Happy birthday, America!
by Angela Wakefield
by Dan D’Amico
by Derek McCrea
by Diane Knott
by Jeffrey Nuemann
By John Baeder
by Linda Nelson Stocks
By Paul Berenson
by Robert Watts
by Tom Antonishak
By Tom Brown
By Tom Cannady
It’s the 4th of July! Independence Day! The 250th birthday of America! Here to help you celebrate are some vintage postcards from Independence Days past! Here’s hoping that everyone has a safe and wonderful 4th of July holiday!
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in a few weekly live tweets on twitter. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We tweet our way through it.
Tonight, for #ScarySocial, I will be hosting Attack of the Giant Leeches! It’s only an hour long so you watch it and still enjoy the fireworks!
If you want to join us on Saturday night, just hop onto twitter, start the film at 9 pm et, and use the #ScarySocial hashtag! The film is available on Prime and Youtube! I’ll be there co-hosting and I imagine some other members of the TSL Crew will be there as well. It’s a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy!
It wasn’t difficult to pick today’s song of the day. Here is the National Anthem, performed by the class of 2012 at my old high school. They did a great job!
4 Or More Shots From 4 Or More Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today, for America’s birthday, I want to celebrate America’s game!
4 Shots From 4 Films
The Natural (1984, Dir. by Barry Levinson)
Major League (1989, Dir. by David Ward)
Eight Men Out (Dir. by John Sayles)
Eephus (2024, Dir. by Carson Lund)
A Boy Named Charlie Brown was the first Peanuts movie. It was released in 1969 and, in this scene, Snoopy gets the Little League season off to the right start with the national anthem.
I hope everyone’s having a great 4th of July!
Happy 4th of July from the Shattered Lens!
I love Independence Day. I love spending time with my family. I love watching the fireworks. I even love listening to the same patriotic songs year after year. This year, the holiday is even more special because it is America’s 250th birthday!
I know that it’s fashionable to get down on America. I don’t care. Even when times are tough, there is no greater country than America. There is no greater idea than America. I consider myself blessed every day to be a citizen of this country. And that’s why I’ll be celebrating all day today.
Happy birthday, America! And here’s to the next 250 years!
1960’s The Angry Red Planet opens with the return of the first manned space flight to Mars. When the rocketship reaches Earth, NASA is stunned to discover that only two members of the crew — Iris “Irish” Ryan (Naura Hayden) and Colonel Thomas O’Bannion (Gerald Mohr) — are still alive and that O’Bannion seems to have been infected by an intergalactic fungus of some some sort. Iris tells the story about what happened during their fateful trip to Mars.
I always enjoy the cheap science fiction films of the 50s and 60s, especially the ones that were made before America even conquered the Moon or really even went into space. Not having anything to really guide their vision of space travel, these films almost always trotted out the old war movie stereotypes and dressed them in a shiny space suit. In The Angry Red Planet, there’s gravity in space and Prof. Theodore Gettell (Les Termayne) smokes a pipe on the ship. Warrant Officer Sam Jacobs (Jack Kruschen, who, the same year this film came out, gave an Oscar-nominated performance in The Apartment) reads comic books and wonders if there will be any life on Mars. Meanwhile, O’Bannion flirts outrageously with Iris and everyone drinks coffee.
The film starts out as a standard low budget sic-fi flick, complete with sexist humor and scientific gobbledeegook, but things pick up once the crew actually reaches Mars. Of course, the Mars that they find has plant life and looks absolutely nothing like the Mars that we all know and love. That’s a part of the film’s charm. Whenever the crew leaves their rocket and explores the Martian landscape, the film suddenly becomes red-tinted. The tinting works far better than it really has any right to. That said, I did look away from the screen a few times. My eyesight is already bad enough without burning it up by watching a tinted movie.
The highlight of the film is…. well, sometimes it’s better just to let the visuals do the talking.
As soon as this fellow showed up, I knew that I was watching some sort of classic.
The Angry Red Planet is a thoroughly silly and implausible movie but, like most guilty pleasures, it’s also a lot of fun. It’s one of the least accurate science fiction films ever made and I love it.
Previous Guilty Pleasures
by Erin Nicole
Happy birthday, America!
Happy 4th of July! Here to help you celebrate are these “American” movie posters!
Through the Shattered Lens 