No Man's Land (Bosnian: Ničija Zemlja) is a war drama that is set in the midst of the Bosnian war in 1993. The film is a parable with a tone of ironic black comedy. The film marked the debut of writer and director Danis Tanović. The film is a co-production between companies in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Italy, France, Belgium and the UK.

No Man's Land has been compared to The Good Soldier Švejk, Catch-22, M*A*S*H and Waiting for Godot for containing equal parts of irony and futility.

* Best Foreign Language Film, 2003 74th Annual Academy Awards
* Best Foreign Language Film, 2002 Golden Globe Award
* Best Screenplay, 2001 Cannes Film Festival

No Man's Land won Prix du scénario at the Cannes Film Festival, followed by numerous awards, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2001, while in competition with French Amélie. Tanović was presented the Oscar by John Travolta and Sharon Stone. Briefly after, Tanović thanked everyone who worked with him on the film and supported its creation. He ended his acceptance speech by saying, "This is for my country".

In total, No Man's Land won 42 awards, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, the European Film Academy Award for Best Screenplay, the César Award for Best Debut in 2002 and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002. It is probably the most awarded first feature film in a history of film making.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283509/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Land_%282001_film%29

"An animated film starring Tom Waits.

Performed for us live (at the La Brea stage in Hollywood, 1978), and rotoscoped - a process that traces back the live action frame by frame and turns it into animation.

The original live action was shot with 5 cameras - 2 high, 2 low and one hand held. The music from "The One That Got Away" blared in the background as Tom sang karaoke style different lyrics on each take. Two strippers, 6 takes and 13 hours of video footage were edited to make a 5 1/2 minute live action short which we turned into animation. A total of 5500 live action frames were hand traced, caricatured, re-drawn, hand inked and painted onto celluloid acitate cels.

Produced by Lyon Lamb, directed by John Lamb, the film bore some cool new technology, talent and was created specifically for a video music market that didn't yet exist. But the buzz was out and we went on to create what arguably may be the first music video created for the new and upcoming MTV market.

A series of unfortunate events prohibited the film from ever being released or sold commerciallly, consequently catapulting it into obscurity... until now,thanks You Tube!

In 1979, an Academy Award was presented to Lyon Lamb for the technology used in this short.

To learn more about this amazing lost film, go to ....TomWaitsLibrary.com and Wikipedia"

I love this play and the movie adaptation.

A Streetcar Named Desire is a famous American play written by Tennessee Williams for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948.

The play is considered in modern society as an icon of its era, as it deals with a culture clash between two symbolic characters, Blanche DuBois—a pretentious, fading relic of the Old South—and Stanley Kowalski, a rising member of the industrial, inner-city immigrant class.

In 1951, a movie of the play, directed by Elia Kazan, won several awards, including an Academy Award for Vivien Leigh as Best Actress in the role of Blanche. In 1995, it was made into an opera with music by Andre Previn and presented by the San Francisco Opera.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Streetcar_Named_Desire_%28film%29

Ennio Morricone (born November 10, 1928) is an Italian composer especially noted for his film scores. He has composed the scores of more than 500 films and TV series. Although only 30 of these are for Western films, it is for this work which he is best known.

Morricone's sparse style of composition for the genre is particularly exemplified by the soundtracks of the classic spaghetti westerns The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968). In more recent years, his haunting scores for The Mission (Roland Joffé, 1986), The Untouchables (Brian DePalma, 1987), Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), and Lolita (Adrian Lyne, 1997) have demonstrated his giftedness and the power of his work.

He is also credited as Dan Savio. He will receive the Honorary Academy Award in 2007, only the second film composer to be so honored.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennio_morricone

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9th_Company

he 9th Company (Russian: «9 рота») is a Russian / Finnish film by Fyodor Bondarchuk about the Soviet war in Afghanistan released in 2005. The film follows a band of young recruits from a farewell ceremony with friends and family back home, through their often brutal training in Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley, up to a bloody battle on a mountain top in Afghanistan against the mujahideen.

The film is based on events which took place in early 1988 during the last large-scale Soviet military operation "Magistral". In the movie, only one soldier from the company survives and the company is said to have been "forgotten" by the military command because of the Soviet withdrawal.

During the actual event, the 9th Company, 345th Guards Airborne Regiment was pinned down under heavy fire on "Hill 3234" between 7 and 8 January 1988. They managed to stop several attacks by an estimated 200-400 mujahideen and Pakistani mercenaries. The company lost 6 men. Another 28 out of the total 39 were wounded. Two of the killed soldiers were posthomously awarded the golden star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. The unit was in constant communication with headquarters and got everything the regimental commander, Colonel Valery Vostrotin, and 40th Army Commander, General Boris Gromov, had to offer in terms of artillery support.

