Film of the Day
Parkland
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 March Ronald Reagan shot, 1981 On this day in 1981, after just over two months in office, President Ronald Reagan was shot outside the Washington Hilton. His would-be assassin was John Hinckley Jr, whose attempt on the president’s life seemed to be part of a plan to impress Jodie Foster, with whom he’d become obsessed after seeing her in the film Taxi Driver. Hinckley’s intention was not to kill Reagan but the President – he’d been focused on killing President Jimmy Carter when Carter was in office until being arrested on a firearms charge. Reagan just happened to be the … Read more
Perfect Sense
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 May England and Scotland become the United Kingdom, 1707 On this day in 1707, the countries of England and Scotland officially became united in “one kingdom by the name of Great Britain” (according to the Acts of Union). By “England”, the acts included the country of Wales, which had become absorbed legally into England by the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542. Though in terms of monarchy, the English throne had been seized by a Welshman, when Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) defeated Richard III in battle in 1485. This Tudor line persisted in England until 1603, when … Read more
Into Eternity: A Film for the Future
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 August Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1963 On this day in 1963, the “treaty banning nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, outer space and under water” was signed by the governments of the USSR, the United Kingdom and the USA in Moscow. Though there was general unease about the increase in radiation on planet Earth, the ban had been proposed first by the USSR in the early 1950s, though in its version of the treaty, no rigorous procedures would have been included to verify whether signatories were keeping their end of the bargain. The USSR finally yielded to the US and … Read more
Hitman
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 June First barcode scanned, 1974 On this day in 1974, a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum became the first product to be scanned by a barcode reader for commercial purposes. The so-called Universal Product Code had been in development since the late 1940s, when Bernard Silver, a Pennsylvania graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology had overheard a local supermarket owner bemoaning the fact that there wasn’t a system for automatically scanning items through a checkout. Drexel went to work, first using ultra-violet inks (they faded), then Morse code in which the dots were stretched to become lines, fatter ones … Read more
11.6
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 August Warren Buffett born, 1930 On this day in 1930, the business magnate Warren Edward Buffett was born, in Omaha, Nebraska, the second of the three children of a father who was a US congressman and stockbroker. At age 11 Warren bought his first shares. He filed his first tax return aged 14, on income earned from delivering newspapers and selling door to door. The following year he bought a pin table and installed it in a barber’s shop. On leaving school in 1947, his report read – “likes math; a future stockbroker”. After graduating from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln … Read more
Morvern Callar
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 29 July Mama Cass dies, 1974 On this day in 1974, Mama Cass Elliot, the large-size singer with the Mamas and the Papas, died from eating a ham sandwich. Except she didn’t. Die from eating a ham sandwich, I mean. Instead she probably died from extreme dieting, in an attempt to lose weight. She’d found fame with the Mamas and the Papas, singing songs such as California Dreamin’ and Monday Monday, and when the band split she embarked on a solo career. Her debut show, in Las Vegas in October 1968, was a disaster, Elliot barely being able to sing, partly … Read more
George Washington
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 14 December George Washington dies, 1799 On this day in 1799, George Washington died. George Washington was the first president of the USA, a commander in chief of the army in the war of independence and was also one of the Founding Fathers, the group who signed the Declaration of Independence, launched the new country into a revolutionary war, and then drafted the Constitution. His presidency was marked by attempts to promote the federal government and national institutions, to get taxation on a fair basis, to avoid wars in foreign lands, to pay down the national debt and to use the … Read more
Winnie the Pooh
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 January AA Milne born, 1882 On this day in 1882, Alan Alexander Milne was born in Hampstead, London, UK. The son of a Scottish teacher, he was educated at his father’s small public school in Kilburn, London, where one of his teachers was HG Wells. After that he attended Westminster, one of the country’s leading private schools, before going to Cambridge University on a mathematics scholarship. While there he was noticed by the humorous Punch magazine, to which he started contributing. After Cambridge he got a job at Punch and became a prolific writer, producing 18 plays and three novels. … Read more
The Angels’ Share
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 March The Proclaimers born, 1962 On this day in 1962, the brothers Charlie and Craig Reid were born in Leith, Scotland. Later known as The Proclaimers, the identical twins were in a string of punk bands before forming their own band in 1983. One-hit wonders in many parts of the world, thanks to their song 500 Miles, the brothers have had a number of hits in their home country, ever since their debut tour, supporting the Housemartins in 1986. The song Sunshine on Leith is the anthem of Hibernian FC, of whom they are fans, and Charlie and Craig lent … Read more
North by Northwest
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 31 October Mount Rushmore completed, 1941 On this day in 1941, the sculpture of four US presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln – was finished on a granite face near Keystone, South Dakota. Sculpted from a mountain known to the Lakota Sioux as the Six Grandfathers, the depiction of the four presidents was masterminded by Gutzon Borglum and carved (after dynamiting to remove the big stuff) by up to 400 workers, each head measuring around 60 feet (18 metres). The gigantic frieze was conceived and created for reasons of promoting tourism, rather than overarching patriotism, and … Read more
The Butler
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 7 March Police attack Alabama marchers, 1965 On this day in 1965, a day that subsequently became known as Bloody Sunday, state troopers attacked civil rights demonstrators outside the town of Selma, Alabama. Between 500 and 600 demonstrators were marching to protest against the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a black man who had been shot by a policeman after a previous civil rights march on 18 February. Any grouping of more than three civil rights campaigners had been declared illegal by a judge, and the local governor, George Wallace, went on to declare the march a threat to public safety. … Read more
Cosmopolis
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 September Occupy Wall Street starts, 2011 On this day in 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement, unable to set up its protest against US financial institutions in its original two preferred locations, took over Zuccotti Park, New York. With its rallying cry “We are the 99 per cent,” it made reference to the growing disparity in income distribution in the US (back more or less to its levels around the time of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, in spite of more than 80 years of relative prosperity) and set off a wave of similar protests all over the world. … Read more
