Whether you missed the movie in theaters, or simply want to watch it for the tenth time, here’s your chance. On Monday, April 29, the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice will be holding a free screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained at 5:30 p.m. I repeat, the screening is free, so head on over to Salomon 001 to catch it. A follow-up panel discussion will be held the following day, Tuesday, April 30, in Petteruti Lounge on the second floor of Faunce. The discussion begins at 6 p.m. Mark your calendars for this event, it should be good. I mean, who doesn’t love excessive violence and satirical comedies?

Hey, little troublemaker.

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With BTV’s spring slate of shorts ready to premiere tonight, BlogDH sat down with Yotam Tubul ’14, the director of Afterlife Sentence, the longest of the four films. He had plenty to say about life, love, and movies (minus life and love).

Kevin Kelly ’15 in Afterlife Sentence

BlogDH: Tell me about the BTV Premiere and why people should go.

Yotam: It’s Monday night in Salomon, which is really cool because it’s the biggest venue we’ve had for it and it’s a big screen and it’s right on campus. [Then he talked a lot about BTV logistics, info you can probably find somewhere on this website.] It’s a lot of people’s work over the course of a semester gone into one night, four short films. It’s a testament to really cool group efforts and hopefully really good filmmaking.

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But seriously, holy shit. Did you ever want to see Trapped in the Closet, R. Kelly’s cinematic fucking masterpiece, on the big screen? Yes. Yes, you did. You are in luck, friend, because the Cable Car Cinema is so attuned to the quirks of modern pop culture that it has sensed that the perfect time to do a one-time screening of what they call “R. Kelly’s classic hip hopera” is this Saturday at 9 p.m. Go drink warm beer in a crusty Wriston basement/crowded sports team house… OR WATCH TRAPPED IN THE CLOSET IN A FUCKING MOVIE THEATER?!!?!? Is it even a question? I’ll see you there.

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The Providence French Film Festival, co-sponsored by the MCM Department, is running through Sunday at the Cable Car Cinema (204 Main Street, down the Hill and just in front of the river). As reluctant as I am to endorse anything MCM-related – I’m still a little worried that the French film I saw Sunday comes with required theoretical readings on the psychosexual motivations of the animated characters – this is the place to be if you consider yourself artsy or trendy or hipster or none of those things but still someone who likes cool shit. The festival is screening 18 different movies two times each (although it has been happening since the 21st and a few have already ended their runs), and most of them are critically acclaimed.

Also, if you’ve never been to a movie at the Cable Car, as I hadn’t, you should just get the hell down there whether or not you like reading subtitles or hearing yourself described as a “Francophile” (i.e. whether you care about French film). It is one of the most delightful theater-going experiences – perhaps the most delightful – that I’ve ever enjoyed. Any venue that can replace previews with an ad for their Kickstarter to purchase digital projection and seem even cuter for doing so must have some kind of inexplicable magic about it. Plus, there’s a full-fledged cafe inside that serves a number of self-described “Good Eats” (they are indeed good). So go. And go now, so you can tell your parents you’re a cultured Ivy League student who does shit like go to the “Providence French Film Festival.”

The French Film Festival runs through Sunday, March 3. The full schedule can be found here. 

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This Sunday, RISD alum Seth MacFarlane will take the mic to host the 85th Academy Awards (7 p.m., ABC). It’s been a solid year for film, with nine incredibly diverse Best Picture nominees vying for a place in the Oscar pantheon.

Before we get into our predictions, we’d be remiss not to mention just how surprising the nominations were. There were audible gasps from the journalists at the live-streamed announcement ceremony in January when both Best Director frontrunners (Argo‘s Ben Affleck and Zero Dark Thirty‘s Kathryn Bigelow) were passed over for nominations, leaving us to wonder: Can Argo pull off the win everyone expects without Affleck on the roster? The Director category is a historical determining factor for Best Picture, given:

• About three-fourths of all Picture winners also win Director, and
• A mere three films ever have scored Picture without a nom for Director. And it’s only happened once (1989′s Driving Miss Daisy) in the last eighty years. Good luck defying those odds, Argo.

