An evening pause: From Broadway Melody of 1940. This is probably one of the best tap dance duet scenes ever filmed.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.
An evening pause: From A Day at the Races (1937).
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.
An evening pause: Hat tip again to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime. As Phil wrote to me, this scene is “the sensational finale from Martin Brest’s NYU student film, Hot Tomorrows. Brest, who went on to direct Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman, broke all the rules in scrounging every resource he could find to make this 73-minute tragi-comic riff on the subject of death.”
Makes for a perfect Halloween evening pause.
An aside: Long ago, when I was in the movie business, I worked with many of the people who helped Brest make this film, and can say without doubt that he scored the best crew one could imagine finding for a student production.
An evening pause: From Amadeus (1984).
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, who described this as “a portrayal of divinely inspired genius.” Be sure to check out Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.
An evening pause: From The Road to Rio (1947), with a little help from Bob Hope.
Hat tip again to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime, which I have found to be a great reference for finding the best films from movie history.
An evening pause: He plays this with the verge and style of the best bluegrass fiddlers.
Hat tip again to Phil Berardelli.
An evening pause: Performed live 2011 with Sabine Grofmeier on the clarinet. From the 1986 film The Mission.
Link here. Many of these could easily be an evening pause, other than the fact that they don’t have visuals. If you want to get a feel for the beginnings of electronic music, check them out. The styles range from space music to jazzy. The sampling even includes the electronic music from Forbidden Planet (1956), one of the best science fiction films ever made. I have put one as an example below the fold.
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Link here.
An evening pause: From the 1954 Jimmy Stewart film, The Glenn Miller Story. They play on, even as a German V1 buzz bomb comes flying in.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Heh. Doug Messier has found exclusive footage of the arrival of Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin at the new Vostochny spaceport under construction in eastern Russia, just prior to Vladimir Putin’s visit on Tuesday.
An evening pause: The closing music from the 1983 film Local Hero, performed live by its composer Mark Knopfler.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli.
Link here. And the story is surprisingly not much different than the movie itself.
An evening pause: A classic from 1969. I remember seeing this for the first time at one of the very first comic book conventions in New York. It brought the house down.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli.
An evening pause: Watch Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea in the classic kiss scene from The More the Merrier (1943).
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime (2014 edition).
An evening pause: From the classic musical, The Sound of Music (1965), a moment with few words where all things change because everyone understands everything anyway.
As I noted in my first Evening Pause on July 1, 2010, “Julie Andrews, in her prime, had one of the most incredible screen presences of any actor in the history of film.”
Five myths about hacking you probably believe, thanks to the movies.
The article is focused on hacking, but it really illustrates the general difference between reality and the movies in almost all things. You simply have to ask the same questions about almost every other Hollywood generalization to find out how far from reality those generalizations are.
Five stupid movie deaths that should have been really easy to avoid.
These examples are why I find most modern movies either boring, annoying, or stupid. They too often follow the same predictable action formula developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they too often require their main characters to act stupid, and they too often are based on ridiculous concepts that are so silly that even after typing randomly for one million years one million monkeys would find them unworthy.
An evening pause: As this is June 6, the anniversary of D-Day in World War II, let’s watch John Wayne show us how Americans once did it. From the 1962 film, The Longest Day.
An evening pause: “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?”
Watch how a politician gets his underlings to do his dirty work, while keeping his own hands clean. From the 1964 film, Becket. Click through to part 15 to see that dirty work being done.
Barnes Wallis: the man behind World War II’s Dam Busters.
R.I.P. Ray Harryhausen (1920-2013).
An evening pause: If you listen real close to the second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, you will hear the roots of this lovely song.
An evening pause: In honor of Rand Paul’s filibuster today, let’s watch Jimmy Stewart perform a movie filibuster from the (1939) movie, Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
As Mr. Smith says, “Somebody will listen to me.”
An evening pause: I posted this clip from the 1972 film, Man of La Mancha back in 2010, where Peter O’Toole, as Cervantes, explains why he does not like to look at life, “as it is.”
It is worth revisiting ever so often, as it invokes hope and the possibility that even in the worst times, all things are possible, if we demand it.
An evening pause: The words are still worth living by.
Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue.
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.
An evening pause: A short clip from one of the best films ever made, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954).
