Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood

Film of the Day

Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in Road to Morocco

Road to Morocco

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 October Bing Crosby dies, 1977 On this day in 1977, Bing Crosby died. One of the most forward thinking entertainers of the 20th century, Crosby was one of the first singers to understand that the new system of electrical recording removed the need to sing as if shouting through a loudhailer. Along with stars such as Al Bowlly and Rudy Vallée, he perfected the crooning style, an up close and conversational way of singing, in Bing’s case most often caricatured as “buh buh buh boo”. He was also a pioneer multimedia artist, being hugely successful on record, on the radio … Read more
Nadia Tolokkonikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina of Pussy Riot

Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 December USSR formally dissolved, 1991 And suddenly, on this day in 1991, the Soviet Union suddenly simply ceased to exist. No nuclear bombing by the USA, no internal revolutionary rupture, it just shut up shop. The previous day President Mikhail Gorbachev had unfussily declared his office extinct and handed over the launch codes of the USSR’s nuclear weapons to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia. It was the logical final step of the process of glasnost (literally: openness) and perestroika (restructuring) initiated by Gorbachev in 1985, which had led to the increase of nationalist movements in Warsaw Pact states. This … Read more
Bill Murray in Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 2 February Groundhog Day Today is Groundhog day. In areas of Pennsylvania where a High German dialect known as Pennsylvania German or Pennsylvania Dutch (from Deutsch) is still preserved the event is marked with a fersommlinge (Versammlung in modern German, meaning meeting) at which much interest is shown in a groundhog, a type of marmot, and whether it throws a shadow when leaving its burrow. If it does, so the folklore says, there will be another six weeks of winter. But if it is cloudy, then spring is on the way. The largest of these celebrations is held in Punxsutawney, where … Read more
Aggeliki Papoulia in Alps

Alps (aka Alpeis)

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 3 August Jesse Owens wins the 100 metres, 1936 On this day in 1936, Jesse Owens won the 100 metres at a race meeting hosted by Adolf Hitler, a man who believed the black man was inferior to the white man. It was one of four gold medals Owens won at the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936, and it put the hat on a great year for Owens. He’d set three world records in less than an hour the previous year at the Big Ten track meeting, which has since been called “the greatest 45 minutes in sport”. Hitler did not … Read more
Rel and Nev Schulman go angling in Catfish

Catfish

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 May Mark Zuckerberg born, 1984 On this day in 1984, Mark Zuckerberg was born, in White Plains, New York. The son of a dentist and a psychiatrist, he came into the world on the day that Lionel Richie’s “Hello” was the number one in the USA – appropriate, considering that he’d make his fortune introducing people to each other. Zuckerberg was a computer nerd at school, having learnt Atari BASIC from his father, and his precociousness encouraged his parents to get him a tutor. Interestingly, Zuckerberg was also into sport (he was fencing captain) and was interested in the arts … Read more
The opening shot from Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 October The Bridge over the Bosphorus completed, 1973 It is one of the polite fictions of what used to be called the civilised world that Europe is a continent. Looked at objectively, with space goggles on, the continent is more properly Eurasia, Europe getting special treatment because of its historical importance. One of the “border” points of Europe has always been the Black Sea, the point where it empties out into the Mediterranean being one of the great dividing lines between Europe and Asia (the Urals, Ural River, Caspian and Caucasus Mountains forming the rest of the dividing line). Thus … Read more
Party hats on for the finale of Import/Export

Import/Export

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 February Maastricht Treaty signed, 1992 On this day in 1992, the Treaty on European Union, aka the Maastricht Treaty, was signed by members of the European Community, in Maastricht, Netherlands. Its purpose, as its name suggests, was to create a union of Europe. It proposed and established three pillars of the Treaty –the European Community, a common foreign and security policy and a similar arrangement for justice and home affairs. In effect it formalised arrangements that had already existed, but it also extended them – the European Community was the continuation of the European Economic Community, with the “Economic” being … Read more
Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Louis Calhern in High Society

High Society

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 9 June Cole Porter born, 1891 On this day in 1891, the songwriter Cole Porter was born. The only child of wealthy parents – his mother was the daughter of “the richest man in Indiana” – Porter showed early signs of musical precocity and was writing songs from the age of ten. Later, at Yale, where he studied English, music and French, he wrote 300 songs and several musical comedies. Moving on to Harvard to study law (his rich grandfather’s wish) he continued to write prolifically and eventually switched from the study of law to music, though he didn’t tell his … Read more
Josh Harris takes a shower in We Live in Public

We Live in Public

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 November Tim Berners-Lee publishes World Wide Web proposal, 1990 On this day in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, an employee of the European research organisation CERN, published the formal proposal to create a more efficient information management system which would connect up hypertext documents on different computers running different operating systems, to be viewed by client-server applications (ie browsers). Building on a prediction by Arthur C Clarke that satellites would allow global access via console to vast amounts of information, telephony, video conferencing and so on, Berners-Lee took practical inspiration from the Dynatext electronic book system – which used a rigorous and … Read more
Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 October Steve Jobs dies, 2011 On this day in 2011, Steven Paul Jobs died in Palo Alto, California, aged 56, of metastatic cancer of the pancreas. Famously fired in 1985 from Apple, the company he had started along with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976, he went on to co-found Pixar, before being dramatically taken back by Apple in 1996, taking the company from near-bankruptcy back into profitability in two years. Jobs is often described as a visionary and regardless of whether you believe this was hype he had two insights which set him apart from his rivals. First, … Read more
Ice-T talks to Dr Dre in Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap

Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 10 February Kanye West releases debut album, 2004 On this day in 2004, multi-instrumentalist, singer and rapper Kanye West released his debut album, The College Dropout, which is precisely what West was, having junked art school after one semester in favour of a career in music. The career in music went well, with West rapidly becoming a sought-after producer – Alicia Keys, Jay-Z, Ludacris – and beatmaker, all the while working on his own solo album, whose release got pushed further and further into the future as West spent his time making music for other people. His sample-based singles Through the … Read more
Thekla Reuten and George Clooney in The American

The American

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 6 May George Clooney born, 1961 On this day in 1961, George Timothy Clooney was born in Lexington, Kentucky. Raised a Catholic in a showbiz family (father a news anchor, aunt singer Rosemary Clooney, mother a beauty queen), George was a bright student. He was also adept at sport and at one point wanted to become a professional baseball player. Instead he studied broadcast journalism, taking small roles as an extra on TV to make a bit of money on the side, turning up in shows such as Centennial and The Golden Girls before getting a semi-regular gig on the sitcom … Read more

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