Author: drfilm

Let me take the Dr. Film time machine and hustle you back to 2015.  Jeff Crouse contacted me and asked if I could help restore Little Mickey Grogan (1927).  Well, you guys know me.  I’m always a sucker for a hard luck case, and I’m always overbooked.

I told Jeff that I could not restore Little Mickey because I was already restoring Little Orphant Annie (1918) and I had solid due dates to hit. Jeff told me that one of the stars of the film, Lassie Lou Ahern, wanted to see it before she died.  He’d paid for scans, and Lassie Lou had the script, which was really useful because we only had a badly translated French print.

That was the hard luck case that sucked me in.  How could I make a lady in her late 90s wait until I finished another film?  I agreed to oversee the restoration of Little Mickey, and Jeff did some GoFundMe fundraisers, and we got it.

Except for one thing.  I hadn’t bothered to look up the copyright.  I didn’t bother on purpose, because I knew that the FBO pictures (Little Mickey was made by Film Booking Office, which eventually became RKO) were never renewed.  FBO had a policy of throwing out all their old prints, so no need to renew them.

They renewed Little Mickey.  OK, time for some detective work.  Who could own this in 2017 (by this time the world had marched on).  Elias Savada, copyright genius, told me that the trail went dead after RKO’s 1955 renewal.

This gets complicated, so here’s the scorecard:

It was at this point that I contacted a lawyer.  I did this because it’s not a good idea to call a major corporation and say, “I found an old nitrate print of something you might own and in case you do own it, I don’t want you to sue me.”

So he contacted RKO General, and Little Mickey Grogan was either beneath their notice or their contempt.  But Warners got right back to us.

“We own the film,” they said.  “We want it.”

“OK, but it’s not registered with the Library of Congress.”

“It doesn’t have to be.  We own it.”

“OK, you own it and you want it.  Will  you restore it?”

“No.  It’s not important enough.”

“OK, will you let my client restore it?”

“No, we’ll sue.”

“If he restores it and send it to you, would that be OK?”

“No, it sets a bad precedent letting someone else restore a Warners film since we have our own department to do that.”

“OK, can we license it from you to release?”

“No.”

“If we restore it in cooperation with an archive like Library of Congress, would you release it then?”

“No, and we won’t allow you to work with Library of Congress.  We will sue if you do.”

“So you want this film, you won’t do anything with it, you won’t restore it, you won’t let anyone else restore it, you won’t license it, you won’t prove you own it, but you claim you do.  And if anything is done with it, you’ll sue.”

“That’s correct!”

THANK YOU.

Remember, I have a 95+ year old lady who wants to see this film!  And I’ve greatly compressed the back-and-forths with my lawyer.  This took place over several months.  Amazingly, it cost about as much as mastering the DVD/Blu would have cost.

Jeff set up a second GoFundMe and a few people donated, but we got lots of complaints that it was double-dipping, and no one would ever release this film.

(By the way, if this sounds familiar, the same thing happened with King of the Kongo for different reasons.  I would get grants to get pieces of the film restored as we found better material, and finally we found 35mm and I went back to get more money.  This wasn’t actually double-dipping but rather WE HAVE BETTER AND MORE MATERIAL NOW.)

In the case of Little Mickey it was because we were covering our posterior and didn’t want Warners to sue us, so we did the, ya know… LEGAL THING TO DO.

So we elected to restore Little Mickey and we consulted Lassie Lou extensively.  She recorded a commentary for us.  Jeff made a documentary for it.  It turned out to be a better-than-average program picture, with Jobyna Ralston as the romantic lead.  Frankie Darro is pretty GOOD in it.  We paid Philip Carli to do a score…

BUT WE COULDN’T RELEASE IT. 

We decided to wait Warners out until the copyright expired.  It finally did last year.  Of course, I was already hip-deep in King of the Kongo when that happened.  We ran the film at Cinecon and people loved it.  Went over better than we expected.

