Today is a special day here at the Shattered Lens as we celebrate the birthday of Dario Argento!
Now, we’ve got a lot of Argento-related stuff scheduled for October so, for today, I’m just going to share one of the best scenes from one of my favorite Argento films, 1975’s Deep Red. This scene features what is seriously the creepiest puppet that I’ve ever seen.
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!
117 years ago, on this date, Elia Kazan was born Istanbul. Kazan would go on to become a groundbreaking director, both for the stage and in movies. He would play a key role in turning both Marlon Brando and James Dean into stars and he made films, like Gentleman’s Agreement and A Face In The Crowd, that challenged the political pieties of the day. Of course, he also named names in front of HUAC, a decision that continues to be controversial to this day. Two of Kazan’s films — Gentleman’s Agreement and On The Waterfront — won the Oscar for Best Picture. A Streetcar Named Desire was widely expected to win before it was upset by An American In Paris. A Face In The Crowd is often cited as being one of the most prophetic films ever made. When Kazan was given an honorary Oscar in 1999, many in the auditorium refused to applaud but his influence as a filmmaker cannot be denied.
It’s time for….
4 Shots From 4 Elia Kazan Films
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir by Elia Kazan, DP: Harry Stradling)
On The Waterfront (1954, dir by Elia Kazan, DP: Boris Kaufman)
East of Eden (1955, dir by Elia Kazan, DP: Ted D. McCord)
A Face In The Crowd (1957, dir by Elia Kazan, DP: Gayne Rescher and Harry Stradling)
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasionally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be The Omega Syndrome!
If you want to join this watch party, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up The Omega Syndrome on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!
Enjoy!
by Erin Nicole
Happy Labor Day from your friends here at the Shattered Lens!
My favorite movie about having a job is Office Space. In honor of everyone who is having to work on Labor Day, here’s my favorite scene from that movie. I think this is one of those things that everyone can relate to. Every Labor Day, when we’re hanging out with our family and everyone’s watching the college football games, Lisa and I sing along to this scene.
by Erin Nicole
Happy Labor Day! The work never ends around here.
Here’s a music video for anyone who is working hard on Labor Day.
In a 1984 interview, Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler had this to say about the song that would not only become the band’s biggest hit but also one of the best known videos from the early years of MTV:
The lead character in “Money for Nothing” is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television/custom kitchen/refrigerator/microwave appliance store. He’s singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real….
According to Knopfler, he was in a New York appliance store when he heard a man who worked there complaining about all of the TVs in the shop being tuned to MTV. (Urban legend has it that the man was watching a Motley Crue video.) Knopfler wrote down the man’s exact words, which included the famous line about “money for nothing and chicks for free,” and later set them to music. (Knopfler also included the man’s controversial description of a rock star as being “that little faggot with the earring and the makeup.” In 2011, 26 years after the song’s initial release, that line would lead to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council banning the song from being played on Canadian radio stations.) After hearing the band’s initial recording of the song, Sting suggested the “I want my MTV” line and was rewarded with a co-writer credit.
The ground-breaking music video was one of the first to feature computer animation. Under the direction of Steve Barron, Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair (who later founded Rainmaker Studios) created the animation using a Bosch FGS-4000 CGI system and a Quantel Paintbox system.
Money for Nothing spent 3 weeks as the number one single in the United States and the video was named Video of the Year at the 3rd Annual MTV Music Awards.
