Phil Bradley's weblog

Movie mistakes

Goofs, bloopers, pictures, quotes and trivia from thousands of movies A different sort of search engine I agree but a search engine nonetheless. 101,138 mistakes, 8,270 pictures, 6,563 films and 769 TV shows. Simply type in your favourite film and this will rip it to pieces with the mistakes that were made on it. Continuity people seem to be rubbish! In order to get the most out of the site you need to register, and to really get everything, there's a $10 membership fee, but you don't actually need to pay out anything. Just check to see what films are coming up on the tv over the weekend, read up in advance, and stun your loved ones who never realised that you were so observant!

Movieclips

Movie clips and movie scenes. I'm loving this site. Who wants to watch all the boring bits of the films, just to see the highlights? Movieclips just gives you the best clips, for free and legally, which is the important bit. Search by film, subject, actor, or scroll through a list of categories such as 'most popular', 'iconic lines', genre, mood, character and so on. Then watch the clip, and move on. Three hours later you'll realise that it was a bad idea to take my advice and visit the site.

My only gripe is that the clips start and finish abruptly - they're a little poorly edited. There are lots of movies on there, and I only found a couple that were favourites which weren't on there. Go! Explore! Have fun!

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Lux Radio Theater

OK, quick question. Which Hollywood stars have played Rick Blaine in Casablanca? Yes, there's Bogart, but I mentioned "stars". How about Alan Ladd? No, this isn't some strange alternative universe - Alan Ladd did play him, but in Lux Radio Theater which was a classic radio anthology running from 1934 to 1955 on and off. Originally Broadway shows were adapted, but then they moved onto hour long live radio presentations.

Often the original stars reprised their roles, but sometimes they were unable to do so. When they decided to run Casablanca Bogart was overseas entertaining the troops. Alan Ladd stood in for him. Another interesting thing with the Lux Radio Theater is that the studio system wasn't enforced, so it was possible to get actors working together across studio lines, which was quite revolutionary.

About a hundred of these recordings survive, and you can download them and listen to them, interspersed with the original advertisements for Lux soap. Absolutely fascinating; there are some great ones such as the aforementioned Casablanca, but other favourites of mine include The day the earth stood still, The ghost and Mrs Muir, Mrs Miniver, The Maltese Falcon, After the Thin Man, A farewell to arms and Miracle on 34th Street.

These are fantastic recordings, the adverts, the stars, the original crackles and pops... if you've any interest in Hollywood recordings, you'll love listening to these.

Nanocrowd - The movie search engine

Nanocrowd. This is very clever, and I like it. It's a discovery engine rather than a search engine though. Simply type in a film/actor/director that you like, and Nanocrowd will attempt to find others that you like.

I tried 'Withnail and I'. It then brought up a new screen with 'movies most like' (with generally accurate results) and 'movies least like'.  There's a link to 'Tell me more about this movie' which pulls a summary from Amazon. Trailers and previews come from IMDb, as do external reviews/critics. User reviews are also pulled from Amazon.
There's a 'Movie in a nutshell' tag cloud as well.

Finally there is a 'what are you in the mood to watch' option, which is a 3 word 'nanogenre' - for Withnail there were six options, such as 'funny friendship weird' and 'england subtlety emotional'. Clicking on any of those provides a selected list of other films that match the chosen criteria.

Nice resource, with the additional bonus of creating you own 'Mymovies' option to keep tabs on your favourites. If you're into films, this would be a great one for you!

Movie title stills collection

Movie title stills collection. I seem to be looking at a lot of visual stuff recently, and here's another example. Opening and closing credits from thousands of films from 1900 to now. You get the main title and the end (which almost always contains the words 'The End'). Not sure of the value of this one, though it will be of interest to media studies students perhaps, and also people who have an interest in movie fonts.

Unfortunately the only way of searching the collection is by decade and then scrolling through, which is a shame, having said that, it's a one man band operation, so it would be churlish to be too hard on it.