-
TPB 2024 Alternative Movie Awards
Spoiler Warnings! Best Movie-Related Gift The viral popcorn bucket from Dune 2 What else could it have been but this infamous movie snack receptacle? Not just the best and funniest film-related gift of the year, this is an all-time great movie memorabilia item, inspiring endless online jokes and even an SNL music video. Honorable mentions:…
-
Ranked Choice Voting at the Oscars, Explained
It’s that time of year again! The 96th Academy Awards is taking place next week and to help you win your office pool or impress your friends with your accurate predictions, here’s a helpful and succinct visual explainer on ranked choice voting. This is the system used increasingly commonly in political elections, but within the…
-
TPB 2022 Alternative Movie Awards
Today is the big day, with the Academy Awards as the culmination of awards season recognizing 2022 movies. Of course, we all know that the Oscars don’t really recognize the best films of the year (which should be self-evident when RRR isn’t even nominated for Best Picture), so we’ve put together our very own list…
-
Anna May Wong and the Great Yellow-faced “What If”
It was recently announced that Anna May Wong, Hollywood’s “first Asian American movie star”, would be the first Asian American to appear on U.S. currency, as part of the U.S. Mint’s American Women Quarters program. Wong started appearing in films over a hundred years ago, and worked primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, most famously…
-
An Essential Guide to Letterboxd
For the last ten years, whenever a specific issue or niche need comes up, our societal response has been: “there’s an app for that.” For film buffs and movie lovers, we’ve got an app too: the increasingly popular social media network Letterboxd. The word itself comes from the term “letterboxing”, the process of transferring a…
-
Death Comes for the Movie Theatres
2020 has been a tumultous year for all of us; the movie industry has been no exception. In the same way that Amazon has been making money hand over fist during this pandemic while most in-person retailers have been shuttering and even going bankrupt, streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have been boosted at the…
-
#OscarsSoInclusive
The Academy Awards are often considered the most prestigious – certainly the most famous – movie awards, and it’s been around for almost 100 years now. But the Academy has always shown a willingness to tinker with the categories and standards, even as recently as earlier this year in light of COVID-19. How much the…
-
Streaming Services – A Breakdown
In the past few months alone, HBO Max, Peacock, and Quibi have been released, adding to the glut of streaming services available. Ten years ago, going cordless was simple and good for your wallet. Cutting out cable TV and replacing it with thousands of on-demand movies and TV shows was a no-brainer, and the only…
-
Sundance Film Festival – How to Fest
I just came back from the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT, and it was an epic weekend. Here are some things I learned: 1. Plan it Early Park City is a small ski resort of a town, and Sundance is a huge event that brings over 150,000 attendees every year. Book tickets and…
-
Prologue: Castaway at the Movies
The title of this blog comes from a quote in one of my all-time favorite films, the 2009 Korean dramedy Castaway on the Moon. After enduring some drawn out struggles to survive, the protagonist finally manages to catch and eat some fish and then even a bird, and then he lies down in the grass,…