According to an LA Times report citing an insider in the know, Lionsgate is looking at a few notable names to take the helm of the Hunger Games franchise for the series sequel Catching Fire . Among the “seven or eight names” — all men, it’s noted — are David Cronenberg , Alfonso Cuaron , and Alejandro González Iñárritu . Supposing this shortlist is accurate, and knowing that the studio wants to get a move on with a director capable of wrangling the sequel into shape for an August start date, which of these three alleged candidates would you rather see bring Katniss Everdeen’s next adventure to life? From The LA Times: According to a source with knowledge of the list who isn’t permitted to speak on the record, Lionsgate needs to find a director with enough credits and accolades to appeal to Collins, who is much more interested in quality filmmaking than box-office prowess. This director also needs to have an even keel; no petulant crybabies allowed… task will require someone who can wrangle a large ensemble of actors, juggle the demands of a swift schedule and collaborate on a script with Collins and writer Simon Beaufoy. “No petulant crybabies allowed.” Interesting. Well, Cuaron’s got Harry Potter cred under his belt. Iñárritu would certainly drive home the abject desperation of the world of Panem. And maybe working with Twilight ‘s Robert Pattinson has brought Cronenberg one step closer to the YA universe. But I’m more curious about the other four or five names on this list… who else matches the profile for non-crybaby, good with kids, franchise-able serious-movie directing? [ LA Times ]
It’s spring rummage week at the movies, with four releases – Lockout , The Three Stooges , Cabin in the Woods and Craig Moss’s vigilante goof Bad Ass – retooling old gems and selling off genres for parts. Maybe next year we can look forward to a film made up solely of references to this quartet – The Three Bad Asses Escape Lockout in the Woods ? Wait, don’t Google that. I don’t want to know. Spoofing all the ways that it’s all been done before has itself become a pretty predictable gig. A genre, even. But every once in a while a movie like 21 Jump Street manages to stay two steps ahead of our endlessly attenuated expectations, making clued-in silliness look like a (funny) walk in the park. Bad Ass has a bit of that gonzo energy – a fair bit, actually. In the first few minutes a montage sequence challenges the record for film clichés-per-second to tell the back-story of Frank Vega, a Santa Rosa farmboy who grew up to fall in love in a pasture and then fight in Vietnam, where the memory of his girl back home sustained him through unimaginable torture. Once returned, Frank (played as a young man by Shalim Ortiz) finds his true love married with kids, and his hope of becoming a police officer is snuffed out by a bum leg. He begins selling hot dogs in the street, a career that carries him all the way to the moment where he turns into Danny Trejo. A considerable part of the point of any Danny Trejo performance involves the question of what a person has to do to get a face like that. It’s what made him a favorite of genre geeks like Robert Rodriguez: The face is its own movie with its own set of references. Here he is the gentle ogre, a scary-looking softie in combat shorts and a camo jacket who just wants to get through the day and nurse his disappointments with a bottle of El Matador at night. The problem is he lives in the vicious Los Angeles of Falling Down, where there’s always some racially charged a-hole trying to bring you down. The morning of one particular bus ride, it’s a couple of skinheads harassing an older man in a Black Panthers beret. When Frank intervenes with a few definitive blows – the geriatric set has all the hand-to-hand skills in Bad Ass – a cell phone video taken by a member of the generation that doesn’t do much else with their hands makes him a YouTube star. But Internet celebrity doesn’t pay the bills, nor does it protect your best friend from his enemies. Shortly after his Vietnam buddy Klondike (Harrison Page) joins Frank in his recently deceased mother’s home, he is gunned down by a couple of gangsters. Frank’s abiding faith in the police (a little strange, given the routing the system gave him) is shaken when they fail to follow up on the murder, and he takes matters into his own iron-cast hands. Frank doesn’t want to fight, but the world keeps demanding (and then rewarding) his beat-downs, whether they involve the cholos shaking down the local liquor store, the barflies spoiling for a piece of the tough guy, or his jerk-ass neighbor, who beats on his pretty wife (Joyful Drake) and yells at his sitcom-ready son (John Duffy). “Violence just seems to follow me,” he protests when one of his cop buddies tells him to cool it with the public beatings. It’s one of many lines in a script (also written by Moss) that plays like the entire Charles Bronson oeuvre was fed through a shredder, tossed into the air, and glued into a new configuration wherever it landed. The effect, a kind of hard-boiled camp, makes the first two-thirds of Bad Ass lots of fun. Moss, the Weird Al of genre goofs, has a surprisingly light touch (especially given that his last film was a Twilight take-off called Breaking Wind , also starring Trejo). Very often the line between spoofing and playing it straight is too subtle to make out. When Frank tackles an old lady to shield her from drive-by fire and she makes a corny joke about being manhandled, Moss uses a sound bridge of sitcom canned laughter to carry us into the next scene of Frank alone in front of the television that night. When a cop warns Frank, “They say you’ve been leaving a bloody trail all across the city,” Frank shrugs: “Doesn’t sound familiar to me.” It’s the casual tone that makes all the difference, but it can’t quite carry the movie. When the mystery behind Klondike’s execution begs resolving and Frank begins romancing his battered neighbor, the plot’s worminess proves a distraction from Bad Ass ’s more mindless charms. It’s a funny catch for this kind of thing – to really let it fly the movie needs the safety of a narrative’s inner logic. The Internet celebrity factor adds novelty but not much else, and by the time Frank is hunting down the gang boss behind a vague political conspiracy (involving Ron Perlman and Charles S. Dutton) an anomalous chyron introduces a key location because the storytelling isn’t strong enough to get us there on its own. This feels disappointing mainly because, to do some borrowing of my own, in the world of classic send-ups, Bad Ass coulda been a contender. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Looper ! The full trailer for writer-director Rian Johnson’s latest is here, planting Joseph Gordon-Levitt in time-travel assassin mode — at least until his older self (Bruce Willis) is one day sent back to the past to become his own next victim. What’s a smirky, brash young hit man to do? Don’t let him escape, that’s for… Oh, wait. There he goes. The rest is what it is, blending Johnson’s sleekness and class with pure sci-fi/action pulp. Works for me, even if the other genre angle generally doesn’t. Take Jeff Daniels’s word for it: “This time-travel crap just fries your brain.” Thoughts? [via ENTV ]
The sci-fi action flick Lockout , directed by first-timers James Mather and Stephen St. Leger from a script they wrote with Luc Besson, features a scene in which characters somehow skydive out of orbit through the stratosphere to land, neatly and not even a little on fire, on an urban road. It isn’t a sequence of events I’d ever have dreamed I needed to see on-screen, but boy, was I glad to. Gleefully preposterous, Lockout is packed with moments like that — its very setup, involving a maximum-security prison in space that the inmates take over, is a metaphorical out-of-orbit parachute jump. Anchored by a smirky Guy Pearce channeling John McClane via Snake Plissken, Lockout is derivative and ridiculous and a good time, provided you can turn off higher brain functions along with any other part of you that might want to lodge a complaint about liberal borrowing from better movies. Pearce’s is always a welcome face to see on-screen, but in Lockout he gets the rare opportunity to be funny. And he is, in the style of a deadpan, wisecracking ’80s action hero — his character, Snow, is an agent who’s falsely accused of murder along with something about the selling of state secrets. He’s scheduled to spend a few decades in stasis on the experimental space jail MS One, the costs of which are being defrayed by a long-distance interstellar exploration company test-driving its cryosleep technology on a population no one’s concerned about, even if it sometimes causes brain damage. Before Snow can be put under and ferried out to the big penitentiary in the sky, MS One crumbles with surprising ease after psychotic prisoner Hydell (Joseph Gilgun, hamming it up with a heavy Scottish accent that’s almost incomprehensible) gets hold of a weapon. The other inmates are woken up and hostages are taken, one of them Emilie Warnock (Maggie Grace), the president’s daughter, who was there on a humanitarian mission. Who can possibly rescue her? Who? “We can send in one man,” suggests a higher-up named Shaw (Lennie James), a laugh line though not a joke. (A little later in the film, a declaration that “He’s my brother!” gets the same effect.) Lockout has no pretensions about being anything other than over-the-top hokum, but to its credit, it’s neither winking nor smarmily self-aware — it’s a straight-faced B-movie. And once all its players are in orbit, it becomes a brisk pursuit through the hallways and tunnels of MS One, as Snow sets out to save the target he’s been assigned while also trying to track down his old partner Mace (Tim Plester) by getting the location in which he stashed a briefcase, the contents of which could clear his name. Pearce is fun to watch, his character drawling out one-liners while demonstrating a cartoon-worthy near-indestructibility, a combo laid out in a nicely staged opening sequence in which he’s being roughly interrogated and each punch he takes knocks his face out of the frame, only to return a little more bruised, bloodied and snarky. Grace can’t keep up, though it’s hard to say whether the problem belongs to her or her dialogue — Emilie’s regulation flirty/angry banter with Snow upon meeting him involves her responding to every work out of his mouth with “You’re a selfish dick!” or “asshole” or “obnoxious.” (The film’s approach to putting the rescued princess in her place has a needlessly mean edge — at one point, Snow sucker punches her in the face as part of a disguise to make her look tough.) Peter Stormare summons up some restrained weirdness as Langral, the government guy who doesn’t trust Snow, and Vincent Regan is Alex, the self-appointed boss of the hijacked MS One. Besson, who also served as Lockout ‘s executive producer, leaves a few recognizable fingerprints on the film: Shot in Belgrade, it has his rootless, international feel, and when Emilie gets her hair cropped and dyed black as a disguise, she instantly transforms into one of his signature steely waifs. But the overwhelming inspiration is John Carpenter’s Escape From New York — sometimes Lockout seems to be paying tribute to it, other times just ripping it off. The world of Lockout is a similarly dystopian future in which the White House is now an armored bunker and crime has gotten bad enough to necessitate a 500,000-capacity multinational space jail, and the film shares an underlying disillusionment with social structures, with Emilie, in this case, getting taunted for acting high-minded in the face of the obvious special care she’s being given because of who her father is. But Lockout doesn’t actually have anything more ambitious on its mind than being entertainment, and while Mather and St. Leger are sometimes overly hurried (an early set piece involving a chase through a hotel, onto a road and down to the subway might be impressive if it weren’t so visually garbled), they manage just fine once the film makes it to MS-One. Lockout ‘s a weightless bit of galactic debris that fills an hour and a half just fine — you may not believe a man can parachute out of space, but wouldn’t you like to see him try? Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
” By 2013 , film will slip to niche status, shown in only a third of theaters. By 2015, used in a paltry 17 percent of global cinemas, venerable old 35 mm film will be mostly gone.” The epic life and death struggle between film and digital rolls on, and in LA Weekly’s cover story must-read Gendy Alimurung details the sobering — and imminent — sea change in film production and exhibition with insights from figures at every stop on the cinematic food chain: Filmmakers, arthouse/rep theaters, film curators, projectionists, preservationists, and even the cold, lonely (and increasingly studio-blocked) vaults that house the dwindling ranks of cinema’s remaining 35mm prints. “Digital is the future!” you might say. “It’s cheaper and looks just as good as film!” Great taste, less filling, etc. Many a sentimental plea has been made on behalf of 35mm: The way things are going, repertory houses will find their programming options limited to the smattering of popular titles studio vaults make available. There’s that distinguishable living quality to film, with its pops and hisses and beloved imperfections, that digital prints just can’t replicate. Or, as Edgar Wright suggests, shooting on costlier film changes the relationship a director has to the process itself: “Because when you hear the camera whirring, you know that money is going through it. There’s a respectfulness that comes when you’re burning up film.” Most of that’s already been argued, but Alimurung takes pains to appeal to the pragmatic side of digital cheerleaders by pointing out what many proponents of digital film and its many admitted benefits (lower cost, ease of production, cheaper distribution methods) seldom have an answer for: the long-term hazards of going exclusively digital. “The main problem is format obsolescence. File formats can go obsolete in a matter of months. On this subject, [UCLA Film & Television Archive director Jan-Christopher Horak’s] every sentence requires an exclamation mark. “In the last 10 years of digitality, we’ve gone through 20 formats!” he says. “Every 18 months we’re getting a new format!” So every two years, data must be transferred, or “migrated,” to a new device. If that doesn’t happen, the data may never being accessible again. Technology can advance too far ahead.” But the demands and costs of constant technological upgrades aren’t the only issue with the industry moving exclusively to digital. “In the digital realm, the archivist’s mantra, “Store and ignore,” fails. If you don’t “refresh,” or occasionally turn on a hard drive, it stops working. You can’t just stick it on a shelf and forget about it. As restorationist Ross Lipman says, ‘You’re shifting from a model focused on a physical object to data. And where the data lives will be constantly changing.'” What’s saddest is that there isn’t an easy solution to be offered other than appealing to the studios (and, it’s worth noting, the vast majority of allied theater chains represented by the National Association of Theater Owners) to leave room for niche 35mm film culture to live on while their charge into the digital future continues. Major changes are in store for everyone — not just the studios, or the theater owners, or the increasingly obsolete ranks of actual trained projectionists, or the ticket-buyers. So yes, a storm’s coming. What can be done about it? Discuss. [ LA Weekly ] Photo: Julia Marchese of the New Beverly Cinema, Jennie Warren for LA Weekly
You may have heard the news that Sony plans a big-screen adaptation of Sabrina the Teenage Witch , the animated series that yielded the Melissa Joan Hart cult TV favorite from the ’90s. This time, though? She’s a superhero . “The live action film will be an origin story in the vein of Spider-Man , about a young girl coming to terms with her remarkable powers,” writes Mike Fleming at Deadline. Of course. I guess it’ll work, but I can think of at least 20 TV characters off the top of my head whom I’d sooner see grappling with hero issues: 20 . Omar Little 19 . Erica Kane 18 . Special Agent Dale Cooper 17 . The Fonz 16 . George Costanza 15 . Diane Chambers 14 . Brandon Walsh 13 . Columbo 12 . J.R. Ewing 11 . Kenny Powers ( obviously ) 10 . Butters 9 . Laura Ingalls Wilder 8 . Rudy Huxtable 7 . George Jefferson 6 . Sam the Butcher 5 . Lou Grant 4 . & 3 . Sanford & Son 2 . Carmela Soprano 1 . Squiggy Who else? [ Deadline ]
When I was in college, I once went on a weekend trip with my two roommates to Cape Cod, where someone had scrounged up a summer home belonging to a family friend who was willing to let us stay for a few days. The owners were in the middle of renovating the place, so instead of windows there were just sheets of plastic that bulged in and out with the wind. Half the rooms didn’t have electricity, and we had to go to the tap outside to get water — but hey, someone was letting us stay in their house in a scenic location far from our shabby apartment near campus, and for free. No one was complaining. Except that it got dark, and the fact that we were out in the woods down a narrow driveway removed from the road with nothing sheltering us from the outside but transparent tarps (just the thing for wrapping up dead bodies) started to seem a little spooky. We were three young women huddling around one of the few working lamps in a house in the middle of nowhere, and I started to reflect on the fact that if we were in a movie, we’d for sure get murdered in a few minutes by someone with chainsaws for hands or something. And then the friend who’d set this up, a sporty, outgoing environmentalist who’d definitely outlive me in any theoretical slasher flick, mentioned offhand (she wasn’t joking ) that the owners of the house