Cast
Jeff Daniels as Richard Dunn
Emma Stone as Abby
Ryan Reynolds as Captain Excellent
Lisa Kudrow as Claire Dunn
Hunter Parrish as Bryce
Kieran Culkin as Christopher
Arabella Field as Lucy

Harold Lloyd, a popular silent clown, has been dubbed the 'third' genius or master of silent comedy - after Chaplin and Keaton. [An actor/producer, he actually outgrossed his better-known counterparts, by retaining ownership of his films and their profits.] Like them, Lloyd also spent some time in the early years with Mack Sennett, became known for realistic, daredevil stunts, and for his bespectacled, neat, innocent, noble-hearted, 'average Joe' characters. From 1915-1921, he produced a number of short films for Keystone and for major comedy producer Hal Roach, playing the character of Willie Work (debuting in his first starring film Just Nuts (1915) as a Chaplin-like character) and Lonesome Luke (first appearing in Lonesome Luke, Social Gangster (1915)).

Cast
Gretchen Mol as Catherine Caswell
James Rebhorn as Lucian Carver
Cameron Bright as Adam Stafford
Perrey Reeves as Adrienne Stafford
Mark Pellegrino as Graham Caswell
Noah Wyle as Mike Stafford
Fearless Swift as Miley Walker
Laurel Astri as Faith

Starring Kristen Bell
Jamie Lee Curtis
Sigourney Weaver
Odette Yustman
Betty White

The primary moods of classic film noir were melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt, desperation and paranoia.

Heroes (or anti-heroes), corrupt characters and villains included down-and-out, conflicted hard-boiled detectives or private eyes, cops, gangsters, government agents, a lone wolf, socio-paths or killers, crooks, war veterans, politicians, petty criminals, murderers, or just plain Joes. These protagonists were often morally-ambiguous low-lifes from the dark and gloomy underworld of violent crime and corruption. Distinctively, they were cynical, tarnished, obsessive (sexual or otherwise), brooding, menacing, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure loners (usually men), struggling to survive - and in the end, ultimately losing.

Filmmakers often attempt to pay homage to filmmaking techniques of a bygone era. Frequent and recent attempts include stabs at grind house and blaxploitation cinema, but those films come with a built-in genre audience which makes them seem like less riskier efforts than what writer/director Michel Hazanavicius (OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies) has attempted to pull off.

The Big Parade (1925) is director/producer King Vidor's most famous, precedent-setting war film from the silent era. It was the first realistic war drama and has served ever since as an archetypal model for all other war films. It was the first big box-office success of the newly-formed MGM Studios - and possibly the most profitable silent film of all time - it helped bring back the popularity of war films in the late 20s. Vidor, often compared to the end of the century's director Steven Spielberg, brought his own epic, sweeping style to his intimate yet massive work about love and war.

Screenwriter Harry Behn based his script on a story by author Laurence Stallings, who based his writing on his own gritty wartime experiences as a Marine serving in N. France. Made only seven years after the Great War's Armistice, the film captures the impact of the conflict on an ordinary GI. It was the first war film of its kind to tell its story from the viewpoint of the GI. Handsome matinee silent screen idol John Gilbert gave his greatest acting performance in a star-making role as one of three Americans who enlisted and was swept into the war in France.

Film Plot Summary

The credits, accompanied by the tune "Jingle Bell Rock" (sung by Bobby Helms) played atop nighttime aerial views of Los Angeles a few weeks before Christmas. The camera zoomed into the window of a penthouse at the top of a round Century City LA high-rise where a scantily-clad young woman, later identified as 22 year-old Amanda Hunsaker (Jackie Swanson) was snorting cocaine and ingesting pills. Obviously hallucinating, the half-naked female stood on her balcony, and then jumped from its railing to the street many stories below, landing on the top of a parked car - an apparent suicide.

The next scene introduced the film's two main characters, both naked: veteran LAPD Detective Sgt. Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover), an African-American celebrating his 50th birthday in his bathtub (although depressed about his age), with members of his large family including his wife Trish (Darlene Love) and gorgeous teenaged daughter Rianne (Traci Wolfe), and younger 37 year-old LAPD Detective Sgt. Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson), tattooed, wild-haired, beer-drinking, and living alone in a parked, beachside camper-shell trailer with his collie dog Sam. Riggs emerged from his bed to strut bare-assed into his kitchen for a cold beer and greet his collie at the door, while a day-time game show (Family Feud) played on his television.

A controversial, explicitly racist, but landmark American film masterpiece - these all describe ground-breaking producer/director D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). The domestic melodrama/epic originally premiered with the title The Clansman in February, 1915 in Los Angeles, California, but three months later was retitled with the present title at its world premiere in New York, to emphasize the birthing process of the US. The film was based on former North Carolina Baptist minister Rev. Thomas Dixon Jr.'s anti-black, 1905 bigoted melodramatic staged play, The Clansman, the second volume in a trilogy:

* The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900
* The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
* The Traitor

Bringing Up Baby (1938) is one of versatile director Howard Hawks' greatest screwball comedies and often considered the definitive screwball film. It is also one of the funniest, wackiest and most inspired films of all time with its characteristic breathless pace, zany antics and pratfalls, absurd situations and misunderstandings, perfect sense of comic timing, completely screwball cast, series of lunatic and hare-brained misadventures, disasters, light-hearted surprises and romantic comedy. The non-stop, harum-scarum farce skewered many institutions, including psychiatry, the sterile field of science, the police, and high-society upper classes. At the time of its release, it failed miserably at the box-office and was soon forgotten, until it was revived years later.

As is true of many of Howard Hawks' finest films (including the crime film Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), His Girl Friday (1940), To Have and Have Not (1944), the detective film The Big Sleep (1946), Monkey Business (1952), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)), this masterpiece was not nominated for a single Academy Award. Director Peter Bogdanovich paid homage to Hollywood's screwball comedy genre with a loose remake titled What's Up, Doc (1972) starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal.