With the entire original run of The Twilight Zone available to watch instantly, we’re partnering with Twitch Film to cover all of the show’s 156 episodes. Are you brave enough to watch them all with us? The Twilight Zone (Episode #106): “He’s Alive” (airdate 1/24/63) The Plot: A street-corner neo-Nazi grows disillusioned with the quality of the crowds who listen to his fascist rants before beating the sauerkraut out of him. Then he meets the ghost of man much more adept at raising a furor among the masses. The Goods: Pete the Nazi (Dennis Hopper) is getting pretty sick of seeing his message of hate ignored by people who’d rather beat him up than buy into his rhetoric. The latest incident leaves him with a busted lip and a bad case of depression, but at his lowest moment he receives a very special visitor. The man stays hidden in the shadows, but he speaks with authority about how to engage the people by identifying with their fears. Pete listens and learns, and soon he’s drawing the crowds and the respect he’s always wanted. But then the mysterious man in silhouette begins giving Pete orders. And telling him to kill the kindly old Jew who’s been like a father to Pete since he was a boy.

Hoosiers is one of those films that somehow finds a way to strike a chord with nearly everyone who watches it. There are some movies that are just mainstream right down to their DNA. There’s this, there’s The Shawshank Redemption, maybe a Forrest Gump; they get mentioned as people’s favorite movies with far greater frequency than anything else. And I’m not talking about cinema buffs when I say people, I’m talking about your grandma, the guy who works on your car, the grandma that works on your car. You know, regular people.  Since it contains one of the big starring roles of Gene Hackman’s career and it was directed by David Anspaugh, who repeated his success at telling an Indiana sports tale with Rudy, that should probably come as no surprise. Disney is maybe the most mainstream production company in the movie business. From the very beginning they’ve focused on creating wholesome entertainment that the whole family can enjoy together.  In the early 90s one of those attempts at making movies for the whole family was Cool Runnings, a John Candy starring bobsled movie that most people might describe as a “guilty pleasure.” It gets lumped in with other 90s sports movies that Disney made like The Mighty Ducks and Air Bud, movies that you can look back at with nostalgia, but if you were to watch them today would look about as ridiculous as a team of Jamaicans showing up to the Winter Olympics with a bobsled.

As a relatively young person, far too young to speak meaningfully about an important era of American culture, it’s difficult for me to ascribe any sense of value even unto my own words about a picture that encapsulates and represents an alternate ideology of real American freedom than what we consider as being truly “free.” When we think of freedom we think of rights and when we think of American we think of the dream. We have the right to be happy and we have the freedoms to pursue it.

For the rest of the summer, Adam and Landon will be focusing on films included in the Criterion Collection released by the legendary BBS Production Company whose anti-establishment films rocked the world of Hollywood in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So dust of your old LPs, set out on the highway, and embrace your countercultural sensibilities with one of the most eccentric and essential stories of New Hollywood. When rummaging through the Criterion Collection’s available box sets, one thing becomes abundantly clear: the serious and traditional role that authorship has played in forming both the Collection and its reputation. Whether it’s five films by John Cassavetes, Sergei Eisenstein’s sound years, or Truffaut’s cinematic adventures of Antoine Doinel, the Collection places the director as the primary author of the text, just as they do when ascribing possession to individual titles (“Orson Welles’s F for Fake,” for instance). Then came the BBS set, which frames authorship to a group of films not because of the signatures of the directors who made each individual title, but as a group effort through the umbrella of a production company. BBS may refer specifically to Bob Rafelson, Bert Schneider, and Steve Blauner, but the talent pool that determined the artistic output of this company was hardly exclusive to them, incorporating the then-young talents of Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, Jack Nicholson, and Henry Jaglom. None of these figures solely inhabited clear and exclusive occupational signposts like “writer,” “director,” “producer,” or “actor,” but a combined contributions to [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

What is Movie News After Dark? This is a question that I am almost never asked, but I will answer it for you anyway. Movie News After Dark is FSR’s late-night secretion, a column dedicated to all of the news stories that slip past our daytime editorial staff and make it into my curiously chubby RSS ‘flagged’ box. It will (but is not guaranteed to) include relevant movie news, links to insightful commentary and other film-related shenanigans. I may also throw in a link to something TV-related here or there. It will also serve as my place of record for being both charming and sharp-witted, but most likely I will be neither of the two. I write this stuff late at night, what do you expect?

Every Sunday, Film School Rejects presents a movie that was made before you were born and tells you why you should like it. This week, Old Ass Movies presents the story of a gritty ranch hand who makes it big with black gold, a feud between two families, and the emptiness of wealth in making a man complete. No one drinks anyone else’s milkshake, but a bunch of wine bottles get smashed. So do a lot of lives.

I believe it was Robinson Crusoe who once said “Fess up, Friday” after discovering a urine puddle on his straw shack’s linoleum floor. As revolutionary as that statement was almost three hundred years ago, it took a young man by the name of William B. Goss to bring it into the digital age. Thanks to his initiative, #fessupfriday is the most-used hashtag in Twitter’s four decades of existence. There are certain movies that every cinephile should have seen, but only the brave foolhardy movie lovers immune to ridicule actually admit to the acknowledged classics that have so far eluded them. Which brings me to Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam adventure, Apocalypse Now. #fessupfriday

Welcome back to Junkfood Cinema; the burning means it’s working. This is the weekly movie column that does its small part to battle piracy by highlighting several films no one in their right mind would ever want to download.

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, we mourn the loss of Dennis Hopper and do a three-word review of Sex and the City 2.

The world has lost a cinematic rule-breaker. What’s your favorite Dennis Hopper film?

Our Culture Warrior Landon Palmer digs into next month’s Cannes line up so you won’t have to. Learn what to look out for when they hit the states and feign sounding cultured at parties!

It’s been a year of comebacks, so we decided to take a look at a few stars who’ve made it all the way back from the void and a few that haven’t.

I guess that being a cynical bastard like myself, I just couldn’t swallow the plot.