FerdyonFilms

A New Beginning “Marilyn, in all the time that I’ve been reading and participating in the film blogosphere, this is the most valuable cause I’ve seen them take up. A display of solidarity that is extremely touching. I'm grateful to have been a part of it.” The above quote is from Ryan Kelly, who offered a post to the blogathon on his estimable blog Medfly Quarantine . As I thought about what I wanted to say to wrap this amazing week up, it seemed that Ryan said it best. It’s true that... Read Full Story

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon DONATE TODAY! A Fool There Was (1915) Director : Frank Powell By Marilyn Ferdinand There are a lot of legendary eyes in the history of film: the impossibly beautiful lines of Greta Garbo’s, the bedroom eyes that won Rudolph Valentino millions of adoring fans, the fathomless blue of Paul Newman’s, and Elizabeth Taylor’s musgravite eyes. Chicago has only one set of famous movie eyes: the kohl-rimmed orbs of Theda Bara, the... Read Full Story

For the Love of Film, Join the Party! That’s my gal Colleen Moore in the film that made her one of the icons of the flapper era, Flaming Youth . Moore tried all her life to find copies of the films that she worked on, but so many had vanished into time, including all but one reel of Flaming Youth . It’s possible that the complete film did not physically survive, but it’s also possible that it is squirreled away with a private collector or part of an archive that hasn’t got the time or... Read Full Story

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon DONATE TODAY! Rescuing Cry Danger : The Story of One Film’s Restoration By Eddie Muller The Film Noir Foundation re-premiered its latest preservation project on January 23, 2010 at the NOIR CITY film festival in San Francisco . The unjustly rare 1951 noir Cry Danger , starring Dick Powell and Rhonda Fleming, has been completely restored in 35-millimeter through the joint efforts of the Film Noir Foundation (FNF) and the UCLA Film... Read Full Story

For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon Is Almost Here By Marilyn Ferdinand Well, after all the phone calls, e-mails, planning, and pre-event publicity, For the Love of Film is only two days away. Farran, the folks at the National Film Preservation Foundation , and I have been excited and amazed by the widespread support this event has generated. If you don’t know much about film preservation, this blogathon will fill that gap in your cinematic knowledge pronto! We’ve got... Read Full Story

Ink (2009) Director/Screenwriter : Jamin Winans By Marilyn Ferdinand The technical wizardry and straightforward, heroic storytelling of James Cameron has again captured the world, as the science-fiction actioner Avatar is thrilling audiences and earning back its stratospheric cost in spades. But there’s another 2009 action-fantasy movie pitting good against evil that manages to razzle-dazzle on a modest $250,000. Jamin Winans is younger and less experienced than Cameron, and the... Read Full Story

King & Country (1964) Director : Joseph Losey By Roderick Heath In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a major tonal shift manifested in cinematic approaches to tales of conflict and warfare. This is especially discernable in those films made in Britain, where the film industry had been sustained through much of the ’50s by high-flying entertainments celebrating the victories of World War II in fairly unequivocal terms. Even the likes of Charles Frend’s severe The Cruel Sea (1953) and Guy... Read Full Story

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon, 2007) Director : Julian Schnabel By Marilyn Ferdinand Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of French Elle , became something of an instant legend when from inside the stroke-paralyzed, speech-robbed shell of his body, he produced a book of haunting, poetic beauty called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly . Originally intending to reimagine Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo with a woman as the main protagonist, he described instead... Read Full Story

Something's Wrong Ferdy on Films has been hacked! Or something. Anyway, there are odd links throughout the site that encourage you to visit some Russian honeys. This is perhaps the natural extension of posting a positive review of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman , which is a favorite on a Russian discussion board. Anyway, we're trying to fix the problem, so please bear with us. The Management Read Full Story

Plague of the Zombies (1966)/The Reptile (1966) Director : John Gilling By Roderick Heath In gratitude to Marilyn and her hubby Shane for a terrific birthday present, Marcus Hearn’s Hammer Glamour , a gorgeous paean to the heyday of gothic cheesecake, I’m finally getting around to writing up several excellent works to come out of the great British house of horror, starting with two of the most sober, solid, and intelligent of their 1960s output, The Reptile and Plague of the Zombies... Read Full Story