Wittertainment

Hollywood is good at recycling things. After all, you build a giant house or an elaborate prop and you wouldn’t just use it once and toss it, right? This is why they have backlots at studios; they can hoard all their favorite stuff for later use (like the iconic building in the image above) or, failing that, at least use it for the studio tours. Same kind of goes for on-location sets – some places are just too dynamic to use only once, especially when the owner is more than willing to pimp out their place for cash…

We met award-winning actor Alec Baldwin on Twitter (@AlecBaldwin) and asked him to contribute a Criterion Top 10. His response was immediate and enthusiastic. Baldwin’s film credits include Beetlejuice, Miami Blues, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Cooler (for which he was nominated for an Oscar), and The Departed. He has won two Emmys for his role as Jack Donaghy on NBC’s 30 Rock. In October 2011, he debuted a WNYC podcast, Here’s the Thing, on which he interviews artists, writers, actors, and other public figures.

Here is a galley stills complied by Actualidad Simpson from The Simpsons with the corresponding movie stills they reference.

Well, that was fast. Just one day after Eddie Murphy relinquished his hosting duties for the 84th Annual Academy Awards following the controversial departure of producer Brett Ratner, Deadline is reporting that past host and comedy legend Billy Crystal will return to the Oscar stage next year…

MGM meant musicals for more than a decade after the second world war. David Thomson looks at a time when a little cheer at the movies was appreciated – and wonders if the same couldn’t be said now.

In 1993 Super Mario was bigger than Mickey Mouse, and so Hollywood decided it would be a good idea to make a Mario Bros film. It wasn’t.

First off, the main reason I’m doing this is because I know my list will differ from yours, primarily because I’ve already seen several of the hotly anticipated upcoming films. So I knew I my list would include a few titles that might otherwise go unrecognized as I preview my top ten most anticipated films coming up for November and December of 2011.

It should come as no surprise that when creating its movie posters, Hollywood likes to recycle. Because it’s difficult to come up with original ideas — and because a lot of the folks making these decisions feel moviegoers would rather something familiar than something fresh and new — a good amount of the movie posters we see look exactly like the movie posters for other movies, to the point where sometimes it just feels like we keep watching the same movie over and over and over again. But Hollywood believes firmly that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and as such they’ve remained committed to the same cycle of poster trends for quite some time now.

Decapitations have been a horror movie staple for decades. To celebrate this fact, here’s Phil’s list of cinema’s finest choppings, loppings and beheadings…

There’s 20 films listed on indieWIRE’s November calendar. From Lars von Trier and Werner Herzog to Marilyn Monroe and Sigmund Freud, check out indieWIRE‘s picks for the seven best options, and then check out the full calendar or iW’s fall movie preview; there’s many worthy films that didn’t make this list (including notable studio efforts like “Hugo” and “J. Edgar”).