Aaaand…

The coda happened some time later.  I spoke to a now-retired gentleman at Library of Congress, told him the story, and he said, “Oh, Warners never owned that.”

“But they said they did…”

“Oh, yeah, that was (NAME REDACTED, let’s call him NICE GENTLEMAN), and he knew that they didn’t own the picture.”
“What?”

“Yeah, he was just following company policy.  Warners claims they own anything.”

“What about RKO?”

“They really own it, but they didn’t know and they didn’t care.  You could have released it and they would never have known.”

“What a horrible thing to do!”

“Oh, I know REDACTED NICE GENTLEMAN.  He’s a good guy.   I’ve had dinner with him.”

“Well,” I finished, “as far as I’m concerned, he’s living human slime.”

So now that we can release Little Mickey Grogan, we do intend to.  With Lassie Lou Ahern’s commentary and Jeff’s documentary.

We have two problems:

1. I don’t have the money to afford a pressing.
2. We don’t know all of the people who donated to GoFundMe years back.

I sure TRY to be honest, but Dr. Jeff Crouse is as honest as they come.

If you donated and we can still contact you, we will do so.  If you donated and you have not yet gotten an email from Jeff, please let me know or post in the Dr. Film page.

We’re gonna make this right and get this out.

And, for the record I violated copyright law by working on this film.  I did it to help an extremely old lady who has since passed on.  We would have missed her participation.  I’m guilty.  

But Warners has NO LEGAL STANDING to sue me.  They can bite me.

In 2019, I inherited a bunch of 16mm and 35mm film, a huge cache of film that frankly made me sad to receive.  Their owner, Chris Jacobs, was a collector and film professor who taught early film and filmmaking.  He died an unfortunate death of leukemia a few years ago.  I’d spoken to him a few times and he wanted to sell me all his collection, but I couldn’t afford it.   A little later, he passed on, and I was told he wanted me to have his film.

Chris was one of those guys for whom the adage, “Still waters run deep,” was written.  Always very soft-spoken, very unassuming, he was nonetheless quite friendly and willing to help if I needed something for a show. With a heavy heart, I made two epic trips to North Dakota to pick up loads of film.  Not only was it unsorted–made worse by the mad dash to load the prints, which were in a basement, into a rented SUV–but the reels had suffered through two floods. Things were missing, unlabeled, stained, you name it.

I have spent many hours going through this collection, missing an old friend, finding things that I never knew were there.  As with anything, much of it is stuff no one would want, things that only Chris liked, and then there was the rest of it.

It’s a treasure trove of early silent films.  Not anything that would be extremely valuable… most of it is already on video.  But then he’s got Kodascopes of 1920s films.  Kodascopes are original 1920s prints (on safety stock).  Nothing spectacular, mind you, but fascinating stuff.  Educational value and just plain COOL value.

I’ve been sifting out the coolest stuff and slowly running it at conventions and sharing it with others.   I think that’s what Chris would have wanted.  And then one day I found THE FILM.

The Birth of a Nation (1915).

It’s not especially rare.  You can probably find it on archive.org if some do-gooder hasn’t removed it.  But I’d never had a film print before and I thought this would be a perfect chance to run this landmark film.

And then I thought to myself, “You can’t run that.”

You see, The Birth of a Nation is an extremely racist film.  When I say extremely racist, I mean it.  I’m not even going to recount the plot here.  It’s not nice.  But it’s also a good film.  As they said in the New Yorker, “the worst thing about The Birth of a Nation is how good it is.”

It was made by DW Griffith of Louisville, Kentucky, a guy who was raised in a racist society after the Civil War.  Racism was so natural for him that he didn’t understand anything else. 

But, like so many things, the racism is baked into it, and so is the contradiction.  What do I mean?  Well, we’d like to cast Griffith as a one-dimensional racist, evil to the core.  But he wasn’t.  How do I know?  There were home movies shot at Griffith’s funeral in 1948.  One of the mourners there was Madame Sul-Te-Wan, an African-American actress who appeared in several of Griffith’s films.  She is weeping openly at the funeral.  Griffith was her friend.

