The Playlist

The Essentials: Douglas Sirk

By The Playlist Staff
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April 26, 2013 2:33 PM
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5 Comments

Features

German filmmaker Douglas Sirk (né Hans Detlef Sierck) directed almost 40 films in a career that spanned three decades. A late bloomer known for grand, gorgeously expressive and emotional melodramas in the 1950s, he took a third of his career to hit full stride. The early movies were comedies, glossy adventure stories and war dramas. During his days working in Germany the director was heavily censored and when he escaped to the United States in 1937 he found himself stifled once again, “A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do,” he once said. 1942’s vengeful, vehemently anti-Nazi “Hitler's Madman” only really existed because it was seen as patriotic, and films Sirk made as late as 1952, like “Has Anyone Seen My Gal?” featuring his broad-shouldered go-to male muse Rock Hudson, were insubstantial trifles compared to his mature work. That film, lightweight comedy though it is, does still possess hints of commentary on class, status, money and the sickening desire for it all -- themes Sirk would explore, and quietly explode, in his best work.

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20 Wedding Movies To Say "I Do" To

By The Playlist Staff
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April 25, 2013 2:56 PM
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10 Comments

Features

This weekend, "The Big Wedding," a movie about a catastrophic wedding-gone-awry, opens everywhere. It comes stocked with a veritable three-course meal of big-time movie stars, including Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton, Robin Williams, Susan Sarandon, Amanda Seyfried and Katherine Heigl. While the movie, which was based on a 2006 French film, looks kind of dopey (a divorced couple has to pretend that they're still together for the sake of the young groom's staunchly Catholic mother), it was, at the very least, enough to get us thinking about our favorite wedding movies – and not just movies which end in dream nuptials, but the messy, heartbreaking, awkward, complicated emotions that often accompany what many feel is one of the single most important days of their lives.

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The Playlist Bares All: 20 Unforgettable Nude Scenes

By The Playlist Staff
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April 12, 2013 10:51 AM
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25 Comments

Features

Not to dick around, but we've got nudity on the boob right now. Mind. On the mind. Thing is, with an intriguing article over at EW exploring the death of the movie sex scene and the rise of the New Prudishness, with waves made over Kristen Stewart's nudity and handjobs in "On the Road," and now with this week's "Trance" under fire from some quarters for Rosario Dawson's (some say plot-driven, others say gratuitous) birthday suit scene, we've been thinking about nakedness in film almost as much as Seth McFarlane was when he wrote his already-infamous Oscars opening song, though largely without, we hope, the sniggering misogyny.

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The 10 Best Music Moments In Danny Boyle's Movies

By The Playlist Staff
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April 3, 2013 1:31 PM
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13 Comments

Features

When Danny Boyle first started out in England, his movies were often criticized for their sleek MTV-era construction with accusations that the films weren’t films at all, but rather just music videos stitched together by flashy editing at a breakneck pace. Boyle's reaction wasn't what the British press was expecting. "I was quite proud of that," he said at a recent 92Y conversation in New York, addressing the use of music in his films. Boyle didn't mind the criticism for several reasons (for one, he thought it was a compliment at first), but chief among them, Boyle thinks music is integral to every part of our lives.

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The 5 Best & 5 Worst Horror Movie Remakes

By Drew Taylor
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April 2, 2013 12:01 PM
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19 Comments

Features

This weekend the new, gore-soaked remake of Sam Raimi's "The Evil Dead" (review here) chainsaws its way into theaters nationwide. A bold reimagining that jettisons much of the original film's humor, replacing it with an unrelenting bleakness, it's the kind of movie that sometimes feels less like an entertainment and more like an endurance test. It also got us thinking about other horror classics that have been brazenly retrofitted for modern audiences (and the other ones that absolutely do not work). So we've cooked up a list of five of the best horror remakes and five of the worst, omitting movies that were too sci-fi-y (sorry, "The Thing") and focusing specifically on what worked and what didn't work as it related to the original. Get ready for some pretty scary stuff.

