m. c. de marco

Groundhog Day is this week’s 99 cent movie rental in the iTunes store. According to Wikipedia,

In 2006, Groundhog Day was added to the United States National Film Registry as being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Via SFScope: an original print of Metropolis has been found in Argentina.

Museum of Cinema Director Paula Felix-Didier said a private collector brought an original version of the film to Argentina in 1928, where it languished in the museum’s archives. It was rediscovered in April,

SciFi.com reports about the light and fluffy B-movie content of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which opens today:

“One of the things that I said to everybody—the cast and crew—I said, ‘This is a B movie,’” Shyamalan said in a press conference in New York on June 9. “Let’s get ourselves straight here. This is just a great B movie. We’re making the best B movie we can here. That’s our job. We’re making a B movie.

Not every movie can star Natan Sharansky, but The Andromeda Strain was an exceptional disappointment. Blogcritics Magazine has a negative review that touches briefly on the movie’s major weakness: poor technobabble.

Since the scientists actually do very little science, the script pads out the running time with plenty of pseudo-science, giving every actor a chance to graft on some ludicrous exposition without actually explaining a thing.

I saw Refusenik tonight at the Kendall Square Cinema, and producer Laura Bialis also spoke afterwards about how the refuseniks’ story inevitably took over the movie from her original subject: protesters outside the Soviet Union.

REFUSENIK is the first retrospective documentary to chronicle the thirty-year movement to free Soviet Jews. It shows how a small grassroots effort bold enough to take on a Cold War superpower blossomed into an international human rights campaign that engaged the disempowered and world leaders alike.

Steve Sailer blogs “The Thing”, a once and future creature feature with roots in the Golden Age of science fiction:

[…] John Carpenter’s classic 1982 horror film “The Thing” is being remade by Battlestar Galactica screenwriter Ronald D. Moore.

All the movie versions, including the 1951 rendition, are based on the great 1938 sci-fi story “Who Goes There?” Written by John W. Campbell at age 28, it was his last major piece of fiction.

There’s a new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie coming out in May. Here’s the trailer and some exclusive Vogon pics [via del.icio.us scifi].