That’s certainly not enough to exonerate Griffith, but, like so many things, life is more complicated than “Cancelled” or  “Not Cancelled.”  There’s a lot of nuance in between.

Besides being racist and offensive, The Birth of a Nation is also one of the most important films ever made.  No superlatives here.  Our world looks differently today because of The Birth of a Nation.  Really.  Not only did it change the face of cinema, but it changed the way cities look.  It helped kill vaudeville.  You can’t overstate it.

Griffith was racist and a friend to African-Americans.  Birth of a Nation is racist and important.  I get pretty passionate about these things.  You’ve heard me rail about them before.

Thomas Jefferson was a hugely important man and a racist slave owner.

Bill Cosby supported all kinds of important African American projects and he’s a convicted felon.

There’s good and bad in all of these things.  If I laugh at Bill Cosby, then I’m not condoning his behavior.  If I admire Thomas Jefferson for his writing and architecture, I am not condoning racism.

If I talk about the brilliant structure of The Birth of a Nation, I’m not condoning its message.

Yes, Birth of a Nation sparked riots, inspired the Ku Klux Klan to reinvent itself in my home state of Indiana, and it also proved that feature-length motion pictures could enthrall audiences for two or three hours.

That’s huge.  Since the days of the 1890s, movies were put into 1000-foot reels.  This size of reel could run 10-15 minutes depending on the projection speed.  It was a convenient length to ship the old combustible nitrate stock.  A projectionist could travel from city to city and be a part of a vaudeville tour, where all of the acts were about ten minutes.  Cities had buses, interurbans, mule cars, a lot of public transportation.

At every major stop, there was a Nickelodeon.  For ten minutes, you could duck in to a small shop, a projectionist would run a movie, it would be over, and they’d empty out the place for the next crew.  Bigger Nickelodeons would have two or three shows.  There were maybe three dozen of these in my home town of Indianapolis when Birth of a Nation opened.

If you want to see what this was like, watch DW Griffith’s Those Awful Hats (1908), which shows a typical setup, a flat floor with uncomfortable seats, and a piano player.  Why have comfortable seats?  You were only going to be there for a few minutes.  Why would you have a sloped floor?  If you couldn’t see over someone’s hat, you could just stay and watch the film again.  It wasn’t a big deal.

Universal Studios, which started in 1912, based its whole business model on this idea.  They continued a release schedule of almost 100% short films until 1917 or so.

But Birth of a Nation is TWELVE REELS.  You were sitting there for at least two hours and closer to three.  OK, it wasn’t the first film this long.  The Italians were doing films like Cabiria (1914).  The Germans were doing it with things like The Student of Prague (1913).  These films made it to the United States, but they weren’t mainstream.

Suddenly, when Birth of a Nation broke onto the scene, we had an American film that covered recent history (it was based in the Civil War, a time period no more removed from 1915 than the Vietnam War is to us.)  It was thrilling, with clever, innovative chase sequences, realistic action and accurate reconstructions of historic events.  It made $11,000,000 in 1915, more than $315 million dollars in today’s cash.  This is probably a gross underestimate given the bookkeeping at the time.

Nickelodeons didn’t want to run a film like this.  No one wanted to sit in stiff chairs in a flat room for three hours.  But the big vaudeville houses, well, that was a different story.  All they needed to do was to put up a big screen, throw some projectors in where the spotlights were, and ZOOM, you’ve got a movie theater with comfortable seats and a raked floor.

It started to kill vaudeville.

It started to kill the market for most film shorts.

It made people sit up and take notice of a new art form.

Theaters sprang up that were built exclusively for motion picture exhibition, something that was new.   Instead of going to any street corner for a film, you’d go downtown for an evening’s entertainment.

President Woodrow Wilson allegedly called Birth of a Nation “history written with lightning.”  Yes, there were lots of protests.  It was considered racist from the start.  DW Griffith was so upset by this reception that he made a followup film called Intolerance (1916), similarly innovative, that called for tolerance and understanding.  It played to expensive road shows with a traveling orchestra.  Griffith toured a lot of the midwest in it.  It was a cultural event.

So you can see why I’d want to run a landmark film like Birth of a Nation.  But in today’s hyper-sensitive environment, I’d be afraid for my safety.  The right way to do it would be to have a cultural historian, an African-American historian, and a film historian introduce the film.  In fact, that’s really the only way to do it these days, and I would encourage that kind of dialogue.

I’m a big believer in this sort of thing.  A lot of these films don’t make a lot of sense if you don’t see them in context.  We tend to see films through our own modern lens and it’s valuable to see them in the same way that they were seen in their day.   It helps our understanding.  It helps our empathy.  It helps us know where we came from.

But I can’t run it.

I’m not sure why we can stand up for books but not films.  When people wanted to ban Slaughterhouse Five or Catcher in the Rye or Huckleberry Finn, there were huge protests.  But ban Birth of a Nation and the world is with you.

I think some of this is that films are not considered real, important art.  I’m not sure why this is.  Older films are particularly not considered real, important art.  They are expendable, like the Sunday comics.  People like me who want to preserve these things are not only irrelevant, but sometimes foolish.

I recently had a conversation with a group that openly censors old films.  If there’s a scene that might be considered offensive, out it goes.  Given the fact that censoring film prints is hard, they’re moving to all digital, which is easier to, let’s call it what it is, bowdlerize.

The rationale behind this is that old films are considered “societally irrelevant” and that we need to have the widest possible audience.  Running a controversial picture is not in the cards, because we’d be fragmenting an already microscopic audience.  One of the show sponsors said that we should all be thankful that we have any audience for our “little film hobby” at all.  How patronizing that is.

The only reason that films are “societally irrelevant” is that no one sees them.  No one sees them because we don’t know how to present them properly.  Since we don’t present them properly, audiences don’t understand them and they react poorly.  It’s a vicious cycle.

Presenting sanitized films simply shows us a world and a history that never existed and that doesn’t make sense.  The great example of  this is Leave it to Beaver.  It was never intended to reflect reality.  No one really lived in that world, and we seem to believe it represents an idyllic past.  Political hacks have used clips of the show to invoke sort of fictional nostalgia.

A few years ago, I ran The Thing (1951) followed by The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).  I carefully explained that the latter film is the liberal reaction to an alien invasion: the military people are stupid, the aliens are misunderstood, the scientists are heroes, the government is powerless.  On the other hand The Thing was the conservative reaction to an alien invasion: the military people are heroes, the scientists are wishy-washy and too intellectual, the alien is deadly, and the government is trying to do the right thing but is still powerless.  I don’t think you understand these films unless you know that they’re made only six years after WWII and in the middle of a Communist threat.

You can run them without this background, but the audience won’t be as engaged.  With The Birth of a Nation, the distance between us and the film is greater, and the need to provide context is increased.

And I still think I should run Chris’ print of The Birth of a Nation somewhere.

I have every frame of film the Library of Congress has scanned.  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other reels of clips.

I have an entire reel of clips from a second archive .

There’s a reel of material from Bob Monkhouse in England that I do not have scanned yet.  It contains some footage I can use.

I have a complete 16mm print in my collection, but the quality is iffy.  All of the 16mm prints are like this.

The goal is to have as much of this sourced from 35mm as possible.

Chapter 1 R1:

The sound version is completely missing in 35mm.

We have the sound version in 16mm.  I have scanned this.

We have the camera negative for the silent version, and we have the credits and tag from other materials.  

About 2/3 of the reel can be found in the silent version in identical shots.

A bit of the sound footage in the clip reel we just had scanned.

We do not have sound for this reel.  We have the script for the two dialogue scenes and will have to have lip readers help out.

Restoration just started.

Chapter 1 R2:

We have camera negative on this.  It’s in fair shape.  Bruce Lawton is helping me go through it now.

We do not have sound for this reel.  We have the script for the two dialogue scenes and will have to have lip readers help out.

Restoration not started.

Chapter 1 R3:

We have a print and negative on this.  Bruce Lawton is helping me go through it now.

We do not have sound for this reel.  We have the script for the two dialogue scenes and will have to have lip readers help out.

Restoration not started.

Chapter 2 R1:

This is missing the cliffhanger resolution from the previous chapter, but the previous chapter is using footage from a different camera.  Replacement footage has  been scanned from 16mm.

Some footage from Bob Monkhouse in 35mm will cover this better.

Restoration only barely started.

Chapter 2 R2:

Have print and negative.  Print is a little short in end tag.  Two brief sequences removed that exist in negative.  Long goofy piece in beginning of reel set in Africa has insert sequences rotted in negative.  Sequence in here can be used to fix a damaged section in Chapter 10. Lots of film and camera jitter.  Looks like it was shot this way.

Restoration only barely started.

Chapter 3 R1:

Not examined closely yet.

Chapter 4 R1: 

Have print and neg,  mostly looks in good shape.  Not examined too closely yet.

Chapter 4 R2:

Tinting starts last half of R2.   Tint has caused rot in print.  Focusing on this because it’s got a lot of issues and it’s going to cause problems.  We have no backup except 16mm.

Chapter 5 R1:

Graded and awaiting stabilized.

Chapter 5 R2: Awaiting grading and stabilization.

Chapter 6 R1: Awaiting grading and stabilization

Chapter 6 R2 graded and stabilized.  Awaiting de-dirting.

Chapter 7 R1: graded and stabilized.  De-dirting in progress.

Chapter 8 R1: Pretty well finished; needs some touch-up, but we just found more footage, which needs to be replaced.  Yet more footage in Monkhouse.

Chapter 8 R2: Pretty well finished.  Maybe a little bit more to be done on ending.

Chapter 9 R1: Pretty well finished.

Chapter 9 R2: Pretty well finished, found more footage in LoC reel.  Needs to be replaced.

Chapter 10 R1: Nearly finished, but found footage in Monkhouse, LoC Reel.  Needs to be replaced.

Chapter 10 R2: De-dirted, extensive line removal and de-flicker in progress.  Stabilization upgrade running now.

General comments:

The negatives in this are usually rotting and starting to mottle. Location footage is almost always going in the negatives.  Fortunately, there’s a lot of repetition and a lot of backup.

The prints are almost always edited, with little bits that were found to be exciting that got excised.  For example, the entire opening of Chapter 7 was excised from the print and put into Robert Youngson’s Days of Thrills and Laughter, so that had to be rescued from the negative, which isn’t in wonderful shape.  The dinosaur scenes in several chapters were cut out.  I’ve managed to find all of them except Chapter 10, which we had to rescue from 16mm.

I keep finding better footage of a lot of stuff, particularly Chapter 10.  I had originally had about a 3 minute section that was replaced from 16mm.  Then a piece showed up that was cut into Chapter 9… why, I don’t know.  In August, the Library of Congress shipped me a clip reel that had another minute in it.  In mid-September, I got reel from another archive with still more footage in it.  I think we’re going to end up with just the dinosaur scene from Chapter 10 replaced.

Here are the questions I keep being asked—

1. When is this going to be finished?

I don’t know.  I’d like to think we’re about at the halfway point.  It may not seem like that but because of the pandemic and my needing to get upgraded computers, we were slowed immensely.  The fact I’ve now been through every chapter but 3 is a nice fact, and I’ve identified pretty well what needs to be done.

I was hoping for end of this year but maybe early-mid next year.

2) Why is it taking so long?

The film is in bad shape. As you see, bits are missing and need to be replaced.  It’s not a simple process.  We’re doing this at 4K which takes longer.

We’ve also had 2021 be the year of bad health for everyone.  Amongst my family and the people who are helping me do this, we’ve had one death, three cases of cancer, a case of sepsis and gangrene, and a broken leg.  

