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Showing posts with the label It Happened One Night

Countdown to the Oscars: Top 20 Favourite Best Picture Winners

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I love making lists of stuff. Films, TV shows, books, songs... anything. So, in anticipation to the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony, I thought it would be fun to make a list of my favourite Best Picture winners. I did a similar thing back in 2017, but I have watched a few more winnings films since then, so this is an updated version of my top 20 favourite Best Picture winners. Please bear in mind that I have not seen every single film that has won the award, so my choices are based on the ones that I have in fact seen so far.   20. Rain Man (1988) Directed by Barry Levinson, Rain Man  is the story of an abrasive and self-centered wheeler-dealer named Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise), who discovers that his estranged father has died and bequeathed all of his multi-million-dollar estate to his other son, Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), an autistic savant who lives in a world of his own and of whose existence Charlie was completely unaware. Besides winning for Best Picture, Rain Man also re...

80 Reasons Why I Love Classic Films (Part I)

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I started this blog six years ago as a way to share my passion for classic films and the Old Hollywood era. I used to watch dozens of classic films every month, and every time I discovered a new star I liked I would go and watch their entire filmography. But somewhere along the way, that passion dimmed down. For instance, I watched 73 classic films in 2016, and only 10 in 2020. The other day, I found this film with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. that I had never heard of, and for some reason it made me really excited about Old Hollywood again. It made me really miss the magic of that era and all the wonderful actors and actresses that graced the silver screen. And it also made me think of all the reasons why I fell in love with classic films in the first place. I came up with 80 reasons, which I thought would be fun to share with you. Most of them are just random little scenes or quirky little quotes, but put them together and they spell Old Hollywood to me. This is part one of the 80 reasons w...

10 Random Facts About Classic Hollywood

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The Golden Age of Hollywood was all about the glitz and glamour. Movie stars were fashion icons, western heroes, brooding outsiders, average Joes, and femme fatales. Some had careers that spanned decades, others were short-lived in their success, and most of them were no strangers to scandal. In such crazy times as these, there are bound to exist some wild facts about the stars and films that made Old Hollywood legendary. I've rounded up 10 of them. In all honesty, they're not really «wild» facts; they're more like random, useless tidbits. 1. When Clark Gable appeared without an undershirt in It Happened One Night (1934), women across the nation stopped buying the garment for their husbands. This caused a depression in undershirts in the United States in the 1930s. In 1957, Gable said, «I didn't know what I was doing to the undershirt people. That was just the way I lived. I hadn't worn an undershirt since I'd started school. They made me feel hemmed in and...