News

Clint Eastwood — movie star, award-winning auteur, icon of stoic masculinity, man who occasionally talks to chairs — turned 94 this past May. It may be weird to mention this upfront, although talk of age, the ravages of time, and the art of knowing when to gracefully retire has been a steady topic of conversation in the first half of 2024. None of that hand-wringing seems to apply to our man Clint, however. In the past decade, the actor-director has made eight movies, ranging from musicals (Jersey Boys) to docu-thrillers (The 15:17 to Paris) to complicated-men biopics (Sully,...

November 2024, Criterion Channel is set to deliver an exceptional lineup of films that will excite cinephiles and casual viewers alike. The month promises a rich exploration of genres, featuring a strong selection of Coen Brothers classics such as Blood Simple (1984) and The Big Lebowski (1998), along with their more recent works like A Serious Man (2009) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). Noir and crime enthusiasts will revel in an array of titles, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), Gilda (1946), and The Big Heat (1953), showcasing the genre’s iconic narratives and stylistic depth. International cinema also shines through with compelling French dramas like Fat Girl (2001) and Dheepan (2015), highlighting diverse storytelling from around the globe.

The lineup doesn’t shy away from classic drama, featuring timeless films like On the Waterfront (1954) and Seven Samurai (1954), which continue to resonate with contemporary audiences. Additionally, viewers can look forward to a variety of documentary and experimental films, including Wild Wheels...

With Janus possessing the much-needed restorations, Catherine Breillat is getting her biggest-ever spotlight in November’s Criterion Channel series spanning 1976’s A Real Young Girl to 2004’s Anatomy of Hell––just one of numerous retrospectives arriving next month. They’re also spotlighting Ida Lupino, directorial efforts of John Turturro (who also gets an “Adventures In Moviegoing”), the Coen brothers, and Jacques Audiard.

In a slightly more macroscopic view, Columbia Noir and a new edition of “Queersighting” ring in Noirvember. Gregg Araki’s Teen Apocalypse trilogy and Miller’s Crossing get Criterion Editions, while restorations of David Bowie-starrer The Linguini Incident, Med Hondo’s West Indies, and Dennis Hopper’s Out of the Blue make streaming debuts; and Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park arrives just in time for another grim election day.

See the full list of titles arriving in November below:

36 fillette, Catherine Breillat, 1988

Anatomy of Hell, Catherine Breillat,...

Tisa Farrow, the actress who appeared in such 1970s films as James Toback’s Fingers and William Richert’s Winter Kills, has died, her sister Mia Farrow announced. She was 72.

She died unexpectedly on Wednesday, “apparently in her sleep,” Mia Farrow reported on Instagram.

“If there is a Heaven, undoubtedly my beautiful sister Tisa is being welcomed there,” she wrote. “She was the best of us — I have never met a more generous and loving person. She loved life & never complained. Ever.”

Tisa Farrow made her onscreen debut in Homer (1970), portraying the girlfriend of a high school student (Don Scardino) deeply affected by the Vietnam War, and she also starred in the low-budget horror films Zombie (1979), directed by Lucio Fulci, and Anthropophagus (1980).

In her most prominent role, Farrow played a woman who has a kinky romance with a disturbed loner (Harvey Keitel) in writer-director Toback’s Fingers (1978). She then showed...

Judy Nugent, who portrayed one of the twins on the early TV sitcom The Ruggles and a girl who flies around the world in the arms of the Man of Steel on a heartwarming Adventures of Superman episode, has died. She was 83.

Nugent died on Oct. 26 “surrounded by family at her Montana ranch after a short battle with cancer,” according to a family statement shared by her daughter-in-law and Battlestar Galactica and Chicago Fire actress Anne Lockhart (the older daughter of Lassie and Lost in Space star June Lockhart).

The younger daughter of a prop man at MGM, Nugent also appeared in two films directed by Douglas Sirk: as a wise-cracking tomboy who tries to get a blinded widow (Jane Wyman) to snap out of it in Magnificent Obsession (1954), and as one of the daughters of Fred MacMurray and Joan Bennett’s characters in There’s Always Tomorrow (1956).