I’m having trouble getting people to do dirt removal.  Two of my assistants hate it so much as to almost refuse to do it, taking forever to get it done.  One other guy is so overbooked that he can’t do it.  Two other people are on the docket for doing it, but one just had an apartment fire.  

Yes, I can do it myself, but I’m busy sorting out bits of what parts of the film go where.  This is stuff only I can do.  Others can do de-dirting.  Almost every day I set up a render in the morning that takes all day, then head out to a coffee house and do correspondence, mostly on this project, for the rest of the day, sometimes a second render, sometimes visiting some of the guys helping me.  There ain’t room for more.

3) Didn’t you get a grant to do this?

Yes, I did, from the Efroymson fund.  We blew through the money by having to buy new computers.  I don’t regret that; they were needed, and they are being used, but I’m out of cash and frankly my helpers are all telling me that their trade for “new computers in exchange for work” isn’t really working out in their favor.

4) I thought you got an NFPF grant to restore this.

I got two NFPF grants to restore chapters on 16mm and I did do those.  The negatives are on file at Library of Congress.  But we discovered that there were 35mms after those were done.  When I did the NFPF grants, the 16mms were the best we knew of.  Let’s be clear: there was the negative in the camera, then there were master prints, and the 16mms were badly copied onto a 16mm dupe negative and then printed.  The 16mm negative also has clunky splices in it (particularly in Chapter 8 for some reason)

5) Are you just being anal retentive to get every frame?

No.  Most of the time that stuff is missing, it’s a good hunk of at least a minute. In chapter 10, almost 3 minutes are missing and were replaced from 16mm, but we’ve found nearly all of it from 35mm at this point.  Bear in mind that when we have sound, it’s best to have every frame because that keeps things in sync.

One of the things I get asked a lot is this: “Don’t you ever watch NEW movies, you know, color, sound, made in the last ten years?”  Well, yes, I do.  You’ll note I have an aversion to superhero movies, so you won’t see any here.  Since I get this question a lot, here are some of my cranky opinions on movies made in the last 10 years:

The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy:

The Force Awakens: an uncredited remake of A New Hope.

The Last Jedi: A truly brave attempt to do something different with the franchise, with nice peppy writing and something less predictable than we are used to.  Naturally, everyone hated it but me.  Rian Johnson is someone to watch out for: talented.

The Rise of Skywalker: an uncredited remake of Return of the Jedi.

I was afraid that Disney would wimp out and do only easy stuff for mass audiences, shying away from real storytelling.  I was right.  They cloned the Emperor?  Gimme a break.

The Star Wars spinoff films:

Solo: A decent script, it’s too slow, and it’s one of the few films I’ve ever seen that I thought had lousy cinematography, so bad that it distracted from the film.  There, I said it.  Cancel me.

Rogue One: Well, I suppose it was OK, but I wouldn’t say it was fantastic or anything.  One wonders why the Death Star plans are stored in some crystal citadel and this universe has no technology to copy any files electronically.  Amazingly, they can send holograms, but they can’t send data.  Oh, and a huge thumbs down for rubber-plastic Peter Cushing, who looks nothing like Peter Cushing and sounds even less like him.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote: I really wanted to like this.  I didn’t, but I really wanted to.  The problem isn’t that it’s bad.  The problem is that I liked it better when they called it Brazil, to paraphrase David Spade.  It’s the old “unreliable narrator” thing that Gilliam does so well, except he’s done it too much now.  Of note: Adam Driver should be in every film that’s poorly written (like this or the Star Wars films).  Driver has that ability, like Harrison Ford, to get some deep meaning out of ill-conceived dialogue.  He’s great in this.  The cast is actually almost all very good.  It’s just that the movie isn’t.  It’s beautiful, there’s a lot to look at and see, but in the end, it doesn’t do enough with the characters and it just doesn’t hold water.

