News

When I first heard about this list this morning I could have sworn it was old news, but as it turns out, this list of Quentin Tarantino's top 20 spaghetti westerns is a new thing as presented to us bt Spaghetti-Western.net. What I must have been thinking of was a list of spaghetti westerns that influenced Tarantino's Django Unchained, some of which are repeated here such as Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence (read an essay I wrote on this one here) and the obvious, Django, and Giulio Petroni's Death Rides a Horse. However, this list is more than that and more than just Sergio Leone and Corbucci titles, though those two do make up eight of the twenty films on Tarantino's list. I haven't looked to see how many of the more obscure titles listed here are available on Netflix, but I have a feeling now that...

December was Tarantino Month here at Sos, and since January is dedicated to westerns, I thought it would be best to whip up some articles spotlighting films that influenced Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Since I began my list back in December, I’ve noticed similar lists popping up online – all of which are somewhat suspect, since they recommend some terrible films. For my money, all of the movies listed below are essential viewing for fans of Django Unchained, and come highly recommended.

Note: This is the third of a three part article.

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I Giorni dell’ira (Blood and Grit) (Day of Anger) (Gunlaw) (Days of Wrath)

Directed by Tonino Valerii

Written by Ernesto Gastaldi, Tonino Valerii, Renzo Genta

Italy, 1967

Day of Anger is a spaghetti western directed by Tonino Valerii, who began his career as Sergio Leone’s assistant and would later direct My Name Is Nobody (1973). Lee Van Cleef stars as Frank Talby,...

Comedian Frankie Boyle's gloves-off style leaves many people disgusted – but is he simply being honest about what many of us think?

Title: Frankie Boyle - Live

Date: 2008

The setup: Frankie Boyle takes comedy about as low as it can go. His baiting of taboos is not the problem – jokes about rape, cancer, paedophilia and so forth are now as commonplace as the ones about Irishmen and mothers-in-law used to be. The problem, rather, is that Boyle gets personal.

This show, his first live DVD, includes jokes about Lewis Hamilton's brother having cerebral palsy, the children's television presenter Mark Speight killing himself, and the schoolgirl Shannon Matthews being kidnapped and imprisoned. "The ugly ones always turn up alive," is his remark on that. You may be appalled, or you might laugh. Both emotions are visible in the crowd, and you can some people's faces wrestling with them too. What's...

You can classify almost all trade news posts into the categories of good, bad, and ugly. The good ones are rare, and usually exist merely to get our hopes up for a sucker punch later. The bad ones appear constantly and generally involve the fact that romantic comedy even exists as a genre or more generally that: [insert moron] who made [insert travesty of film] is now making either [film that sounds stupid] or [film that sounded great until you mentioned that moron]. The ugly ones are the trade posts about films being made in 3D. This largely overlaps with the "bad" category in terms of which films are being talked about, but varies in the nuance of subject matter.

Here are a few posts from the various sundry news sites from the last couple of days:

The prequel of Alien will be two films ... in 3D! (source: SFFMedia) Paramount is making The Ring 3 ... in 3D! (source: THR) There's a new trailer for Airbender out that adds nothing, but...

British-born actor Richard Stapley began his film career in Hollywood in the late 1940s. He starred as French nobleman Denis de Beaulieu, who becomes a pawn in Charles Laughton’s revenge plot in the 1951 horror thriller The Strange Door, with Boris Karloff as the menacing manservant Voltan.

Stapley was born in Westcliff, Essex, England, on June 20, 1923. He moved to Hollywood in the late 1940s, where he appeared in such films as The Challenge (1948), The Three Musketeers (1948) with Gene Kelly and Lana Turner, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1949) with June Allyson and Elizabeth Taylor, King of the Khyber Rifles (1953), and Jungle Man-Eater (1954), with Johnny Weissmuller as Jungle Jim.

He returned to England in the late 1950s, where he continued his career in films and television under the name Richard Wyler. He starred as Interpol Agent Anthony Smith in the television series Man from Interpol from 1960 to 1961. He also appeared in episodes of The Saint,...