With the “Sunrise” section of Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathrustra” blasting, the unforgettable marriage of space imagery and classical music comes together with full force. The old meeting something so new it hasn’t been seen yet. Stanley Kubrick trucked in tons and tons of sand to make the moon in this iconic sci-fi masterpiece (that’s not nearly as action-packed as some feel led to believe). He also provided the breathing noises for inside the spacesuits, although it’s debatable which took more effort. Of course, special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull also claimed that they shot 200 times more footage than made it into the movie, a claim that’s difficult to believe, considering that would mean they shot close to 536 hours of film. Hopefully you enjoy this trailer for its beauty and lack of plot. That’s all for us today. See you next Wednesday.

Every week, Landon Palmer and Cole Abaius log on to their favorite chat client of 1996 as OhDaeSu2039 and CatsandDogsLvng2Gether in order to discuss some topical topic of interest. This week, the duo try to avoid the pitfalls of bad novel adaptations by exploring some of the best. How do you take a work by one and turn it into a work by thousands? How do you appease fans while introducing a new audience to the story? Does it always involve whale genitalia? What are the rules of making a great film adaptation of a book?

Every day, come rain or shine or internet tubes breaking, Film School Rejects showcases a trailer from the past. I love this trailer because it’s so care-free and silly, while the movie is dark and satirical and possibly exploitative. Of course, the bulk of this teaser is simply each character calling out a very special name. James Mason stars as an older man drawn in by the newly-grown charms of the title character and her ability to enjoy a lollipop. It’s unclear how they ever made a movie of this literary classic, but Stanley Kubrick sure as hell nailed it. Check out the trailer for yourself:

If I could finish that time machine taking up space in my guest room to travel back to visit college-aged Gwen I think the first thing I would tell her would be to take more notes in her Film Studies classes. Remarkably she would need them nearly five years later. All those hours spent in the dusty, haunted film book section of the library stacks devouring the almost forgotten tomes detailing women’s objectification in cinema, the battle between art and pornography, and the influence of 1960s era sexploitation films on modern day moviemaking would definitely not be for naught. I still have vivid memories of discovering there were in fact sexy movies being made before 1970, and they were considered treasured celluloid artifacts. In 1966 the previously used American rating standard known as the Hays Code was traded out in favor of the industry-wide rating system we now know. While the studios got used to this new form of self-governing rather than censoring, many controversial films passed through to receive national distribution. Audiences could now attend sexual charged films just as easily as they could a family-friendly picture. By the time the rating system really got its legs in the late 1960s to early 70s it was too late. The country had had a taste of something always featured off-screen, and they wanted more. In the coming weeks I’m going to explore each decade’s contribution to modern-day exploration of sex on screen. I chose to start in the middle, mostly

Warning: This article contains spoilers regarding the ending of Four Lions. You have been warned (hence, y’know, the whole “Warning” thing). Almost exactly one year ago, on December 25, 2009, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 headed from Amsterdam to Detroit. The mission, as we all know, failed. The incident regarding the man who became known as the “underwear bomber” is one that has understandably been met with fascination in the media. The incident proved fodder material in discourse amongst comedians who mutually expressed an inability to understand why al-Qaeda would even take credit for such an embarrassing and silly failure. A mental image perpetuated across culture of a young Muslim fanatic attempting to light his underwear on fire as a show of religious devotion. The actual details of the incident are in fact far funnier. Passengers and flight attendants saw that Abdulmutallab’s leg had caught flame during flight, and used blankets and a fire extinguisher to put it out. His pants were gone, he had burns on his leg, and when he was finally asked by a flight attendant what it was he had in his pocket that caught fire, he simply stated, “an explosive device” as dryly as one would say “chapstick.” As an act intended to induce terror, Abdulmutallab’s attempted underwear bombing is as great an embarrassing failure for his associated enterprise as one could imagine.

One of more interesting aspects of the difficulty in getting a film off the ground is the battlefield of movies that never made it to the big screen. Some came just one shot short, some never even made it past the conceptual stage, but all are the What If children of a parallel universe where Stephen Spielberg actually made E.T. 2. Stanley Kubrick was no exception to the rule of false starts and films unmade. The man was meticulous, and the widespread nature of his interests must have kept hundreds of ideas from ever seeing the camera.

There has been a heated debate happening in the world of art cinema criticism, from the printed words of Sight and Sound to the blogspots of grad students, about the status and function of a continually dominating aesthetic known as slow cinema. The discussion basically goes like this: on one hand, slow cinema is a rare, unique and truly challenging methodological approach to film that exists to push the boundaries and expectations of plot and pacing to an extreme antithetical to expectations conditioned by mainstream filmmaking, disrupting the norm by presenting a cinema that focuses on details and mood – in a way that only cinema can – rather than narrative; on the other hand, slow cinema has become such an established and familiar formal approach witnessed in art houses and (especially) film festivals (like Cannes, where such films are repeatedly lauded and rewarded) that they have devolved into a paint-by-numbers approach to get an “in” into such venues rather than a sincere exploration of the potentialities of cinematic expression, and furthermore the repeated celebration of slow cinema devalues the medium’s equal potential to manipulate time by condensing it or speeding it up (‘fast’ cinema).

Whether you love him, hate him, love to hate him, or hate that you love him there’s no denying that Tom Cruise’s career decisions in terms of what directors he will work for have been second-to-none. Or, maybe they have been. You decide.

We’re spending all week celebrating war movies. Today, we look at an early work from a master film maker, one of Stanley Kubrick’s lesser known films that shows World War I from view from the trenches as well as the courtroom.

Stanley Kubrick may be gone, but he’s not done making movies just yet. According to Production Weekly, two big stars — Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johansson, who will share the screen this summer in Iron Man 2 — are attached to a long-dusty Kubrick script that has been resurrected from his estate.

This May, iconic director Stanley Kubrick steps outside his wheelhouse and into a haunted wheelhouse. But can the auteur tackle horror?

A highly anticipated sequel, Scorsese and De Niro back together, and another from a Japanese legend round out our list of what we’re looking forward to most this year.

Some movies are meant to be slow. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Slow can be beautiful.

Being the adventures of some film geeks who love music, ironic imagery and a bit of the old ultra-violence – we take a look at one of the best films of all time.

With the weekend’s release of the much-celebrated sci-fi indie Moon, Culture Warrior compares and contrasts two classic films of the genre made by two essential filmmakers.

This weekend, the mecca of geekdom was the Drexel Theater in Columbus, Ohio. More than 300 people gathered for 24 hours of science fiction movies. Several of the Rejects were in attendance to enjoy the good, the bad and the ugly that science fiction cinema had to offer.

So how do you follow up eight Oscar nominations for your most current film that most people think is a horror flick? I guess the next logical step would be to actually direct a horror film.

What makes a DVD release great? Anticipation of the release? Maybe. Really cool packaging? Without a doubt.

Since the advent of DVD, FSR Editor Brian Gibson has been compiling debt… Lots of Debt. Every week he scours the Earth for the best DVD releases. Each week he’ll take you with him and let you know what to buy, what not to buy and why.