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You can't buy certain things anywhere.
Stop watching. Even the old stuff. Stop buying.

The BBC even produced (as a 13 part series) "The roads to freedom" by Jean-Paul Sartre, and apparently has all rights necessary. It's not available online, offline, or anything else (DVD? Hah, no). However, the BBC does have the master tapes for it, and showed it in a limited screening at BFI.

Uh, no. Most of the species figured that out PDQ. There are also these things called search engines. One of the really choice things about them is that they can be used to find answers to questions that you can't quite puzzle out on your own.

If you think search engines are likely to simply remain beyond you, you might just look at some film sites. For instance, by 2002, The British Film Institute had it on their list of the top ten films of all time.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/topten/poll/critics.html

Even the Internet Movie Database has a plot synopsis that should clear it all up for you. In an effort to be helpful, I'm leaving that URL as an exercise you might find useful in stretching your mind.

The other factor is quality of categorisation, SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT AHEAD, I work for a company that's just finished witting a search engine for the British Film Institute (http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/searches.php) and I've had the opportunity of trawling through their reasonably extensive database. It's not just the quantity of data that makes this database interesting it's also the quality, their looking at implementing a feedback system to accept corrections and additions (only a very simple system has been implemented to start with) and they've taken the wise decision to to build researcher review into the plans from the start. The BFI has taken on board the lessons that others have had to learn in the past.

I have one of these, as a matter of fact, purchased from the BFI's Museum of the Moving Image. It is not a "master", as it is quite evidently a positive, and it's 70mm wide, and Star Wars IV was shot Panavision and VistaVision, which are 35mm formats. 70mm prints are blow-ups made for special venues, particularly because they had very good sound for the time.

The claim that he destroyed the originals in the process of creating the Special Editions is highly suspect, even if it is him saying it. The modern method for recutting/restoration is to ingest the print into a 4K telecine (that is, 4000 lines res) and work with the data files, and then burn it out to a print (4K exceeds film resolution handily.) However, this workflow was not very common at the time of the SE's, and it's possible he did the horrible thing of recutting the negative. When you cut negative, you have to scrape a frame of film on either side of the cut in order to get a hard splice (there are ways around this, but the 1-frame rule is a common method). So, if you cut the neg, you are destroying a frame of film every time you make a splice, thus your original cut is unrecoverable.

However, as other threads point out, there are interpositives, and these are generally what DVDs and stuff are mastered from, and these are never cut into for any reason. However, Lucas can always elect to destroy these if he retains physical possession of them -- I'm not sure if the distributor (Fox) vaults them indefinitely or not; even if they did, Emperor George and his estate for a very long time to come are the only ones that can authorize a re-release based on them.

Ok, so that may be an exaggeration, but I think the point remains valid: there isn't much point in coming up with genres.

Mark J. P. Wolf in Medium of the Video Game list a bunch of genres that are fairly useless such as listing demos as their own genre.

While I'm not a fan of applying film theory to videogames, I think that Rick Altman in Film/Genre makes the most interesting use of genre by syntax and semantics. (Actually, there isn't a lot of need to read the entire book. He lays out syntax and semantics as a way of looking at genre in his article, "A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre" which is widely reprinted and is included as an index in the Film/Genre book).

I like this guy's stuff - http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/researchers/mirr/ researcher/300. His paper on Lord of the Rings-based sexploitation movies at last-year's Tolkien-2005 conference was, er, unique. As was the video-show at the party afterwards.

I think "second-rate" books - i.e. books that aren't canonized as "classic" or great - tend to make better movies. Take Jane Austen books: they rarely make "great" movies because the director is often constrained by the expectations of the audience, particularly those who wish to defend Austen's reputation. The director is less likely to tear it apart and make it into a decent film. See adaptations of Shakespearean plays. The keyword is usually "faithful". Once that comes into play, then you know you're likely to have a turkey to hand. If someone does make a good film out of a "classic" novel then it's more often than not, damned for not being "faithful".

It's the inverse with The Hunt for Red October. This can be taken apart at will and re-constructed as a movie because there's no need to defend Tom Clancy's literary talent or ouvre. I suspect he wants to make a buck or two rather see a "faithful" adaptation and the audience for TC's books don't have any great expectations of his work either.

As further weight for my assertion, I can't remember any adaptations of classic literary making it into anyone's top ten. Take this: poll from 2002. There are *no* adaptations of classic lit works here.

>However I don't reckon that we have IMAX cinemas over here in the good ol' U of K.

There are IMAX cinemas in London, Bristol, Bournemouth, Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester and Glasgow.

For some reason, they seem to be unusually heavily concentrated in cities beginning with B. Coincidence? I think not!

but will it do imax? that's what i'm waiting for.

Imax Experience Explained

There is an original Dalek in the museum at the British Film Institute in London (under the south end of Waterloo Bridge).

The best part is you can get inside it, and it has a synthesizer/microphone so you can say, "exterminate, Exterminate, EXTERMINATE!!!" and you sound like the real thing.

Check it out, it only costs 10 quid to get in.