Nugent also...

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“The Devil Makes Him Do It”

By Raymond Benson

The actor Ray Milland always presented himself on screen with a serious intensity. His Oscar-winning turn as an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945) catapulted him into the upper ranks of Hollywood stardom in those years. He didn’t always appear in A-list pictures, though. Film noir and thrillers like The Big Clock and So Evil My Love (both 1948) featured Milland in what might be perceived as moonlighting roles, but he is nonetheless effective.

Such is the case with Alias Nick Beal, directed by frequent Milland collaborator, John Farrow. This is not a film noir, per se, but rather a thriller-cum-supernatural tale that borrows heavily from the Faust myth. And while Milland is the fire that energizes Nick Beal, it is third-billing Thomas Mitchell who is the protagonist of the story.

Mitchell is Joseph Foster,...

Sunshine and noir are antithetical, as probably anyone who knows even a word of French could tell you. Sunshine and film noir, nearly as much so. Yet summer’s here and the time is right for skulking in the murderously foggy streets, thanks to a three-day festival of vintage ’40s and ’50s crime dramas being presented this weekend at the newly reopened Hollywood Legion Theater by the Film Noir Foundation.

In a year that hadn’t started off with a pandemic in full force, or wasn’t continuing with Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre being closed for renovations, noir fans would have already something close to their fill with the annual Noir City festival that’s usually co-sponsored by the American Cinematheque every March or April. But with the absence of that 22-year-old standby leaving a doom-shaped hole in L.A. repertory moviegoers’ hearts, the Noir Foundation has stepped in with a shorter,...

Vintage high-end Film Noir from the classic year 1947! Low Mileage too — this long cut hasn’t been seen since the early laserdisc days. I didn’t know it needed restoring until George Feltenstein talked about it a couple of years ago. It’s a domestic noir crossed with Double Indemnity with a little An American Tragedy thrown in for good measure. Normally squeaky-clean Robert Young throws his hat into the ring with the lowest of noir hero-villains: in this one he double-crosses three terrific noir leading ladies. We can now spell ‘Unspeakable Cad’ with the initial Ry. The most amazing thing about The Warner Film Archive’s new disc is that it restores a full fifteen minutes — Eddie Muller screened They Won’t on his Noir City show not long ago, with no mention that it was the short, edited version.

They Won’t Believe Me

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1947 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 95 min.

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“A Likable Cad”

By Raymond Benson

Robert Young had a career of playing mostly trustworthy nice guys—after all, one could say he was born to play Marcus Welby, M.D. on television. But in 1947, he took the chance of portraying an all-around heel, a no-good philanderer who married for money and looks for every opportunity to score with someone new. And yet, Young’s admirable qualities are still there, making his character of Larry Ballentine in the film noir drama, They Won’t Believe Me, a likable cad. He pulls it off, too.

Audiences didn’t take to the change, though, and the picture was a box office dud. However, the lack of profits when a movie is released is never a true indication of its quality. They Won’t Believe Me is an artfully crafted, well-acted, twisty tale about lies, fate, and luck.

Robert Garland, a Hollywood screenwriter who began his career writing episodes of such popular sitcoms as That Girl and Sanford and Son before going on to pen the big-screen hits The Electric Horseman and No Way Out, died Nov. 21 in Baltimore. He was 83.

His son, Michael Garland, said the cause of death was complications from dementia.

Born in Brooklyn, Garland got his first job in television as a talent coordinator for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1969, when the program was based in New York. He quickly rose to writer status and helped prepare Carson’s nightly monologues.

Throughout the early 1970s, Garland wrote scripts for That Girl; The Bill Cosby Show; Love, American Style; The Bob Newhart Show;and Sanford and Son.

In 1979, Garland wrote the screenplay for The Electric Horseman, starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. A year later, he was a writer on Steve Martin’s...