had mentioned that if we saw a guy in the woods outside in the middle of the night, it was probably their friend Bill, who was helping with the remodeling and sometimes stayed in their shed. What’s my point? My point is that you don’t want me telling you about the premise for The Cabin in the Woods , so instead I’m inflicting on you this personal story of a cabin in some woods (spoilers: we then drove into town and ate seafood). It’s true that the film, which was written by geek demigod Joss Whedon with Drew Goddard (the latter of whom served as director) is much more fun to watch if you don’t know anything about the plot going in. But I’m concerned that all this trumpeting about how sensitive the movie is to being disrupted by oversharing will set up expectations for something filled with reversals and silly twists, when in fact your enjoyment will be derived from an appreciation for how clever its concept is. Goddard and Whedon have devised a meta-movie about horror tropes that comments on its genre without foregoing a plot or characters of its own — it’s funny and scary enough to please the deeply fannish, while being sufficiently quick and smart to entertain those less inclined to dork out on the many horror in-jokes in store. Suffice it to say, the film introduces two groups of characters. The first, made up of Bradley Whitford, Richard Jenkins, Amy Acker, Brian White and others, work in a compound somewhere seemingly official, though not so official that they don’t sexually harass each other for fun, bitch about their spouses and run office pools. The point of the film is how they fit together with the second group, which consists of five college students headed out for a weekend away at, yes, a cabin in the woods. There’s good girl Dana (Kristen Connolly), her friend Jules (Anna Hutchison) and Jules’s football-player boyfriend Kurt (Chris Hemsworth), Kurt’s studious teammate Holden (Jesse Williams) and their stoner friend Marty (Fran Kranz, who steal the show). The five fit these types from afar, but don’t up close. Kurt and Jules aren’t just a jock and his blonde bimbo girlfriend — when he teases her about bringing textbooks along, they fall into a pitch-perfect reenactment of the old “I learned it by watching you!” anti-drug PSA. Dana’s getting over a complicated break-up, Holden’s kind and perceptive, and Marty sees a lot more than you’d expect through his haze of pot smoke. The relationship of our expectations of characters and plot developments to the genre and why we keep coming back for more even when we think we know what’s going to happen is examined throughout the movie, which plays off all the old slasher standards while being about something very different. Making a film that depends on an audience’s recognition of other films is a tricky thing — not just because it presumes existing knowledge, but also because meta-humor often just stops at making a reference instead of actually going on to do something with it. When you look at Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s _____ Movie series of (for the most part) awful spoofs, most don’t get further than a “Remember this? How about this? You saw this one, right?” Cabin in the Woods touches on everything from characters who have sex being doomed to J-horror to classic monsters, but it is also questions, for the most part not in a scolding way (the slight but discernible touch of that is the film’s only real downside), the reasons why we like watching these scenarios unfold so much that we’ve worn the ideas out like an overused record. Cabin in the Woods does what Scream only halfway managed, which was to find something new by looking back at the familiar — and at least in Whedon’s world, the geeky ones are never first on the chopping block. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The Avengers premiered last night in Los Angeles, where luminaries, cognoscenti and unalloyed geeks took in the Marvel megaspectacle as one, big nerdy family. Afterward, with tweets permitted by Disney reps (and full reviews embargoed until the first week of May), many of those viewers took to Twitter to exhort director Joss Whedon, the nonstop action, the humor, the Hulk, and basically anything that wasn’t the ” worthless ” 3-D. Read on for a brief round-up. [ UPDATE 2:10 p.m. PDT : And starting now you can follow Jen Yamato’s Avengers press conference livetweet over at @Movieline !] Movieline’s own Jen Yamato was there, and it was Renneriffic: Avengers was big, messy, fun. More importantly