Cottage's Cinema Club :: The way to learn English

hardwired... to self-destruct

17 November 2016

Say your prayers, little one
Don’t forget, my son
To include everyone
Tuck you in, warm within
Keep you free from sin
Till the sandman he comes...

Sleep with one eye open
Gripping your pillow tight...

Exit: light
Enter: night
Take my hand
We’re off to never never land...

Something’s wrong, shut the light
Heavy thoughts tonight
And they aren’t of Snow White
Dreams of war, dreams of liars
Dreams of dragon’s fire
And of things that will bite...

Sleep with one eye open
Gripping your pillow tight...

Exit: light
Enter: night
Take my hand
We’re off to never never land...

Now I lay me down to sleep
Pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I die before I wake
Pray the Lord my soul to take
Hush little baby, don’t say a word
And never mind that noise you heard
It’s just the beasts under your bed
In your closet, in your head...

Exit: light
Enter: night
Grain of sand
Exit: light
Enter: night
Take my hand
We’re off to never never land...

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beware! earth invaded! beware!

14 November 2016

On Halloween morning, 1938, Orson Welles awoke to find himself the most talked about man in America. The night before, Welles and his Mercury Theatre on the Air had performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, converting the 40-year-old novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Some listeners mistook those bulletins for the real thing, and their anxious phone calls to police, newspaper offices, and radio stations convinced many journalists that the show had caused nationwide hysteria. By the next morning, the 23-year-old Welles’s face and name were on the front pages of newspapers coast-to-coast, along with headlines about the mass panic his CBS broadcast had allegedly inspired...

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clinton vs. trump

10 November 2016

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the wurst filmmaking ever?

31 October 2016

For decades, Plan 9 was the de-facto answer to “What is the worst movie ever made?” But although it’s certainly bad, it’s not quite that bad—or maybe it is, and we’re just willing to forgive because it’s also quite charming. It’s just a nothing of a movie, practically plotless and featuring some of Wood’s most nonsensical dialog. The alien characters in particular are written as these totally ineffectual pseudo-intellectuals, lambasting the humans about “your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!” As most bad movie fans know, Bela Lugosi died in the course of filming, and unrelated footage he’d shot for other half-finished Ed Wood projects was cycled into the finished product. Some scenes also featured chiropractor Tom Mason impersonating Lugosi by crudely holding his cape over his face, as if no one would notice. It’s perfectly emblematic of Wood’s laissez-faire filmmaking...

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best, or rather wurst?

26 October 2016

Not every film can be the Citizen Kane of its day. For every high-budget “A movie” that commands significant promotion and funding from its studio, there are piles of B movies that scratch and claw their way into existence without the benefit of things like “a budget” or “a script” in some cases. To compare them with A ..movies in terms of resources and immersiveness isn’t a fair proposition. Instead, discerning film fans are able to simply appreciate them for what they are.

But what does “best” mean when we’re talking about films often famous for their shoddy construction? It certainly doesn’t mean “best-made.” It also doesn’t mean “worst-made,” or else films like Manos: The Hands of Fate and The Beast of Yucca Flats would make prominent appearances. They’re not on this list because the meaning of “best” here is “most entertaining,” and I defy you to be entertained by Manos without its MST3k commentary or a pound of medical-grade marijuana. If these films are painful, they’re also equally fun.

Whenever possible, I tried to keep the list to more obscure titles. Although John Carpenter’s Halloween is a great example of a superbly made “B movie” in terms of budget, any film fan has most likely seen it already. Gathered here is a collection of some of the most entertainingly cheap and endearingly bad movies ever made...

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Andrzej Wajda (1926-2006)

10 October 2016

Andrzej Witold Wajda (Polish: [ˈandʐɛj ˈvajda]; 6 March 1926 – 9 October 2016) was a Polish film and theatre director. Recipient of an Honorary Oscar and the Palme d'Or, he was a prominent member of the "Polish Film School". He was known especially for his trilogy of war films consisting of A Generation (1954), Kanał (1956) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958).

Four of his films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: The Promised Land (1975), The Maids of Wilko (1979), Man of Iron (1981), and Katyń (2007)...

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Newspeak, New Times, Good Change Era, PL

03 October 2016

Newspeak is the fictional language in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell. It is a controlled language created by the totalitarian state Oceania as a tool to limit freedom of thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, and peace. Any form of thought alternative to the party’s construct is classified as thoughtcrime...

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alex

23 September 2016

A child’s letter to Barack Obama asking for a young Syrian refugee to be resettled in his home has gone viral and been praised by the US president at the United Nations...

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D. W. Griffith

15 September 2016

He achieved what no other known man has achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man...

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