Ultra Swank - Retro Adventures

Film

Marilyn Monroe – Beautiful Misfit
Written by Patricia Greenwood in Film

Marilyn Monroe – Beautiful Misfit

My first encounter with Marilyn Monroe was when I was eight or nine years old and the babysitter had allowed my brothers and I to stay up late to watch The Misfits (1961) on our little Black and White TV. I remember clearly a scene of Marilyn sitting in between two men, an ethereal foil for the beat up looking cowboys played by Clark Gable...

The Most Popular Feature Films Released in 1950

Films from the 1950 made a big impact on pop culture as Disney’s Classic Cinderella and the first Father of the Bride starring Elizabeth Taylor were released. These timeless classics make us believe that movies from that generation were indeed golden and had a magical quality to it. Here are the Most Popular Feature films released in 1950. Cinderella A perennial Disney classic based on...

Video

Ever wonder how early computer animations was created? This video from 1971, complete with spacey synthetic music, demonstrates not only one of the first interactive computer systems for animation, one used for production, it was also an outstanding example of early user-centered design, including one of the first computer mice. The system was developed by Marceli Wein and Nestor Burtnyk, both of whom won Academy...

A Celebration of Polish Cinema & Poster Design in London

Iluzjon is an exhibition that showcases the very best of Polish film and theatre posters from the 1960s and 1970s, collected by Eye Sea Posters. These posters were commissioned by state controlled film and theatre institutions during the communist era in Poland, in order to create alternative imagery to the foreign originals they deemed inappropriate to use as advertising. Often they had little visual reference...

American Graffiti and Mel’s Drive-In Restaurant

Inspired by similar restaurants serving motorists in Los Angeles, Mel Weiss and Harold Dobbs founded Mel’s Drive-In restaurants in 1947 in San Francisco, California. Night and day, hordes of patrons that fancied dining-in-your-car came early and often. It didn’t take long for the first restaurant to multiply into eleven. In 1972, the original Mel’s located at 140 South Van Ness in San Francisco was selected...

50 Years of 007 – The Golden Anniversary of James Bond

Before we get started, I need to point this out to you. Bond, for me, is Dr. No-Die Another Day. Daniel Craig does not exist. We won’t get into the debates here, because I’m trying to focus on the good, not the bad. So I won’t be mentioning how Pee Wee Herman would make a better Bond, or how they ruined one of my favorite...

Mant! – The Movie Within The Movie
Written by James Vaughan in Film

Mant! – The Movie Within The Movie

In 1993, director Joe Dante, made a little known film that has since become a cult classic for lovers of ‘B grade’ 1950’s science fiction. Matinee, starring John Goodman, is a feel good comedy about a Hollywood huckster who premieres his gimmicky new monster movie in the town of Key West Florida while the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is coincidentally occurring. Events are particularly important to...

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