there’s now nothing but Hawkeye fanfic swimming around in my head. #mmmrenner — jen yamato (@jenyamato) April 12, 2012 And what of the others, fans and press alike? ‘The Avengers’ is a big tub of popcorn heaven. A huge grin on my face throughout and much applause from the crowd too. Well done Mr. Whedon. — edgarwright (@edgarwright) April 12, 2012 So that was AMAZING. Like, double plus awesome. Thank you Joss Whedon for giving us all the #Avengers movie we deserve. #OnlyYou — Seth Green (@SethGreen) April 12, 2012 The Hulk we have been waiting for has at last arrived. #AvengersFuckYeah — Damon Lindelof (@DamonLindelof) April 12, 2012 The Avengers is pretty epic. There is probably more action in this film’s climax than all the other Marvel movie combines! — Peter Sciretta (@slashfilm) April 12, 2012 Just saw #Avengers !Holy crap!!! #HULKSMASH !!!! — JennaBusch (@JennaBusch) April 12, 2012 The Avengers – Epic. EPIC! Everyone fights everyone, but it does deliver. Marvel’s movies get better every single one. Hulk! HULK!! — Alex Billington (@firstshowing) April 12, 2012 That’ll do, Joss, that’ll do. — Devin Faraci (@devincf) April 12, 2012 …and so on and so forth. Expect the fanboy equivalent of David Denby to snap the review embargo sometime in the days ahead, no doubt. Movieline’s full review will run closer to The Avengers ‘ May 4 release date. Stay tuned! Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Police close their investigation into the singer’s death after concluding it was accidental. By Gil Kaufman Whitney Houston Photo: 20th Century Fox/Getty Images Police investigators have concluded their probe into the death of Whitney Houston and concluded that she died of accidental drowning. According to CNN , the probe by the Beverly Hills Police Department was officially closed after investigator found “no evidence of foul play.” In a statement from the department, police said, “Based on the findings of our investigation and our review of the coroner’s report, we have determined that this is not a criminal matter.” The Los Angeles County coroner released its autopsy report last week in which it determined that Houston’s February 11 death was an accidental drowning with the “effects of atherosclerotic heart disease and cocaine use” as contributing factors. The conclusion of the police investigation was followed by the release of the 911 emergency call about the incident, in which a hotel security officer told the 911 operator that the woman who called for help from Houston’s room was “irate and pretty much out of it.” The security officer did not identify Houston as in the call. “I need paramedics, apparently I’ve got a 46-year-old female, found in the bathroom,” he told the 911 operator. “That’s all I’ve got right now, but they’re requesting paramedics.” The autopsy report said that Houston’s assistant found the singer, who is actually 48 years old, face down in a bathtub of “extremely hot water.” “I’m not sure if she fell, or if she was in the bathroom with the water,” the security officer said in the call, adding, “apparently she wasn’t breathing.” When asked if the guard could get the 911 operator into the room to give CPR instructions, the security officer said “no, because she [the woman who called from Houston’s room] kept hanging up on us.” The coroner’s report did not detail exactly what happened to cause Houston’s death, but addiction medicine specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky told CNN he had a theory. Pinsky examined the autopsy report and suggested that Houston might have suffered a seizure brought on by the use of cocaine, possibly combined with a withdrawal from alcohol and a prescription sedative. Police did find an empty bottle of the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in Houston’s room, as well as empty beer bottles, but alcohol was not detected in her body and the level of the sedative in her blood was low. “To me, a sudden drop-off in the Xanax level, a drop-off in your alcohol consumption, add cocaine, that’s a recipe for a seizure,” Pinsky said. “Somebody who’s now upside down in a bathtub could easily seize and drown.” Related Videos Whitney Houston: Life And Music Of An Icon Related Photos Whitney Houston: A Life In Photos Related Artists Whitney Houston
