Tag Archives: films

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Rare Opportunity: Classic Silent Films at AFI Silver Theatre

Promotional photo from Harold Lloyd's film Safety Last!, via Wikimedia Commons.

Promotional photo from Harold Lloyd’s film Safety Last!, via Wikimedia Commons.

This weekend the DC area’s finest movie palace, the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, begins a Silent Cinema Showcase. Many of the films and shorts will feature live accompaniment. While you’ve probably seen the image above, you may not know anything about the film Safety Last! itself. Even Roger Ebert hadn’t seen it before he reviewed it in 2005!  He wrote:

It is by general agreement the most famous shot in silent comedy: a man in a straw hat and round horn-rim glasses, hanging from the minute hand of a clock 12 stories above the city street. Strange, that this shot occurs in a film few people have ever seen.

Your chance to be one of the few comes this weekend. A new 35mm print of Safety Last! will be presented Sunday at 7:30, with live musical accompaniment. Other films in the series include two feature films starring screen legend Mary Pickford, a collection of experimental shorts called Wild and Weird, and shorts by Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and Buster Keaton (you get two chances for Keaton: one short is grouped with Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, and then three Keaton shorts will be presented together).

The series starts this weekend and runs through May 4.

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HBO’s Screen on the Green cancelled for 2009

Photo courtesy of
‘Screen on the Green – Movies Under the Sky – 7-14-08’
courtesy of ‘mosley.brian’

HBO has cancelled the long-running Screen on the Green program for 2009, according to a representative from HBO’s consumer affairs department.

Reader TJ tipped us that we should look into this; someone at the National Mall permits desk told him HBO was no longer sponsoring the event. A call to the hotline at 877-262-5866 still yielded the old 2008 schedule, but if you stay on the line all the way through you can get connected to consumer affairs. Representative Melana confirmed for me that the program had been cancelled. No word on if it will return.

UPDATE: If you’re looking for a replacement outdoor screening option Katie wrote about two happening just across the river in Crystal City and Rosslyn, both metro-accessible.