From the best source of classic cinema comes a new trivia card game that will challenge the savviest fans of a century of movie history. Turner Classic Movies’ Ultimate Movie Trivia Challenge is for anyone and everyone who has watched not only the Oscar-winning dramas and late-night noir marathons, but also paid attention to the hosts supplying behind-the-scenes trivia about the directors and stars. It’s just right for pulling out at a cocktail party of your fellow movie fans, but fair warning: It’s the kind of game where you’ll be lucky to score a right answer in every few cards.
Let’s face it. The “turn of the century” was eighteen years ago. Are you happy with the styles that define this decade? Why not re-define what the new ‘twenties are going to represent, and why not start with how you want to look? Timeless, a new book by fashion makeup artist Louise Young and film industry hairstylist Loulia Sheppard, provides readers with a step-by-step guide in photos and instructions to recreate the most memorable styles from the silent screen era forward. So not only is it an obvious tool for cosplay and theater, it’s a way to bring the golden age of women’s fashion to everyday lifestyles.
Young and Sheppard also recreate actual style icons, and provide the steps for anyone to follow suit. Readers will find not only how they can recreate styles, but what materials were available for contemporary women to make the look they are after. Models reflect many memorable looks in Timeless, including Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, Ginger Rogers, Myrna Loy, Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, Gene Tierney, Grace Kelly, Lucille Ball, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Farrah Fawcett, Julia Roberts, and many more.
Timeless is not your typical makeup and hair book. The creators have decades of experience in film creating any and every look imaginable. Louise Young has created makeup designs for celebrities in movies including Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange, Spectre, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Wonder Woman, Murder on the Orient Express, Pride & Prejudice, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Clash of the Titans, Jack the Giant Slayer, and The Avengers. Loulia Sheppard has created hairstyles for several award-winning productions, including Gosford Park, The Phantom of the Opera, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Last Samurai, Jane Eyre, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, RED 2, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Victor Frankenstein, and Murder on the Orient Express–and most recently the looks of Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson.
It’s that time of year again, time to take a look forward at what movies should be on your radar for 2022. We’re changing up this year’s preview by adding several trailers. Unlike in previous years, we have trailers for most of these movies. These are the genre films we think borg readers will want to know about to make their own checklists for the coming year. In all we pulled 60 movies from the hundreds of films that have been finalized or are in varying stages of final production and slated for next year’s movie calendar. Many of these will be more than familiar to you, as we’ve previewed some going back to 2019.
The biggest surprise is there aren’t a lot of surprises on the horizon, at least for big movies, like Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, Black Adam, Lightyear, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse, Halloween Ends, Top Gun: Maverick,Jurassic World: Dominion, a new Predator movie called Prey, and The Batman.Compare the below list to our 2021 list, 2020 list, 2019 list and even the 2018 list, 2017 list, 2016 list, 2015 list, or 2014 list, and you’ll see the studios continue moving genre content from the big screen to the small screen via streaming services. Hollywood hasn’t made its way back to full production mode yet since the pandemic risks aren’t over yet, and it’s beginning to look like TV will be the location most people watch their movies for the foreseeable future, if not permanently. What do the big movies have in common? They’re all sequels–and more remakes of movies, books, and TV shows are on the way.
First up, the top 15 movies expected in 2022 that don’t have an announced release date yet, followed by our annual month-by-month rundown of trailers. Grab your calendar and start making your plans–here are the movies you’ll want to see in 2022 (and some you might not!):
Havoc –Tom Hardy stars as a detective in a crime drama directed by Gareth Evans (Netflix)
Enola Holmes 2 –sequel, starring Millie Bobby Brown and Henry Cavill (Netflix)
Prey – the fifth movie in the Predator franchise will be a prequel, starring Amber Midthunder as a Comanche who must protect her tribe from the alien threat (Hulu)
Pinocchio– live-action version of the fairy tale stars Tom Hanks as Geppetto and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Jiminy Cricket (Disney+)
The Amazing Maurice – animated young adult fantasy about a sentient cat, based on the 2001 book The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett, starring Emilia Clarke, Hugh Laurie, David Thewlis (theatrical release)
Blonde – a biopic about Marilyn Monroe starring Ana de Armas, with Adrien Brody and Bobby Cannavale (Netflix)
Wendell and Wild – comedy duo Key and Peele create a stop-motion dark horror comedy (Netflix)
The Gray Man –the Russo brothers direct a film about a an ex-CIA agent, starring Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas (Netflix)
The Adam Project – sci-fi movie stars Ryan Reynolds as a man who goes back in time to get his younger self for help (Netflix)
Spaceman – sci-fi movie stars Adam Sandler and Carey Mulligan (Netflix)
The School for Good and Evil – long-delayed young adult fantasy with Charlize Theron (Netflix)
Slumberland – kids fantasy adventure starring Jason Momoa and Kyle Chandler (Netflix)
All Quiet on the Western Front – remake of novel adaptation, this time starring Daniel Bruhl (Netflix)
Blade of the 47 Ronin – sequel to 47 Ronin, starring Mark Dacascos (Netflix)
Deep Water– another Ben Affleck bad marriage “erotic psychological thriller,” with Ana de Armas (Hulu).