James Cameron ’s Titanic is a stunningly realistic portrayal of a sinking ship , but apparently it just got more real for at least a handful of people. According to some tweets that are making the rounds, some younger Americans had no idea until now that the “unsinkable” cruise liner existed and did in fact hit an iceberg and sink in the Atlantic 100 years ago. What? They didn’t watch Downton Abbey and put two and two together either? (Note: Just like the deceased would-be heirs of Downton, Jack and Rose are fictional. Though something tells us many of the Titanic’s passengers probably had acting abilities comparable to Billy Zane’s.) Instead of ridiculing these youths for being ignorant of a fairly remarkable historic event and complaining about Idiocracy becoming more factual each day, let’s turn this into a teaching moment. Here are nine other films that depict a very real thing that happened in human history: Pearl Harbor In case the reference didn’t register at the time, there was a real Day of Infamy behind those insipid comments on Twitter a year ago about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami being payback for Pearl Harbor. Those jerks weren’t talking about the Ben Affleck movie, but a real military strike that happened. The movie that tells the sobering story of the naval base attack in 1941, in which 2,402 Americans were killed, was directed by Michael Bay (which seems like a joke but is true). Apollo 13 The three-man crew on the Apollo 13 mission really did spend four bleak days in their spacecraft after an oxygen tank exploded on the service module. What had been planned as the third manned moon landing instead became a harrowing effort to make it back to Earth safely. The drama captivated the nation on television in 1970, a time before the Internet. The Perfect Storm Before George Clooney and his perfectly disheveled beard hairs set sail in 2000, the dangerous storm that swept away the Andrea Gail fishing vessel really occurred, serving as the basis for the ill-fated film of the same name. Some of the facts in the movie have been disputed, but the 1991 nor’easter/hurricane did in fact collide in what many referred to as “the perfect storm.” The Killing Fields The mass killings by the Khmer Rouge in the mid- to late 1970s might be difficult for even Cambodian youths to fathom, but the story of journalists Dith Pran and Sydney Schanberg was very real. The two were covering the fall of the capital to the regime, and at the time, many journalists managed to flee. Pran was stranded but ended up escaping the death camps. He coined the phrase “killing fields,” the mass grave sites of which there are a mind-boggling 20,000. Alive A chartered flight really did crash in the Andes in 1972, and survivors stayed alive by eating the flesh of dead passengers. Sixteen of them were rescued two months later when Uruguayans Nando Parrado (played in the film by Ethan Hawke) and Roberto Canessa climbed through the mountains for 10 days to seek help. All the President’s Men Wondering where the “-gate” suffix originated? Decades before Weinergate, a little scandal called Watergate happened, and journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were there to reveal the truth behind the wrongdoing and President Nixon’s involvement in it. The film is an adaptation of the reporters’ book, which was based on their investigative reporting in an era before “truthiness.” Silkwood Another pop culture reference is about to make sense to many: A “Silkwood shower” isn’t just something germophobes want to take after they get off the subway. It’s a term derived from a scene in which plutonium plant worker Karen Silkwood (Meryl Streep) is, horrifically, contaminated with radiation. Silkwood really did die mysteriously as she planned to reveal wrongdoing at the plant in the mid-’70s. GoodFellas Based on the book Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi, GoodFellas recounts the dirty deeds of Henry Hill and Co. Hill, who became an FBI informant, was a member of the Lucchese crime family and was involved in the also-real Lufthansa heist, among other crimes. Hill’s still out there somewhere, being forced to eat “egg noodles and ketchup” instead of spaghetti with marinara. United 93 After terrorists hijacked United Flight 93 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, passengers and crew learned of the strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those aboard refused to let the plane hit its intended target, likely a government building in Washington, D.C., and planned to storm the cockpit. Some liberties were taken regarding whether they successfully entered the cockpit, but unless you believe conspiracy theorists, the plane did crash in a field in Pennsylvania.