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The string of Hollywood notables to visit Brown will continue this Sunday night, as Jonathan Levine ’00–director of 2011′s 50/50 and 2008′s The Wackness–will screen and field questions on his upcoming zombie rom-com Warm Bodies. Levine’s latest stars Nicholas Hoult (apparently of fame for his role in the British teenagers-sexing-and-drinking drama series Skins) as a zombie whose love for a living girl (Teresa Palmer) seems to be bringing him back to life, and also stars John Malkovich, Dave Franco, Rob Corddry, and Analeigh Tipton. Though the premise may sound both tired and ridiculous on first glance, the story is adapted from an acclaimed novel of the same title and is one of the more anticipated movies of Winter/Spring 2013. For all those interested in attending (and I can’t see why you wouldn’t be), tickets will be distributed TODAY (Friday) at JWW at 3 p.m., free with a Brown ID, one per person. If you miss that, don’t despair–some walk-in space will be available as well on a first-come, first-serve basis. Don’t miss it.

There’s a certain sweet spot as far as Hollywood’s historical films are concerned: that elusive topic that is simultaneously thrilling and relatively unknown. The unknown factor breeds curious hype, the thrills big box office returns. Argo, the most recent offer from actor-turned-startlingly-competent-director Ben Affleck, hits this spot perfectly by detailing a lesser-known chapter of the Iran hostage crisis.

Based on the true story of a CIA extraction operation popularly known as the “Canadian Caper,” Argo follows the efforts of CIA operative Tony Mendez (Affleck) in his attempt to rescue a group of American diplomats who successfully escaped the U.S consulate in Iran immediately before it was overrun by a mob of nationalist Iranian students. The students imprisoned the consulate staff in a Khomeini-sanctioned hostage situation that went on to last for over a year. Cooperating with the Canadian government and its ambassador to Iran (at whose house the six escaped staff members were hiding), the CIA devised an elaborate plan to send in an agent posing as a producer scouting locations for a Star Wars-themed science fiction knockoff with “a Middle Eastern vibe,” titled Argo.

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Over the long weekend, I came down with a rather heavy cold. It was miserable to say the least. While staying in bed most of the weekend was exactly what I needed insufferable, I had at least found a silver lining in my snot-encrusted Kleenexes: As I trolled the the archives of Netflix with no limitations (except for coughing fits and frequent naps, naturally), I rediscovered one of my favorite movies, Death at a Funeral. It is an extremely outrageous British (not the American remake) comedy about the troubles of an upper-class British family that has been torn apart by sibling tensions, the passing of their patriarch, and a hidden love affair with Tyrion Lannister.

You know, the norm.

While this is a plug for everyone to watch the movie—seriously, you will laugh your ass off—I also want to encourage you to hit pause on your work and press play on your favorite movies. Taking that trip down nostalgia lane is refreshing, heart-warming, and downright, well, nostalgic. Everyone loves that feeling. There’s nothing better. For me, Death at a Funeral led me from one movie to another … and then another until I had watched well over 5 10 15 movies from way back when.

So this week, take some time to watch a movie or two that you haven’t seen in a while, eat some pumpkin-flavored food, and get cozy. To help you with your planning, here is a tribute to movies from our childhood.  [Read more →]

If you’ve checked your calendar recently, you’ve noticed we’re really down to the final stretch: after this weekend, it’s Spring Weekend, and then reading period starts. So yes, if there was any time to neither party nor study, this weekend would be that time. But rather than spend hours at a mall shopping for things you don’t really need, in honor of the Ivy Film Festival ending tonight, we suggest checking out the movies before you get too busy or it gets too warm outside.

With Flixster (Apple / Android / Blackberry / Windows), you can do pretty much anything even remotely related to movies on your phone: buy tickets, watch trailers, read Rotten Tomatoes reviews, and even manage your Netflix queue or stream movies from iTunes. Since Flixster bought the Movies app from a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon in ’08, the app has consistently been one of the top movie apps on all platforms, so there really isn’t any reason why you wouldn’t already have it. There’s also a solid selection of highly-rated movies in theaters right now: Hunger Games, 21 Jump Street, Titanic, The Lorax… If anything, it’ll just be an extra reminder that you “really should go to the Avon/Cable Car more often.”

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In anticipation of the 84th Academy Awards ceremony to be held this Sunday night (7pm, ABC), BlogDailyHerald is once again breaking down the major categories for you.

If anything, 2011 was a year marked by nostalgia. Martin Scorsese’s 3D family film Hugo explored the birth of film as an imaginative medium, while its rival The Artist functioned as a love letter to the long-gone silent film genre. Gil Pender, the protagonist of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, contemplated whether nostalgia for a past decade should dominate one’s opinion of the present. The Muppets reminded us of the ragtag band of puppets we’d left behind with the birth of CGI. Of the Best Picture nominees, only one (The Descendants) didn’t take place in the past.

That being said, it’s appropriate that we take another look into the past, to celebrate the films of 2011 that awed and inspired (and sometimes underwhelmed) us. [Read more →]