January
The 355 – Spy/thriller, starring Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Bingbing Fan, Diane Kruger, Penelope Cruz, Sebastian Stan – January 7.
The Tender Bar – Coming of age story starring Ben Affleck and Christopher Lloyd (Amazon) – January 7.
Hotel Transylvania: Transformania– Latest entry in the animated franchise (Amazon) – January 14.
Scream– Horror, the big reboot/sequel stars Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette – January 17.
People have been colorizing photographs nearly as far back as the invention of photographs in the early 19th century. Hand-painted photography took personal photographs from cold and lifeless to something more real, vivid and exciting. Although methods for actually developing photographs in color existed as far back as the 1860s, it was rarely done. Mid-twentieth century colorizing became a popular pastime, and so many people can look back to family portraits in color (by hand, with pencil or other coloring) regularly found in the 1940s and 1950s, just as color film became more available to the public. Attempts of the past to accurately add color to historical images sometimes were made with reference to actual objects or people–such as matching eye color and hair color via reference to paintings or contemporary written descriptions–to ensure the accuracy of color choices. But no single effort has been made to accurately colorize historical photographs until recent digital technologies made it more possible. Brazilian artist Marina Amaral has become well-known for her coloring work, and she has teamed up with historian and journalist Dan Jones to create an extraordinary new history text, The Color of Time: A New History of the World, 1850-1960. It is a must-read for history buffs and anyone who could use a brush up on their history knowledge.
Readers first will be attracted to The Color of Time (titled The Colour of Time in European editions) first for Amaral’s 200 colorized images (she has colorized images seen in this book plus many more). But the book’s value is equaled in Jones’s history text, which stitches together photographs of important subjects from the beginning of the tintype to 1960, when black and white was still prevalent, with a chronology of every major world event and figure in between. So The Color of Time is, in a sense, a world history textbook (this one is ideal for teaching high school world history or as a supplement to a first year college history survey course) with the added benefit of bringing historical figures to life via color. Amaral has noted it is nearly impossible to perfectly capture every color correctly (you’d need historical access to every item in the camera’s lens), but Amaral has researched the clothing, objects, and people who are the subjects of this book to get as close as possible. Historical figures–many presented for the first time in color–include Darwin, Marx, Lincoln, Tolstoy, Edison, Stanley, Schliemann, Pope Pius IX, Sitting Bull, Barton, Twain, Mata Hari, Curie, Einstein, Villa, the Red Baron, Rasputin, Louis Armstrong, Lenin, Stalin, Michael Collins, Elie Wiesel, Hitler, Mussolini, Earhart, FDR, Mau, Gandhi, Churchill, Elvis Presley, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Castro, Guevara, and Mandela.
A surprising number of these photos take on a new life in color. A spectrum of color in the Times Square photo of a sailor and a nurse in an embrace on VJ Day brings out the happy dispositions of nearby watchers. The blue sky in a Wright Flyer image accentuates the fragile, finely geometric balance of the famous inventors’ first airplane. A colorized image from 1900 of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid makes them look like movie stars of the Golden Age of cinema. Perhaps nothing compares to the beauty of England’s Crystal Palace in 1854–you can almost smell the clear, blue water in the great pool. Another image shows the tan wooden infrastructure of the Statue of Liberty’s hand, while being built. The famous 1895 Montparnasse rail crash is even more jolting in color. But the strangest jolt may come from an image of a handsome young man that could be a young Clint Eastwood–it is instead of a man days before his hanging, for stabbing President Lincoln’s secretary of state while his co-conspirator killed the President a few streets away.
1959. A gallon of gas cost a quarter. Movie tickets were a dollar and color was replacing black and white film. You could buy a new car for $2,000. In technology the Soviets beat the United States to the Moon, with a hitch, crashing their Luna 2 spacecraft into the lunar surface. The U.S. selected seven astronauts for their Mercury space program. Xerox began selling copiers to companies, IBM made headway with its mainframe computer, and Jack Kilby invented the microchip. Kids first began playing with Play-doh, Etch-a-Sketch, and Barbie dolls. On one end of the country The Sound of Music opened on Broadway and everywhere music fans faced the day the music died. The world first witnessed The Twilight Zone. The gray flannel suit defined the businessman. And in 1959 the great filmmaker Billy Wilder produced and directed his own screenplay and the film would become the best reviewed comedy of all time, pegging the number one spot on the American Film Institute’s registry of best American comedies. The film was Some Like It Hot. And it’s back in theaters this weekend for a limited release.