Kino Lorber presents its fourth volume of forgotten or obscured film noir remnants with a trio of three titles from noted directors. With this set spanning 1946 to 1955, once again there’s an evident trajectory of diluted elements and attitudes as the cynicism and misanthropy was eroded or folded over into more palatable narrative aesthetics by the end of the 1950s Although none of these three titles represents the best work of either their directors or notable leading stars, each features its own little noteworthy kernels worthy of admiration.

Calcutta (1946)

John Farrow directed a wide variety of features in a career spanning four decades, but he contributed one of noir’s most enduring specimens with his 1948 classic The Big Clock (remade in 1987 as No Way Out).…...

Here are many more movies to watch when you’re staying in for a while, featuring recommendations from Jim Gavin, Karyn Kusama, Matt Christman, and Jonah Ray.

Please support the Hollywood Food Coalition. Text “Give” to 323.402.5704 or visit https://hofoco.org/donate!

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

Three Tough Guys (1974)

Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969)

Tower of Evil a.k.a. Horror on Snape Island (1972)

Blow-Up (1966)

Blow Out (1981)

Body Double (1984)

Rififi (1955)

The Big Clock (1948)

No Way Out (1987)

Funeral In Berlin (1966)

The Ipcress File (1965)

Billion Dollar Brain (1967)

The Innocents (1961)

Miracle Mile (1988)

Femme Fatale (2002)

Main Street Women (1980)

Sleepwalkers (1992)

A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)

Dracula’s Dog (1977)

Moneyball (2011)

Together (2000)

Contagion (2011)

Panic In The Streets (1950)

The Killer That Stalked New York (1950)

The Satan Bug (1965)

A Prophet (2009)

Point Break (1991)

The Thing (1982)

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Hit! (1973)

Outbreak (1995)

The Island (2005)

6 Underground (2019)

Pain And Gain (2013)

The Invitation (2015)

High-Rise (2015)

The ’Burbs (1989)

To My Great Chagrin: The Unbelievable...

The Art Directors Guild Hall of Fame will be induct William J. Creber – the production designer responsible for, among other achievements, the Statue of Liberty scene in the original Planet of the Apes – and frequent Cecil B. DeMille collaborator Roland Anderson into its ranks at the 24th Annual Art Directors Guild’s Excellence in Production Design Awards next month.

The announcement was made today by President Nelson Coates, Adg and Awards Producer Scott Moses, Adg. The 2020 Awards will be held Saturday, February 1, at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown.

Creber, who died last year, is best known for his work on the Irwin Allen disaster movies The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno as well as the first three Planet of the Apes movies. He was Oscar-nominated three times, for The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). He was Emmy-nominated for his work on ABC’s...

Ginger Rogers in The Major And The Minor will be available on Blu-ray September 24th From Arrow Academy

From one of Hollywood s most acclaimed auteurs, Billy Wilder, comes the charming comedy classic The Major and the Minor.

Legendary actress and dancer Ginger Rogers (Monkey Business) stars as Susan Applegate, a struggling young woman who pretends to be an 11-year old girl in order to buy a half-price train ticket. Fleeing the conductors, she hides in the compartment of Major Philip Kirby. The Major believes Susan is a child and takes her under his wing, but when they arrive at the military academy where Kirby teaches, his fiancée (Rita Johnson) grows suspicious of Susan’s ruse…

Co-written by Wilder and Charles Brackett (Hold Back the Dawn), The Major and the Minor assumes the guise of a light romance narrative in order to cleverly explore themes of identity and deception. Wilder...

Clever plotting goes into overdrive for this light-comedy proto-paranoid film noir about a magazine publishing empire so organized that it seems a sci-fi invention from the future. Ray Milland’s charismatic fall guy finds himself embroiled in a murder plot filled with false identities, and a manhunt that he must supervise… to catch himself. Maybe Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale watched this from their cribs, and applied its chaotic symmetry to their pretzel-plotted comedies!

The Big Clock

Blu-ray

Arrow Academy

1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 95 min. / Street Date May 14, 2019 / Available from Arrow Video / 39.95

Starring: Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Sullivan, George Macready, Rita Johnson, Elsa Lanchester, Harry (Henry) Morgan.

