Tag: cameron crowe

The 10 Nicest Movies Ever Made (If These Movies Don’t Make You Cry, You Have a Black Heart)

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Field of Dreams. The undisputed king, for sure. But here’s ten other great ones.

It was a really tricky thing putting this together because they’re ranked on niceness, not goodness.  Number two and number five are the best movies on the list.  But they aren’t the nicest.

Niceness is even harder to define than coolness.  Niceness is a warm and fuzzy feeling that a lot of art can generate.  Probably the most popular example would be Norman Rockwell paintings. Niceness, like coolness, taps into our primal brains somewhere.  We’re wired to feel it because it connects us to each other.  But the problem with niceness is that it borders so heavily on cheese.  Cheese done right is transcendent.  But cheese done wrong is, well, cheesy.
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An Interview With Jeff Krulik, Documentarian Extraordinaire

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There was a period in film history, after the advent of the VCR and before the Generation Y takeover, where people traded VHS copies of their movies on an underground circuit that spread all over the world.  The modern incarnation of this is the ‘viral’ video, or, a video that racks up a lot of views on YouTube.  But, if you’re old enough, you can remember a time when this was essentially done by hand (or, if you’re a Y-er, you can Google it).  

There’s something romantic about it really.  Each video had to be copied with noisy machines that spooled magnetic tape around heads that needed to be cleaned and would break after so many revolutions.  Each tape was an artifact adorned with the fingerprints of the previous owner, or in many cases, the filmmaker himself.  It was personal and exclusive and you had to be in the know to be blessed with a particular video’s presence.
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