In a World…  I get tagged on Facebook as the most racist, sexist, misogynist person who ever lived.  It’s not true, but it’s funny, so I go with it.  One of the reasons that I can prove it’s not true is that I loved this film.  Lake Bell directs and stars, and she does a masterful job.  It’s a cheap little indie film, but boy does it work.  In a lot of ways, it reminded me of Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle in that it simply presents its own reality and lets us draw our own conclusions.  It doesn’t try to drive home a message and instead gives the audience enough credit to think on its own (please note this Spike Lee.)  This film delves into the world of professional narrators, but it’s also Bell’s commentary on her own life.  This is an excellent picture.  I’m looking for Bell’s other film, but apparently it tanked and it’s not widely available.

Knives Out: This was a welcome break for me, because I’ve never been too keen on Daniel Craig as James Bond.  Craig doesn’t match the physicality of Bond in my opinion, so I always think I’m watching a James Bond knockoff.  In this film, I loved his performance.  He’s perfect.  This is a modern riff on “who killed the cranky old guy in the old spooky house.”  These have been done to death and they’re hard to do in a fresh way.  Director/writer Rian Johnson (hey, I just mentioned him earlier!) does a fantastic job with a wonderful cast.  This is one of my favorites of the last few years.

1917: I’m supposed to love this film.  Everyone complains about long-take subjective films like Lady in the Lake (which I loved) and Rope (which I liked).  This film doesn’t work for me.  It moves too fast and unflinchingly and the whole thing feels like a protracted gimmick.

Yesterday: I know a lot of people hated this one, but I liked it.  The central idea is that a guy wakes up after an accident to find that he’s the only one who remembers all of the songs by The Beatles.  The criticism is that a world without The Beatles would be even more different than it’s projected here, but that’s overthinking the premise.  They give no time at all as to why this event happens, because they want to focus on the events.  It’s funny, it’s poignant.  There’s a heartbreaking scene in which we see an elderly John Lennon painting by the seashore.  I was drawn to this because I am a longtime fan of Richard Curtis, the screenwriter (you’ll find I often watch a film more because of the screenwriter than the cast).  

The Farewell: Again, this was a wonderful story just giving us “here is my reality, here is what I am experiencing… you make your judgment.”  Wow.  This is ostensibly about a grandmother with end-stage lung cancer, but it’s really a story about clash between Chinese culture and American culture, about traditional Chinese culture and what it’s becoming, and it ends up being so thought-provoking that I can’t recommend it enough.  We think we understand China and what they’re doing.  We don’t.  Things are changing so fast there that I’m not even sure the Chinese understand it themselves.  The grandmother is not told about her condition because the family doesn’t want to upset her and cause her to give up the fight.  The American wing of the family thinks this is stupid and the Chinese wing wants to maintain tradition.  A coda: the real-life grandmother is still alive at this writing, but she now knows the story.

The Incredibles 2: A loving riff on 1960s films that works well.  Michael Giacchino’s “almost-John-Barry” score is a highlight.  He clearly loved Barry’s work, and I loved hearing the tribute.  The premise is a blast, the execution fun, and even though it’s a by-the-books “Save the Cat” sort of screenplay, I’ll give it a pass.  I liked the first one, too, but it’s a little older than 10 years.

Anomalisa: I’m a big fan of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.  This is a bizarre story, told in stop-motion with a sort of puppet.  Kaufman breaks screenwriting rules constantly, and I love him for it.  We’re never sure we actually like the protagonist and he never gets the “Save the Cat” standard “Howdy” moment.  But the cold alienation of being alone in a slick urban hotel… that’s portrayed so elegantly here.  The basic premise is that this guy is so out of it that everyone sounds and even looks mostly the same to him.  Then he meets Lisa, who has her own voice, different from all others. 