Cinematography: Daniel L. Fapp, John Seitz

Film Editor: LeRoy Stone

Original Music: Victor Young

Written by Jonathan Latimer from a novel by Kenneth Fearing

Produced by John Farrow, Richard Maibaum

Directed by John Farrow

The thriller The Big Clock...

Ray Milland in The Big Clock (1948) will be available on Blu-ray From Arrow Academy May 14th

Adapted by acclaimed screenwriter Jonathan Latimer from a novel by the equally renowned crime author Kenneth Fearing, The Big Clock is a superior suspense film which classily combines screwball comedy with heady thrills.

Overworked true crime magazine editor George Stroud has been planning a vacation for months. However, when his boss, the tyrannical media tycoon Earl Janoth, insists he skips his holiday, Stroud resigns in disgust before embarking on an impromptu drunken night out with his boss’s mistress, Pauline York. When Janoth kills Pauline in a fit of rage, Stroud finds himself to have been the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time: his staff have been tasked with finding a suspect with an all too familiar description… Stroud s very own!

Directed with panache by John Farrow (Around the World in 80 Days...

Director Roger Donaldson is one of those mainstream minded filmmakers whose body of work quickly and quietly dispelled his Australian origins. His glossy Hollywood movies of the 1980s (1987’s The Big Clock remake No Way Out or 1988’s Cocktail) segued into knock-off genre brands, like his remake of Arthur Penn’s The Getaway in 1994, or B-grade sci-fi classic Species (1995). His most noted item might still be 1998’s Dante’s Peak, one of the two dueling volcano action epics which premiered within the same period. Lately, he’s churned out risible fodder for fading action idols, like Nicolas Cage in Seeking Justice…...

They just said their “I do’s” and now Christina Perri and husband Paul Costabile can’t wait to say hello to their first child.

Since the newlyweds revealed their engagement in June, they’ve also shared news of their pregnancy and in October, Costabile announced he’ll be the host of the latest version of the classic game show, Beat the Clock, on Universal Kids.

“It’s crazy. I never would’ve thought I would enter the new year as a new husband and new dad with a new kids’ show. It’s all one big dream together, it’s really cool,...

Rebecca Clough Jan 13, 2017

Samuel L Jackson, Colin Farrell, Kirk Douglas, Denzel Washington and more, as we explore underrated political thrillers...

Ask someone for their favourite political thrillers and you’re likely to get a list of Oscar-winning classics, from JFK to The Day Of The Jackal, Blow Out to Argo. But what about those electrifying tales that have slipped under the radar, been largely forgotten or just didn’t get the love they deserved? Here are 25 political thrillers which are underappreciated but brilliant.

See related Star Wars: Episode IX lands Jurassic World director 25. The Amateur (1981)

Generally, the first hostage to get shot in a heist movie is considered insignificant; luckily this time the young woman killed by terrorists has a devoted boyfriend who vows to avenge her death. Charles Heller (John Savage) already works for the CIA, so he’s able to use secret information to blackmail his bosses into...

Displaying a transparency that few filmmakers of his fame and / or caliber would even bother with, Steven Soderbergh has, for a couple of years, been keen on releasing lists of what he watched and read during the previous twelve months. If you’re at all interested in this sort of thing — and why not? what else are you even doing with your day? — the 2015 selection should be of strong interest, this being a time when he was fully enmeshed in the world of creating television.

He’s clearly observing the medium with a close eye, be it what’s on air or what his friends (specifically David Fincher and his stillborn projects) show him, and how that might relate to his apparent love of 48 Hours Mystery or approach to a comparatively light slate of cinematic assignments — specifically: it seems odd that the last time he watched Magic Mike Xxl, a...

Above: Us three-sheet poster for The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, UK, 1933).

