movies

The story of the Islamic world uprising over a very stupid, cheesy and deliberately provocative movie is too vast to discuss on one show, but on "The Nose" today, we'll break off a little piece of it that is the movie itself, including all the people who worked on it and now claim not to know what it was.

 Also on the topic list: elaborate marriage proposals, the latest one being the guy who faked his own gorey death. I give this union 18 months.

 But wait, there's more!

Every year the Berkshire International Film Festival screens films everyone knows are going to make a big spalsh.

This year, more than 70 independent films from around the country and the world, will be screened. We spoke with Kelley Vickery, co-founder of the festival and interviewed two documentary filmmakers about the changing role of thier craft.

Leave your comments below, e-mail colin@wnpr.org or Tweet us @wnprcolin.

Today on The Nose, we link together a series of only marginally related stories.

We'll start with the amusing tale of Michael Wolff, a well-known media critic who found himself in a standoff with New York City cops over his attempt to bring his own juice to the movies.He got caught and then turned the whole thing into a Twitter episode.

I'm even grumpier than usual about the Oscars, which I both love and hate. Most years, I have a movie I love that's somewhere in the hunt. Last year, even though I knew "Winter's Bone" wasn't going to win anything, it was fun to root for it.

The year before, I most rooted against "Avatar," and cherished the notion that "District 9" was in many ways the most original and thoughtful movie among the nominees.

The year before that -- well, at least there was the certainty that Heath Ledger's performance in "The Dark Knight" was the best work anybody did all year.

Today we have what I think of as the Terry Gross Problem.

I'm always impressed by the way Terry Gross just leads with her own pop culture tastes and doesn't seem to worry too much about whether her audience is on the same page. She'll do a whole show interviewing people from the show "Justified"  and just count on her audience to roll along with her, whether they watch "Justified" or not. 

Let me tell you about the last six days of my life. I've seen, in theaters, "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," "Martha Marcy May Marlene," "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," and, in IMAX format, "Mission Impossible -- Ghost Protocol." At the Bushnell, I saw opening night of the national tour of "Memphis." On television, I squeezed in "The Debt" with Helen Mirren. And the season opener of "Downton Abbey".  

From The Time Machine to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, many movies either focus on scientists or are rooted in science. As part of a national program, Hartford's Real Art Ways is trying to bring film and science even closer together.

It's dangerous business adapting a film as iconic as It's a Wonderful Life for the stage. For one thing, you're begging audiences (and reviewers alike) to compare your new adaptation to the source material, even to reassess the source material itself at every turn. Those comparisons and reassessments are nothing approaching fair, but they happen anyway. So let's dispense with as much of that as we possibly can at the top here.

From the size of the police presence that descended on Occupy Hartford's Turning Point Park yesterday afternoon, you would have guessed that General Zod and his super powered confederates had burst out of the phantom zone. Instead, the enormous caravan of cruisers, horses and police equipment was deployed to evict about ten scruffy, tired tent-dwellers.

Bill Curry says there should be a National "Bring Your Whole Self to Politics" day in which political people reveal all the complicated sides they have that don't fit into the stark equations that make one a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat.

Sports and superheroes have certain elements in common. Maybe I just want to think that because today we're going to talk about superhero movies like the Green Lantern and the Spider-Man Broadway musical. 

Elizabeth Taylor has died. But the moviegoing experience she embodied died long before her. 

Earlier this week, retired US Senator, Chris Dodd, came out of his 8 week retirement.  We talk to the Connecticut Mirror's Deirdre Shesgreen about Dodd's new gig.

Ending months of speculation, the Motion Picture Association of America announced Tuesday that retired U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd would be the movie industry's man in Washington D.C., effective St. Patrick's Day (March 17). 

The job comes with an estimated $1.2 million salary and the "duty" of handing out much-sought-after inivtations to movie screenings in the MPAA's 70-seat D.C. theater. 

The movie that had the biggest impact on the Academy Awards over the last ten years is one that did not win best picture ... or even get nominated - it was  "The Dark Knight," Christopher Nolan's 2008 Batman movie that was shunned in 2009.

Finally, Colin and David Edelstein agree on something - Winter's Bone for Best Picture!

America's Greatest Living Film Critic knows his movies. We talked with him about the surprises in the 2010 Oscar nominations and which awards he thinks are a lock. 

Edelstein also dropped some references to a few really interesting movies, a few of which you can find on the sidebar.