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.”

Pic via.

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 →]

Here at BlogDH, we like to provide you with fun, quick, insightful and/or useful time-wasters. Today’s selection is none of the above. It’s 89 minutes long. It boasts an 11% rating on the Tomatometer. And it stars Tyra Banks and Kevin from American Pie, so insight is, by default, impossible. What are you left with? Arguably the worst  Halloween movie in the franchise, available on Netflix Watch Instantly from the comfort of your underheated dorm room. It’s not that Halloween Resurrection sucks, but more that it still sucks in the realm of slasher films, in which its namesake is honored as one of the masterworks and even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has some clout. In this laughably bad comedy horror film, a web-based reality show producer decides to send a group of attractive young people to the Strode house to experience terror incarnate (aka Busta Rhymes’ acting skills), but then a masked murderer shows up. Continuing a (not very) long tradition of sequels including the word “Resurrection” that absolutely suck, Halloween Resurrection is so bad it’s good, and since it’s peaking out at 41 degrees today, what else are you going to do?

Every now and then, I see a movie I wish I could get my hands on and remake with my own flair.  The movie doesn’t have to be unexpectedly bad, it just needs to be open to some re-envisioning.  Hey, the lives of armchair directors may be comfy and covered with a thin layer of Cheeto dust, but that doesn’t mean we’re wrong.  And since we’re at a school with a rich creative history, we can take our musing a step further and say, “I should totally remake this at Brown.”

So, which popular movies would be vastly improved by a relocation to our campus?  Here are four that would certainly benefit from getting the College Hill treatment: [Read more →]

The Onion’s AV Club is always awesome, boasting tons of intelligent pop culture content. But the most-viewed post on the site these days is a very special AVQ&A: “Actors we hate in movies we love.” From Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, or Katie Holmes in Batman Begins, everybody has inevitably pondered why such shitty actors end up in such entertaining movies. So go ahead, enjoy the AV Club editorial board’s riffs on bad acting in great film instead of listening to that Modern Middle East lecture…Happy Friday!

P.S. The greatest offender of this nature is Vera Farmiga in The Departed. Thoughts?

Original cast is back. The only Stifler relative present will (hopefully) be Stifler’s Mom. There will be awkward scenes involving masturbation. Enough said.

Coming to theaters April 6, 2012.

It’s Friday. And not just any Friday — it’s Fall Weekend Friday. For those of us staying in the jolly ol’ Ocean State, there’s not so much to do this weekend since half of the Brown community booked it onto the first MegaBus to New York. So why not make your way down to Providence Place and catch up on new movies?

Specifically, check out the new Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Seth Rogen dramedy (emphasis on the dra-) “50/50“. Why this film (considering that the new non-Twilight Taylor Lautner movie is out, too…)? Maybe because it’s directed by Brown alum Jonathan Levine ’00! Thanks, @BrownAlumniMag, for letting us know. (Yes, they tweet.) So get your iced coffee float at the Blue Room, and walk downtown! It’s beautiful out, so take advantage of the sun. Trust me, freshmen, it might not come back for a while…

Keepin’ It Reel is a weekly to biweekly movie column that aims to do reviews the Brown way: by waxing philosophical and perhaps using the word “hegemony.” If there’s an upcoming movie that you, gentle reader, would like reviewed, don’t only mildly hesitate to place your requests below.

Moneyball tells the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), manager of the Oakland A’s (whose mascot either is the letter “A” or a really tiny elephant) and controversial pioneer in applying statistical reductionism (“sabermetrics“) to America’s Favorite Pastime. Along the way, Billy befriends a Yale econ grad (Jonah Hill), has a falling out with his team manager (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), and even learns a little about being a father. If that sounds about as thrilling as, say, a “Facebook movie”, then you’re actually onto something: this little ditty was written by West Wing mastermind and recent guest of Brown Aaron Sorkin. But that doesn’t mean it’s anywhere near as good. [Read more →]

“Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaants ingonyamaaaaaaaaaaaa bagithi babaaa.” I’m sure each and every American child has been wondering what that phrase has meant since The Lion King first conquered our hearts and minds in the summer of 1994. Well after all these years you finally have your answer. It’s a Zulu phrase that translates to “There comes a lion.” Shocker. Seventeen years of waiting and it’s really that simple? Honestly, it may have been better had the words just been jibberish-in-the-style-of-Zulu. And that humming after those breathtaking opening lines? As you may have guessed, they’re equally disappointing: “Sithi uhhmm ingonyama” translates to “Oh yes, it’s a lion.” What’s next, do we find out the Simba was voiced by Ferris Bueller and JTT? Well, that’s true too.

So why all this Lion King talk? Sometime between Cars 2 and Tangled, Disney decided to celebrate The Lion King‘s 17.25 year anniversary with a 2 week theatrical re-release in….[drumroll]….3D! This way the company can get 16 dollars a ticket enchant a whole new generation of children with its modern classic. Read the 5 things your preschool-aged self definitely didn’t realize about Disney’s last great non-Pixar film after the jump. [Read more →]

If you’re a French student, or just a film aficionado, you’ve probably heard of the Providence French Film Festival, which has been going on this week and ends this weekend. The Festival closes tomorrow with a round table discussion entitled “Vichy France in the Lens of the Camera”, and a schedule dripping with amazing French films.  It’s located at the Cable Car Cinema on South Main Street (near RISD): go down the Hill to see some quality films and to hear French people speaking incredibly quickly next to you.

If you want a little more information about some of the films that have played this week at the Festival, we’ve compiled a short list of our personal favorites with short synopses. The trailers and plots of all the films are on the Festival website, in case we didn’t include one you’ve been eyeing. (Note: If you’ve missed a film you were really looking forward to, most of the films at the festival are available on Netflix.) [Read more →]