The great Charles Laughton may not have been the prettiest of movie stars, but he had a presence that many matinee idols would have killed for (as the current retrospective running at Film Forum will attest). In an era in which glamor was everything, studio marketers may have struggled with how to present Laughton’s unconventional looks and his larger-than-life portrayals of larger-than-life characters (so many monsters, murderers, tyrants, or simply overbearing fathers) to the public. In most of the posters for his most famous film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), he is all but a silhouette, a spoiler alert to his monstrous transformation as Quasimodo. And in some posters for The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), the film for which he won his first Oscar, Henry is made to look more like the Hans Holbein...

In one hundred years of film, the basic formula has never wavered: if you want to leave them smiling, end with a kiss. But while all screen kisses may be heart-warming, they've looked very different since the dawn of cinema. Here's a look at the history of screen romance, by the decades: Decade: 1920’s Romantic Ideals: Rudolph Valentino and Greta Garbo Their Day Jobs: Sheik and coat-check girl How They Meet: Trapped in a desert oasis while traveling under a secret identity Obstacle in their Path: Her drunken husband, his nattering wives, Hammurabi’s code condemning to death all who gaze upon a member of the tribe. Big Cool Friend’s Advice: “Sail to the ends of the earth, where a man may forget.” Final Kiss Location: Under a full moon atop Mount Kilimanjaro. Watch Party Streaming Pick: “The Sheik” Decade: 1930’s Romantic Ideals: Jean Arthur and Cary Grant Their Day Jobs: Con-woman and paleontologist.

As far as pulpy vintage courtroom dramas go, Billy Wilder’s 1957 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s famed play, Witness for the Prosecution, is hard to beat. By today’s standards, the twists and turns of its once inventive surprise ending has the potential for quaintness, perhaps because it’s something we’ve come to expect from the genre. However, one can’t deny the power of its superb screenplay and a pair of electric performances that make everything wholly unrealistic yet oh-so-watchable. In the pantheon of Wilder’s legacy, it’s not his strongest title, but it stands out, though perhaps for reasons not apparent upon its initial release.

When a wealthy widow (Eleanor Audley) is found murdered, the married man that had been wooing her, Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power) is arrested for the crime considering he had recently been named benefactor in a revised will. Vole’s solicitor seeks...

As all lovers of crime, suspense thriller, war, western, horror and science fiction films know, creating a truly great cinematic villain is no easy task. When it happens, it’s virtually impossible to forget that character.

We’ll now take a look at the greatest film villains of the 1980’s.

The criteria for this article is the same as my previous article Cinema’s Greatest Villains: The 1970’s: the villains must be from live-action films-no animated features-and must pose some type of direct or indirect lethal threat. The villains can be either individuals or small groups that act as one unit.

The villains must be human or human in appearance, so no shape-shifting alien from John Carpenter’s amazing 1982 The Thing, no Aliens from James Cameron’s classic 1986 sequel and no Predator from John McTiernan’s beloved 1987 film of the same name.

Also, individuals that are the central protagonists/antiheroes...

Konstantin Nikolaevič Leont'ev

"Radical Emma Goldman famously demanded 'fun' as a precondition of revolution (the nerve!), and Bl associate editor Andrew Grossman agrees," writes editor Gary Morris, introducing the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal. "Leading off the Articles section, he collates the 'polka tremblante' (aka Bohemian polka) with strolls through Byzantine ascetic philosopher Leontev, Nosferatu, and Carl Sandburg in a magical riff. Equally dazzling is Dave Saunders's paean to the Connectitrons via Hugo, The Big Clock, and Jeanne La Pucelle (Parts 1 and 2)."

Also in Issue 75: "Every trip must end, and our 'empty guest room' is unusually full this time. Jack Stevenson, who knows all things underground, offers thoughtful tributes to two talents associated with, among other things, the Kuchars: Marion Eaton, star of Thundercrack!, and Bob Cowan, who appeared in various Kuchar efforts. These are the kinds of rare histories that would not be written but for Jack,...

