During Agent Carter‘s first-season run, my friend Katie (kawaiibetic) did a great service over on Tumblr by compiling period-accurate resources and research that related to the world explored in the now recently renewed TV show. Agent Carter is set in New York City in 1946, and follows Peggy Carter, an agent with the top secret Strategic Scientific Reserve—the people responsible for the …
This post is part of the 31 Days of Oscar Blogathon, hosted by Paula’s Cinema Club, Outspoken & Freckled, and Once Upon A Screen. Check out all the posts here! Women have been a part of the film industry since the very beginning, yet looking at the list of Oscar nominees throughout history can feel a little… monolithic. Women make …
When you’re a classic movie fan, it can feel hard to motivate yourself to get to the multiplex for contemporary movies—knowing that it means you don’t get to use that time to watch a Buster Keaton comedy or Esther Williams musical or Charles Laughton drama or something jaw-droppingly amazing from 50 years ago that you’ve somehow still never seen. And, true, a lot of today’s …
By the 1980s, the movie musical was… well, far beyond the time of transition. Since their heyday in the ’30s and ’40s, musicals had become limited to just a handful of movies per year, without a lot to choose from—Disney films for kids, pop hits designed to sell soundtracks, the occasional prestigious musical dramas, and the cheesy movies that seemed to capture everything cringeworthy of their era. For the studios financing the films, musicals were, to put it mildly, anything but a sure thing. That’s partly what makes Purple Rain such an interesting moment in film history—though it’s easy to see its significance 25 years after the fact, Purple Rain is still a weird, weird movie.
With 14 Oscar nominations and 11 wins—both of which remain (tied) records—James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic has surely secured an indelible place in Oscar history. But the actual disaster, which occurred on the night of April 14, 1912, inspired many other films prior to the ’97 costume drama spectacle. In fact, because the sinking took place at the …