Some Like It Hot has it all. Marilyn Monroe in arguably her best performance. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon only at the beginning of their long and distinguished careers. The movie doesn’t take place in 1959–it is set 30 years earlier in the heyday of speakeasies and Depression era mobs. Tony Curtis is Joe, a ladies’ man and gambler–the sax player. Jack Lemmon is Jerry, a straight arrow–the double-bass player. They play in a band in a speakeasy (disguised as a funeral home) run by mob boss “Spats” Colombo (George Raft). When Joe and Jerry accidentally witness a Valentine’s Day massacre-inspired mob hit, they must go on the run. They find an all-female band heading to Miami via train and disguise themselves as the original bosom buddies, Josephine and Daphne, befriending the band’s gorgeous and upbeat lead singer and ukulele player, Sugar Kane, played by Marilyn Monroe. That’s where the laughs begin, and a back-up cast of classic Hollywood staples, including Pat O’Brien and Joe E. Brown, fill in the gaps.
Despite the popularity of color film, Wilder shot Some Like It Hot in a steamy black and white. Wilder had already directed Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, so the pairing was an obvious fit. Wilder and Lemmon would start a partnership that lasted until 1981. Wilder was the true King of Comedy. He worked on nothing but hit movies over the course of his career–serious stuff like Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, The Spirit of St. Louis, and Witness for the Prosecution, in addition to comedies including Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, The Apartment, Ocean’s 11, Irma la Douce, The Fortune Cookie, and Casino Royale.
Back in September here at borg.com we predicted the November Bonhams auction of Robby the Robot and his “space chariot” from the 1956 science fiction classic Forbidden Planet would hit the $1 million mark and we even entertained the possibility of a $10 million sale. Yesterday the hammer fell at $4.5 million at Bonham’s “Out of this World” auction of entertainment memorabilia and with the addition of a buyer’s premium resulting in a final sale price of $5,375,000, Robby and his car became the highest movie prop lot ever to sell at public auction. Technically a costume that doubled as a prop, Robby the Robot also became the second highest sale price for any piece of entertainment memorabilia to sell at public auction, eclipsed only by the 2011 sale by auction house Profiles in History of the iconic Marilyn Monroe subway vent dress from The Seven Year Itch, which sold for $5.52 million including buyer’s premium (yesterday Bonhams and the mainstream press, including The New York Times and CBS, mistakenly claimed Robby’s sale surpassed the Monroe dress price, but their reports neglected to factor in the buyer’s premium for the dress–a fee the auction house charges bidders based on a percentage of the hammer price, and the Monroe dress had a hammer price of $4.6 million). The Robby the Robot costume/prop was used in dozens if not hundreds of appearances over the decades, including in key episodes of Lost in Space and The Twilight Zone.
Still, top prop honors is nothing to sneeze at. The sale of Robby and his car nudged from the top spot the sale of the 1966 Batmobile from the 1960s television series, which sold for $4.62 million in 2013, including buyer’s premium. The rest of the pantheon of prime public auction screen-used prop and costume sales includes one of two original James Bond Aston Martins from Goldfinger ($4.6085 million/2010), one of the falcon props from The Maltese Falcon ($4.085 million/2013), Audrey Hepburn My Fair Lady and Breakfast at Tiffany’s dresses ($3.7 million/2011 and $807,000/2006, respectively), Sam’s piano from Casablanca ($3.4 million/2014), the Cowardly Lion suit from The Wizard of Oz ($3.1 million/2014), Von Trapp kids’ costumes from The Sound of Music ($1.5 million/2013), Steve McQueen’s racing suit from LeMans ($984,000/2011), and one of four pairs of ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz ($666,000/2000).
In the science fiction genre, the artifact to beat was another robot–an R2-D2 that was pieced together from several screen-used components, which sold this past June for $2.76 million, and a Back to the Future III DeLorean time machine sold for $541,000 in 2011. Robby easily nudged these props aside yesterday. Would the sale price have been the same without the space car? You’ll need to track down the anonymous telephone buyer to get the answer to that question (the four final bidders all dueled it out via phone bids), although you might keep an eye out at Paul Allen’s Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, as this is the kind of high-end prop he has purchased in the past.
I have been a fan of Edward Hopper since the first time I saw his artwork. I view a print of his Automat every day at home. In college a wall of every other dorm room had either Hopper’s Nighthawks or the Helnwein pop culture adaptation Boulevard of Broken Dreams with Hopper’s characters swapped for Elvis Presley, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe. A few years ago I made a special side trip to visit the original in Chicago, housed just across America’s most famous artwork, Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Nighthawks means many things to many people. For me it’s about nostalgia.