"Harry Morgan, the prolific character actor best known for playing the acerbic but kindly Colonel Potter in the long-running television series M*A*S*H, died on Wednesday morning at his home in Los Angeles," reports Michael Pollak in the New York Times. "In more than 100 movies, Mr Morgan played Western bad guys, characters with names like Rocky and Shorty, loyal sidekicks, judges, sheriffs, soldiers, thugs and police chiefs…. In The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), which starred Henry Fonda, he was praised for his portrayal of a drifter caught up in a lynching in a Western town…. He went on to appear in All My Sons (1948), based on the Arthur Miller play, with Edward G Robinson and Burt Lancaster; The Big Clock (1948), in which he played a silent, menacing bodyguard to Charles Laughton; Yellow Sky (1949), with Gregory Peck and Anne Baxter; and the critically praised western High Noon (1952), with Gary Cooper. Among...

Joe’s a world traveler, some people say.

Having returned last month from two weeks in Hawaii (where he directed the Halloween episode of Hawaii Five-0, in case you missed it), Our Fearless Leader set-forth earlier this month to trek the globe, hitting Wisconsin to curate screenings at the Uow Madison Cinematheque flying to Argentina for the Mar del Plata film festival and then jetting over to France for the Amiens Film Festival. In his wake, he’s left press and bloggings and all manner of reflections from the people he’s run into here and there.

All of this to say that a) I don’t know why that opening read like a letter home from a war and b) Joe’s been very busy and we’ve been trying (poorly*) to keep tabs from afar. Play along, won’t you, and let’s see what’s popped up.

Time for drinks with one of our favorite films!

Note: Our Fearless Leader Joe Dante — as part of his current world tour — recently screened The Big Clock at the University of Wisconsin’s Cinematheque series. Read more about it here. And here.

One of the most exciting nail-biters in the film noir genre, “The Big Clock” will have you wound up tighter than a cheap analog watch. No small digital numbers here. Crimeways Magazine likes it larger than life.

Of all the things to like about this movie, that huge timepiece in the art deco office buiding may be my favorite. It’s like the old scoreboards of classic baseball parks. Inside, though, instead of a guy flipping over the runs and outs, it houses a guy about to flip because his time may be running out.

In Kenneth Fearing’s book, the murder weapon is a brandy decanter, which...

Hollywood producer who helped break the male stranglehold

Laura Ziskin, who has died aged 61 from breast cancer, was an influential and widely liked Hollywood producer who presided over the breakthrough films of stars including Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Kevin Costner. She demonstrated an aptitude for shaping commercial hits, such as the Spider-Man movies, alongside riskier projects.

As a producer with a contract at Sony and the former president of Fox 2000 (a specialist division of 20th Century-Fox), she was one of the first generation of women, along with Sherry Lansing and Amy Pascal, to occupy positions of power in a male-dominated industry. "There are a good dozen women producers consistently working in features, making movies," she said in 1998. "Not one-offs, not one movie every 10 years, but consistently making movies. This is quite a change, a revolution."

Ziskin was born in the San Fernando Valley, California, and graduated in 1973 from the...

At 1:15pm last Friday I abandoned a prime piece of New York real estate. Christian Marclay’s 24-hour installation The Clock had been running for the previous four weeks at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea and on Thursday art critic Jerry Saltz had written in New York Magazine’s Vulture about “The Best Movie You Can See in New York (for Two More Days)”, calling it “My nominee for Best Picture of the year — maybe the best picture ever.” After that all bets were off. I arrived at 9:30am on Friday morning for the 10am opening and by the time I’d queued for 40 minutes there were no seats left inside the theater/gallery (the seating was a grid of black Ikea couches) and I had to sit up front on the floor. But within an hour I’d snagged a prime position on the front couch...

Paul Giamatti has the haunted look and paranoia of a lifelong supporting actor who knows he's never going to get a big lead role

When I looked up Paul Giamatti, I couldn't believe his age – is he really only 43? He seems so much older, darker and sadder, all entirely appropriate to this era. Then, as I pursued the sketch of his biography, I found this: in 2007, the Brooklyn Academy of Music asked him to programme a series of eight films. He chose Hitchcock's very nasty Frenzy; Dr Strangelove; Altman's Brewster McCloud; The Big Clock, a film noir with Charles Laughton; The Seventh Victim, one of Val Lewton's best low-budget horror films; George Romero's Dawn of the Dead; John Frankenheimer's scary Seconds; and Phil Kaufman's 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In short, a paradise for paranoia.

