movies

Think about your local library. Do you still picture a dusty old building full of dusty old books? Do you imagine little old ladies with their glasses down at the ends of their noses, shushing you every time you speak?

Today we’ll check in with the libraries of the 21st century. Ebooks, the Internet, audiobooks. Music, movies, videogames. Coffee bars, couches, comic books… And no shushing? It’s a whole new world in the world of libraries.

On the Nose today: Have you seen so many post apocalyptic movies and read so many books like "The Road" and those Justin Cronin novels, that you're almost too exhausted to participate in your actual dystopian future?

Crispin Glover is an actor, writer, director, recording artist and author. He's in our studio today.

Glover is very famous for two things. The movie "Back to the Future," in which he played the character George McFly at two different ages, and several very eccentric appearances on late night talk shows.

Actor John Hawkes says he doubts there will be a revival of HBO's critically-acclaimed series, Deadwood, but he's not ruling out the possibity of a movie somewhere down the line. 

"I skeptical," Hawkes says. "I would sign up immediately and I'm sure many others would, but the more time that passes, the more difficult that will be. The show itself was a hit, but wasn't a huge hit where there's maybe enough of an audience clamouring for a movie for them to have to make one, but we'll see - who knows.

So what kind of Oscar year is this? One in which two best picture nominees have been criticized by members of Congress for their inaccuracies. The dust-up between Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney and screenwriter Tony Kushner is the more benign. Courtney asked director Stephen Spielberg to re-edit the film before it goes to DVD. He's concerned that classroom use of the film will pass along an untruth -- that two members of the Connecticut delegation voted against ratification of the 13th Amendment. Kushner, a mensch in my personal experience, has been surprisingly testy.

It’s argued that no one can do as good of a job of portraying President Lincoln on film as Daniel Day-Lewis. 

Lincoln, the movie, is up for 12 Academy Awards. But weeks before the Oscars, Connecticut Congressman Joe Courtney is asking the studio to alter an inaccuracy that puts Connecticut on the wrong side of the slavery debate.

I made today's Nose panelists go see Zero Dark Thirty, just to make sure we all had one controversy we could discuss.

That was before I realized how generous the week would be with controversy. The labyrinthine story of football player Manti Te'o and his imaginary girlfriend sneaked up on me. That's the fresh sports scandal making the wires buzz right now.

 But last night's sit-down between Oprah Winfrey and Lance Armstrong breathed new life into an old sports scandal.

Here are the topics we'll be talking about on The Nose today.

First, the onset of the Awards Season, which seems to coordinate somehow with the onset of flu season. The Oscar nominations are out. The Golden Globes are handed out on Sunday, and there lots of other awards rattling around right now, many of them with the word "choice" in their names.

  The movie awards are a little more meaty this year because three or four of the big films drag controversies along behind them.

A romantic comedy about a substitute teacher recently discharged from a mental hospital after eight months of not necessarily complete treatment for bipolar disorder.  His potential object of affection? A woman whose own experience of psychic trauma has led her into a spree of promiscuous behavior that results in the loss of her job. 

America's greatest living film critic David Edelstein comes to our studios today for a discussion of current films and, inevitably, the experience of seeing a film here in 2012.

We're going to be talking about Life of Pi on the Nose today, but let me get my two cents in ahead of time.

Animal House. Diner. Footloose. Tremors. Flatliners. JFK. A Few Good Men. Apollo 13. Sleepers. Wild Things. Mystic River. Frost/Nixon. X-Men: First Class.

Today: Kevin Bacon.

Radio Drama is associated with a so-called “Golden Age” of radio in the 30s and 40s, before TV became the dominant medium. Today, Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” is the best known program still presenting this traditional style.

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.