I always have an eye open for new adaptations of Nighthawks. Some of the best adaptations have been created as variant covers for comic books. It’s a rare find, but it happens, oftentimes in places you wouldn’t expect it. The best comic book cover adaptation of Nighthawks is available this summer, and it’s our pick for the best comic book cover we’ve seen so far this year.
Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks
It’s J.K. Woodward’s variant cover to Micronauts, Issue #5. Innovative, futuristic, inventive, thought-provoking, and evocative of adventure for fans of the 1980s toys. I have been a fan of Woodward since his brilliant and beautiful watercolor work on his cover-to-cover Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who crossover series Assimilation². At first glance you might not even realize this fantastic future world is something familiar to you. Is it the alien behind the counter that cinches the Hopper homage? Maybe the yellow hue color choices in the background? The commercial coffee pot? Or just the overall design? Check out his artwork in full and decide for yourself:
In honor of the one hundredth anniversary of the studio, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will celebrate by releasing 100 classics digitally. Five classic films from the studio will be made available digitally for the first time ever – Sunrise (1927), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), Man Hunt (1941), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and the original Jimmy Stewart classic The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). Throughout the rest of this year a total of 100 digital releases will follow from Fox’s film catalog, including 10 films which have never been released in any format – the Raoul Walsh classics The Red Dance (1928), The Cock-Eyed World (1929), The Bowery (1933), Hello Sister (1933) and Sailor’s Luck (1933); John Ford’s Men Without Women (1935), Will Rogers in State Fair (1933), Shirley Temple in Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (1949), the Marilyn Monroe documentary Marilyn (1963), and Metropolitan (1935), the first film ever from Twentieth Century Fox.
Other films being released include Oscar-winning and nominated favorites from legendary filmmakers F.W Murnau, Frank Borzage and Akira Kurosawa, and movie stars including Henry Fonda, Kathleen Turner, Marlon Brando, Tyrone Power, Jimmy Stewart, Michael Douglas, Betty Grable, Orson Welles, Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, Joan Fontaine, and Sophia Loren.
Check out this big list of films to look forward to, including many fairly recent favorites, all available soon, with some of our recommendations highlighted:
It’s the second time TCM and auction house Bonhams have teamed up to offer screen-used and production-made costumes, props, and other relics from the Golden Age of Hollywood. A November auction, TCM Presents: There’s No Place Like Hollywood, will feature a large private collection of rare items from Casablanca, including the piano featured prominently in the film where Sam plays “As Time Goes By.” A lesser seen piano from another scene in the film sold in 2012 for more than $600,000.
One lot features a mannequin display with costume components worn by Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, said to have been used in several scenes in the film. Many of the costumes and props appear to be the same lots that have been featured in other auctions in the last few years, including various dresses from the Debbie Reynolds collection of items offered by auction house Profiles in History.
Costumes from several classic films are on the auction block, including a Clark Gable jacket from Gone With the Wind, Marilyn Monroe’s saloon gown from River of No Return, Jimmy Stewart’s Charles Lindbergh flight suit from The Spirit of St. Louis, Faye Dunaway’s dress from The Towering Inferno, a Jane Russell costume from The Outlaw, and a John Wayne Union Army coat from Rio Lobo and The Undefeated. Sci-fi and fantasy fans aren’t forgotten in the TCM auction, as there will be costumes worn by Charlton Heston and Roddy McDowall in Planet of the Apes, a background crewmember astronaut jumpsuit from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a test dress for Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and a Saruman staff and Aragorn sword from The Lord of the Rings films, both from Sir Christopher Lee’s personal collection.
More so than Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or The Shining, writer/director Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237 seeks and finds the heart of obsession and insanity.
But that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Documentaries often feature thought-provoking, intelligent, smart people with some appropriate credentials espousing new theories. You will likely walk away from Room 237 thinking your own descriptive words about the participants in the film. These may include: Eccentrics. Crackpots. Batshit crazy. Although the film gives these participants ample opportunity to prove their theories, and despite some obvious effort on their part, no rational person would likely use these words to describe them by film’s end: Geniuses. Visionaries. Lucid.
The titleRoom 237 comes from the numbered hotel room in the Kubrick film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, where a lot of the terrifying horror plot is centered. (King reportedly hated Kubrick’s adaptation of his book). The documentary is predominantly the voices of five fanatics who have watched The Shining far too many times for their own good, who we never actually see in the film. The voices are carried over clips of a variety of Kubrick movies that serve to attempt to prove the theories being discussed. Room 237 was acclaimed by a number of critics and was named an official selection at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and nominated for several other awards.