So it's worth reminding ourselves that the best work...

Usually, I'm the first one to decry the despoiling of my childhood with the constant onslaught of remakes in Hollywood. Every week another classic from the 1980's seems to be plucked from my nostalgic mind and parboiled for moronic Two Thousand Teen Decade consumption. They've also been snagging perfectly good foreign films and paring them down into Americanized versions. Sometimes, they don't even wait more than a year or two, as is the case with the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or the Let The Right One In debacles. It seems like Hollywood doesn't have an original fucking idea in its empty little head anymore.

But then I did research. (I've been doing lots of research lately for the Litely Salted Trivia website which all of you are undoubtedly visiting every single day to get your asses handed to you by my beloved's murderous Ghostbusters Quiz.) And I learned something interesting.

The big clock on the wall of the MTV Newsroom says that it's almost time to put a ribbon on this week's batch of Newsroom Blog goodness. (Note: There is not actually a big clock on the wall in the MTV Newsroom. Strangely, there aren't any clocks at all in the MTV Newsroom. Shouldn't we have that bunch of clocks that tell us what the time is in Tokyo? Mysterious.) Anyway, that means that it's time to kick your shoes off, eat a rack of spare ribs and cuddle up with the latest episode of "Dr. Who." But before you do that, make sure you catch up on all the juicy morsels you may have missed on the MTV Newsroom Blog this week.

» Drake debuted a controversial new video this week, but it just gave us pleasant flashbacks to his fantastic role as Jimmy on "Degrassi: The Next Generation."

» Other...

Top Ten Movie Remakes

Contrary to popular belief, remakes are nothing new in Hollywood. They're actually older than Hollywood. Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, the first film screened for a paying audience all the way back in 1895, is a remake of a version screened privately 9 months earlier. Personally, remakes don't bother me much. Take the upcoming remake of Clash of the Titans for example. The original film had a nifty concept, but it was executed horribly. So why not redo that solid concept? Nothing wrong with that. And if filmmakers want to take on the crushing expectations of remaking a classic, well more power to them. It's not like the remake will magically erase the original film.

So let's celebrate remakes.

But first, what's a remake? Surprisingly, it's a rather subjective definition. Sometimes, a story such as Pride and Prejudice has been filmed multiple times before. Yet, is the 2005 version a remake of the 2003 movie,...

When movie lovers think of a lone hero trapped in a high-rise controlled by bad guys, the classic Bruce Willis actioner Die Hard comes to mind. Released in 1988, the film made Willis more than just that guy from Moonlighting and started a new genre, the contained space action movie. Soon other films were copying Die Hard's spatial premise with thrillers of their own that became “Die Hard on a _____”. Die Hard wasn't the first film to have this premise – The Big Clock (1948) later remade as No Way Out (1987) comes to mind – just the first to do it really well. About a year prior, Charlie Band, who would strike gold with the Dtv Puppet Master horror films, produced a small action movie set in New York about an insurance salesman who finds himself in a Die Hard situation with a local gang. Garry Frank plays Barry, an insurance salesman who's...

At 8, ABC has a new V, then the two-hour season finale of Dancing with the Stars. CBS has a new NCIS at 8, followed by new episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles and The Good Wife. NBC has a new, two-hour Biggest Loser and a new Jay Leno Show. Fox has a new, two-hour So You Think You Can Dance at 8. PBS has a new Nova at 8, then a new Frontline. TCM has The Big Clock at 8. At 9, Discovery has a new Dirty Jobs, followed by a new Ghost Lab. Syfy has two new episodes of Scare Tactics at 9, then a new Ecw. At 10, FX has a new Sons of Anarchy. Bravo has a new Tabatha's Salon Takeover at 10. HBO has a new Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. Also at 10: MTV has a new episode of The Hills, followed by a new episode of The City.

Check your local TV listings for more.