The film received a mixed reaction from the veterans of that war, who pointed to a number of inaccuracies, but nevertheless, judging by ticket sales, was embraced by the general public, and even by Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was also given the Golden Eagle Award for the Best Feature Film by the Russian Academy of Cinema Arts.

It was directed by Fyodor Bondarchuk, the son of classic Soviet film director Sergei Bondarchuk, whose 1959 Destiny of a Man was a landmark in film treatments of World War II and who also shot an Oscar-winning epic, based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace.

Although not the first movie to be made about the Soviet Army's experience in Afghanistan (others included the 1991 classic Afghan Breakdown by Vladimir Bortko), 9th Company was the first attempt by Russian filmmakers to create a big-screen, big-budget movie about that war, comparable to the American Vietnam War movies of the 1980s (Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Born on the Fourth of July). The film, made for $9 million with help from the United Kingdom's Shepperton Studios, was released in September, 2005 and became a Russian box office hit, generating $7.7 million in its first five days of release alone, a new domestic record.

In 2006, Russia selected the movie as its candidate for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film nomination.

"Oliver! received extremely favorable reviews and won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Picture."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver%21_%28film%29

"Jack Wild (30 September 1952–2 March 2006) was an English actor who achieved fame for his roles in both stage and screen productions of the Lionel Bart musical Oliver!."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Wild

"Oliver! received extremely favorable reviews and won the 1968 Academy Award for Best Picture."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver%21_%28film%29

"Jack Wild (30 September 1952–2 March 2006) was an English actor who achieved fame for his roles in both stage and screen productions of the Lionel Bart musical Oliver!."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Wild

From the bloke in the clip...

' In this version, I recite the books of the Bible (Old and New Testaments) the Book of Mormon, the 50 US States, the alphabet backwards, the United States Presidents and the Academy Award Best Picture winners'

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an Academy Award-winning 2004 romance film by Michel Gondry that uses a science fiction element to explore the nature of memory and love. The film has developed a cult following and was one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2004.

The film stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet and features David Cross, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson and Elijah Wood.

It opened in North America on March 19, 2004. The film has consistent high rankings in the IMDB's Top 250.

The movie's title is taken from a few lines from the much longer poem Eloisa to Abelard by Alexander Pope:

How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot;
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.

...check his skills in "My Blue Heaven", Steve Martin's Academy Award..Song: "Let's Misbehave", Irving Aaronson and his Commanders....

Scent of a Woman is a 1992 film which tells the story of a preparatory school student who takes a job as an assistant to an irascible blind, medically retired Army officer. It stars Al Pacino, Chris O'Donnell, James Rebhorn, Gabrielle Anwar, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. It won the Academy Award for Best Actor (Al Pacino) and was nominated for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

This should be watched by everyone growing up. Some trivia for you

* Al Pacino was helped by a school for the blind in preparation for his role. He says he made himself look blind by not focusing his view on anything, and that using prosthetic contact lenses would "fake" his performance.

* During the disciplinary meeting, the headmaster tells Slade "You are out of order!", a line told to another of Pacino's characters in ...And Justice for All (1979).

* Director Martin Brest disowned the version of the film shown on airlines and television.

* In order to get Charlie out of the hotel room Slade asks him to buy some aspirins and a Montecristo no. 1 cigar, a Cuban product banned in the US due to the Cuban embargo. As this task is impossible it would keep Charlie away for a long time.

* Pacino prepared for the famous "tango" scene in the movie by taking intensive Argentine tango lessons at DanceSport, a Manhattan dance studio located near Columbus Circle.

* Slade notices the girl he will tango with a few minutes later by her smell. When Slade and Charlie talk to her, she tells her name was Donna - which is the Italian word for "woman". The approach scene therefore is a homage to the title of the original 1974 movie Profumo Di Donna.

Brilliant documentary that got an Academy Award nomination in 2001. I'm hoping the guy who just posted this first part will follow with the rest of the film.

Link to James Nachtwey on Wiki...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nachtwey

A common misconception made about HR Giger that he was involved with all the movies, but in actuality he was only involved with the Ridley Scott's Alien. With it in 1980, he received the Academy Award for "Best Achievement for Visual Effects" for his designs of the film's title creature and its otherworldly environment..

The James Cameron movie was more Cameron then anything else, Aliens 3 didn't even mention Mr Giger... I believe he ended up suing.

....must agree with Theo, Rap has reached so many new lows, a serious revamp is in order....but, the cultural and social barometer that art and music is, it will no doubt continue on a retrograde course-cause you need some edumocation to espresss yoseaf! Why do rappers continue to produce vapid shit bout bitches an' ho's? Why did the award for best song in a motion picture at the 05(?)' Academy Awards go to "Hard out here for a Pimp?"
Same reason television for the most part sucks, and urban anglos adopt the clothing and dialect of gang-bangers....its the end of the goddamnn world...or, shiva help us all, a new beginning!!??

Beautiful.

Wasn't this up for an academy award?