Watch or download Stanley Kubrick’s 1951 cinematic debut, Day of the Fight, from MutinyCompany.com.  The 16-minute short film is a black-and-white documentary about middle-weight boxer, Walter Cartier, as he prepares for and then faces off against Bobby James.  The film is the first picture directed by Kubrick who would go on to direct Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Full Metal Jacket.  Kubrick died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1999, shortly after screening the final cut of Eyes Wide Shut.

The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) is one of my favorite resource sites.  I keep a link to it in the Reference or Library bookmarks section on every computer I use because I use it so much.  I also use dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopediae (how’s that for pluralization?) often enough, but it’s usually when I can’t think of a celebrity’s name or the name of a movie or TV show that I scramble to the computer and check IMDB.  Forgetting those kinds of things drives me crazy whereas I can usually get on with my day if I’m stumped for a suitable synonymn for a particular word.  When I was a kid, my mother used to keep a large paperback book of movies, actors, brief biographies, and associated information in the bookcase with the other reference books.  It had interesting tidbits like a list of where you could find Alfred Hitchcock (or at least his photo) in each of his films.  The book was a great resource, but it quickly became dated and could only hold so much.  My mother would have marveled at the power of IMDB.

Last night I watched a recent Letterman episode where he interviewed Jonah Hill who is in the new movie, Knocked Up.  He seemed like a nice guy and there wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about the interview, but somehow I was reminded of it while showering for work this morning.  I don’t remember what train of thought had me thinking about EBay and then about the scene in The 40 Year Old Virgin where Catherine Keener (Trish) had the We Sell Your Stuff on EBay store, but something clicked and I had a eureka moment.  “Hey!  I think that kid from Letterman was the one who tried to buy the platform shoes with the goldfish in the bottoms,” I suddenly realized.  “That makes sense, because Seth Rogen, the lead in Knocked Up was also in The 40 Year Old Virgin,” I reasoned.  There was a time when I’d either have to be satisfied with that reasoning and continue to refer to Seth Rogen as “that guy from Freaks and Geeks”, or do a lot of legwork just to prove out an insignificant factoid and their actual names, but with IMDB, I was able to bring it all together with very little effort.  FYI - I also found that Jonah Hill is in the upcoming Evan Almighty starring the lead from The 40 Year Old Virgin, Steve Carell.

Confirming things like that is a great reason to use IMDB, but the best reason is when you have no clue in the first place.  Because of the power of hyperlinking, you can lookup things in IMDB even when you have little information to go on.  For example, sometimes I’ll find myself trying to remember the name of a movie, but I can’t even remember who was in it.  However, if I can remember anything that any of the actors starred in, or anybody who starred with them, no matter how many degrees of separation, I can trace backwards and discover the name of the movie I was seeking.  "Let’s see… it was that 70’s movie about suburban teens who rebel against authority after they close down the teen rec center. I think that actor who’s still around who always played some kind of a punk when he was a kid was in it.  He was in that 80’s beach movie where he’s the cabana boy.  I think his father in that movie was the guy who played the coach in that college football team movie where they had to start from scratch and take walk-on players.  The quarterback was that actor who played the scientist on Quantum Leap.” Knowing nothing but the name of the TV show, Quantum Leap, I could eventually find my way from it to Scott Bakula, to Necessary Roughness, to Hector Elizondo, to The Flamingo Kid, to Matt Dillon, to the 1979 film, Over the Edge.  IMDB can be very helpful.

A lot of people may not realize some of the other features that IMDB has available.  The site has a whole raft of search engines.  For example, if you want to see in which films specific actors have worked together, IMDB has the People Working Together Search.  With it, you can see on what projects have Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman collaborated (two feature films, several awards shows, and a number of documentaries).  IMDB also has a lot of charts available and updated regularly.  They list the top box office grossing movies of all time, the current box office top 10, the rental top 50, the top rated films by genre or decade (e.g. horror), the most searched for movies by genre or decade (e.g. 1970-1979, and even the 100 worst rated films of all time.  Other sections include a listings of award winners for all major movie awards and film festivals and an on this day section for any date that includes births, deaths, marriages, movie shoots, wraps, releases, and grosses.

"You think you know who you are? You have no idea.”
Matt Damon as Officer Ryan in Crash

Filmwad.com has posted a list of the worst films by the best directors. The list doesn’t intend to catalog the worst films ever made, but rather the weakest films made by some of the greatest film directors. Or, at least the purported greatest film directors such as DePalma, Kubrick, Spielberg, and Scorcese, among others. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the list, but I have to credit them for at least taking some educated swipes at some of these vaunted directors. It’s common enough to take swipes at producers like Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay, but directors seldom come under fire.

Interestingly, the list includes Quentin Tarantino and Death Proof, his half of the recent, poorly performing Grind House; however, it doesn’t include his collaborator Robert Rodriguez. Now, to be fair, I haven’t seen Grind House and the reviews I’ve seen all seem to give credit to Rodriguez for his portion, going as far as saying that his Planet Terror half actually increases the letdown by Tarantino’s latter half. But Grind House aside, Rodriguez surely made a few stinkers with his Spy Kids series, particularly the awful Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over. It’s never a good sign when a director decides he needs gimmicks like three dimensional viewing to attract an audience.  This one joins the ranks of fellow third generation, third dimension stinkers such as Jaws 3-D and Friday the 13th: Part III in 3-D.

Another director conspicuously missing is John Woo. Personally, I don’t rank Woo’s work of the same caliber as some of these other directors, but he’s often referred to as a genius and a master of his craft. Although Woo alone can’t be entirely blamed for corrupting the already ludicrous Mission Impossible series with his motorcyle infused vision, he certainly should be called to the mat for some of his other work. It is definitely hard to ignore the far fetched, outrageously acted Face/Off, but even still, I’d have to say that even worse was the entirely implausible Broken Arrow, or as it should have sub-titled Look Out For Those Spinning Helicopter Rotor Blades. It’s interesting that both movies starred John Travolta who manages to overact in both films. However, as bad as Travolta’s hammy, over-the-top portrayals are, they’re nothing compared to the ridiculously convoluted story, poorly fleshed out characters, and the action sequences just for the sake of action sequences. Whenever a helicopter makes its way into the camera’s view, watch out, because it’s going to crash and then Look Out For Those Spinning Helicopter Rotor Blades.

Another excellent director missing from the list is the venerable Clint Eastwood. Eastwood has been directing for 36 years with no end yet in sight. In fact, his work continues to improve with each film. His westerns like High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, and the more recent Unforgiven have all achieved classic status. These all he directed more than ten years before Oscar winners Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby. There’s no debating Eastwood’s status as a premier director. So, it came with much disappointment that Eastwood was also responsible for the simplistic, watered-down Blood Work. Blood Work isn’t horrible as much as it is patently obvious and painfully slow. It particularly suffers from a poor choice in casting.  From the second I recognized Jeff Daniels playing the small role of the poor, shlubby neighbor to Eastwood’s detective character, I had him pegged as the mysterious killer whose face we had not seen. It’s not that Daniels did a poor job, in fact, he seems to be the only one in the film with a heartbeat, but when the killer’s face is kept from view, it’s known that he’d be recognized as another character in the movie. Add to that the fact that Daniels is too good of an actor to have been solicited for such a seemingly minor role and the pieces just fall together. It’s like when you watch an episode of CSI and the murder victim’s pool boy who reported the crime is played by Jack Nicholson - you can be pretty sure that the pool boy is going to play an important role later in the episode.

http://www.filmwad.com/the-worst-movies-by-the-best-directors-2198-p.html