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The Films Of Nicolas Cage: A Retrospective

By The Playlist Staff
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March 23, 2013 12:07 PM
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23 Comments

Features

Yes, the career of Nicolas Cage has taken what one can argue is a serious nosedive in recent years. His frightening hairline has become the butt of endless jokes, his personal life is always a mess (he named his son Kal-El after Superman and he's on his third wife), and his take-a-paycheck career choices of late (seemingly endless riffs on "Taken" that barely get theatrical releases, things like "Seeking Justice," "Stolen," "Trespass," and on the way, a reboot of bonkers Biblical apocalypse flick "Left Behind" ) have made him an even bigger laughing stock (maybe the tax problems and reported ridiculous spending habits explain these terrible tendencies).

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15 Directors Unceremoniously Fired Or Replaced On A Movie

By The Playlist Staff
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March 22, 2013 10:59 AM
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22 Comments

Features

Getting fired, quitting a job hastily, "mutually agreeing" to exit...no matter how it's phrased, being removed from any project is never fun as almost anyone who has ever worked a day in their life can attest. The recent debacle with “Jane Got A Gun” -- director Lynne Ramsay was a no show for work on the first day of filming apparently having clashed with the producers -- is an unfortunate peg with which to take a look back at filmmakers who were fired, replaced or walked off a film, but history is full of interesting tales of films gone awry thanks to the regrettable loss of a film’s director.

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The Essentials: Krzysztof Kieslowski

By Rodrigo Perez
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March 13, 2013 5:34 PM
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8 Comments

Features

It’s perhaps comical to describe a filmmaker revered in some circles as underrated when they’ve been nominated for some of the biggest prizes in cinema -- the Palme d'Or, Venice’s Golden Lion, the Academy Awards, Berlin’s Golden Bear. But perhaps because Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski never really took many of these major prizes home, and never gained global status until later in his career, we find that the filmmaker is not as revered as we’d like (though he tied for a Golden Lion in 1993). Perhaps this observation is very relative. Perhaps it’s because he didn’t enter the Criterion canon until 2006, perhaps because his career ended too abruptly just as it was truly ascending, or perhaps simply because he’s one of our most adored filmmakers: we routinely never give up an opportunity to celebrate Kieslowski’s work when we can.

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20 Oddball Sci-Fi Films Of The 1970s

By Oliver Lyttelton
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March 7, 2013 1:30 PM
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13 Comments

Features

Somewhere between 1968's “2001: A Space Odyssey” and 1977's “Star Wars” something happened in the culture. Storytellers, perhaps inspired by the way the hippie, counter-culture was fizzling out, combined with the still-dragging-on war in Vietnam, and post-Watergate disillusion, began to look at the future in a somewhat darker, more idiosyncratic way than had been the case before, with recurring themes of environmental disaster, utopias gone sour, and the end of all things.

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Not In Kansas Anymore: The Long History Of Disney And 'The Wizard Of Oz'

By Drew Taylor
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March 5, 2013 2:22 PM
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5 Comments

Not In Kansas Anymore: The Long History Of Disney And 'Oz'

Features

This weekend's opulent 3D fantasia "Oz, The Great And Powerful," directed by former "Spider-Man" director Sam Raimi, is one of Disney's biggest movies of the year – a dreamy, technologically advanced marvel that cost $200 million to produce and god knows how much to market. And while this is the latest film from the Mouse House to flirt with the "Wizard of Oz" mythos (originally developed in a series of best-selling fantasy novels by American author L. Frank Baum), it is far from the first. In fact, Disney has been doggedly pursuing the world of Oz, to varying degrees of success, since the late '30s. The odyssey that Disney took to get to "Oz, the Great and Powerful" is more fraught with danger, pain, and dead-ends than anything involving a yellow brick road. Thankfully, nowhere in this story does a flying monkey with the voice of Zach Braff appear.

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