialogue instead of, say, trained professional actors. Featured in this brain-dead, but pretty hilarious collection are scenes from 12 Angry Men, Raging Bull, Schindler's List and On The Waterfront ... all with hot chicks recreating the magic of the original piece word for word. What makes it funny (to me, at least) is just how horrific these girls are at acting. The Raging Bull one (embedded after the jump) is easily my favorite, as two girls with thick New York accents stand there in bikinis debating whether or not one of them had sex with the other one's wife. Ah, the ways in which people absolutely crap on wonderful works of art is astonishing ... but I guess that's why we love the internet so much!

Check out Raging Bull after the jump (NSFW), and the rest over on YouTube.

That's right, Slappy. I'm a so-called Professional Film Critic, and I've never seen Schindler's List. Hell, I recently admitted -- publicly, no less -- that I've never seen Lawrence of Arabia, either. So I may as well go out on a limb and 'fess up to missing this one, too.

In both cases, my initial non-viewing was purely circumstantial. I just somehow never found myself watching these particular movies. In the case of Lawrence of Arabia, I'd certainly like to see it, but it's something like 43 hours long, so it rarely shows up on cable. Maybe someone will give me the DVD for Christmas or my birthday, and I'll take a few vacation days off to stare at Peter O'Toole's blue eyes. It could happen.

But Schindler's List? I can confidently say that I'm never going to watch it. As a cultural icon, I can appreciate its existence -- the film illuminated the horrors of the holocaust at a time when much of the world seemed happy to let it start fading into memory. It inspired programs that recorded the audio histories of survivors, and raised awareness of global genocide. For these things alone, it's a valuable piece of cinema.

But it's also a movie. Just a movie. One that I'll never watch.

He goes by "Night," but it's hard to dispute his sunny disposition. Just a few minutes into a conversation with M. Night Shyamalan in a New York City hotel room yesterday, it was obvious to me that the director has managed to occupy such a unique niche in the Hollywood landscape because he's immediately likable. Of course, a little movie released in 1999 called The Sixth Sense didn't hurt, either.

After landing two Oscar nominations and international acclaim for his masterful ghost story, Shyamalan continued to market himself as a brand. Since then, the results have been mixed. Signs was an indisputable hit. Unbreakable has its supporters. Lady in the Water? Not so much. But that failure hasn't prevented the filmmaker from dealing with audacious material: His latest movie, The Happening, finds a married couple (Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel) thrust into a world where people inexplicably become suicidal after getting struck by an ominous, unseen toxin. Forces of evil usually remain unseen in Shyamalan's films, and The Happening is no exception to that rule. I spoke to the 37-year-old Philadelphia resident about the personal philosophies guiding his career choices, the polarized reactions to his work, and what the future will bring.