Bill and Ted Face the Music: OK, I have to admit that I loved the first two Bill and Ted movies and particularly the second film.  Any movie in which the heroes have to play a game against Death and they choose Twister is automatically three stars.  This sequel, almost 30 years after the last one, is welcome.  Again, this all comes down to screenwriting, and with Chris (son of Richard) Matheson and Ed Solomon at the helm, we’ve got a good one.  This hits all the right notes; it moves a little too fast because they want to squeeze all the old characters in it, but it’s not predictable, and seeing Death (William Sadler) return is worth the price of admission alone.  Sadler is one of those actors who should have been and still should be a bigger star than he is.  I could see him in some action films a la Liam Neeson.

Stan and Ollie: This is a movie with bad history, some questionable writing, and I’m still recommending it because the performances in it are so good that you just have to love it.  OK, maybe they didn’t nail the offscreen Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, but they sure nailed the onscreen versions of them.  Biopics are hard to do well, and this one is only partly a success, but enough of one that I say you should have fun with it.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Well, I really wanted to like this film, too.  Tarantino is kind of hit-and-miss for me.  There are a lot of things about this that I liked.  The performances are great.  The scenery looks and feels just like 1960s LA.  I’ll even take the fantasy that “this is the way I wish the Manson family and Sharon Tate had turned out.”  But this movie is too long.  I mean, it’s really, really, really, really too long.  And there’s some history in it that I just don’t go for, namely that “badass” Brad Pitt was able to hold his own against or even beat Bruce Lee.  Amazingly, Lee’s character is spot-on in looks and dialect, but asking us to believe he’d be challenged into a fight with the likes of Pitt’s character is just goofy.  (Lee wasn’t the kind of guy who would pick a fight or respond to the kind of bullying Pitt gave him.) Then there’s the 45-minute scene at the Manson ranch that seems to go on FOREVER, only to culminate with “Oh, hey, that’s Bruce Dern.”  Well, OK, it’s Bruce Dern.  As much as this is a lot of fun, it’s like ordering a slice of cake and getting the whole cake.  “Well, OK, it’s good, but I didn’t really WANT all that.”   I liked the way that Tarantino milked the scenes at the beginning of Inglourious Basterds, but this goes too far.  I felt like I was watching the Director’s Cut and I desperately wanted to see the official release version.

John Carter: Everyone said this was a bad picture.  It’s not.  I don’t know why it got so roundly panned.  It moves too fast.  Like so many modern films, it’s desperately allergic to its own plot and moves to get past it as quickly as it can.  That said, it’s fun, it feels Edgar-Rice-Burroughs-ish, the effects are good, the acting is good.  I guess Disney wanted to kill it!

The Lone Ranger: Again, I don’t understand the negative reaction from this one.  Johnny Depp in a strange, overwrought performance?  Did you guys not see the Pirates of the Caribbean movies?  Isn’t that what you expect?  Johnny Depp “culturally appropriating” Native American culture?  That’s what actors do.  It’s their job.  Harrison Ford is not Han Solo or Indiana Jones.  Part of the reason we go see Star Wars Part Xxviii is that we hope someone has bribed Harrison Ford to be in a cameo.  Same with Depp.  We go see him to see what he’s doing with a part.  Lone Ranger isn’t the greatest picture ever made, but it’s fun, and it’s got a great joke.  It’s made of up little parts of other movies as cute references.  If you’re a film geek (sign me up), it’s fun to watch this picture just for the jokes.

The Last of Robin Hood: Gee, Errol Flynn being played by Kevin Kline?  What’s not to love?  A lot.  I am second to none when it comes to loving Kline’s work, but he doesn’t really get Flynn.  He seems to be playing someone playing Flynn.  He’s not haggard and flabby enough for Flynn at that time, and Kline never gets the voice quite right.  He’s not bad, just not great.  The movie kind of plods along with not much of an idea on how it’s supposed to go.  Susan Sarandon is fine as the mother of Flynn’s underage paramour, and delivers an interesting performance, being confused and complicit all at once.  I wanted to like this a lot more than I did.

The Rules Don’t Apply: Plays well with Last of Robin Hood as a movie that doesn’t quite work. Warren Beatty isn’t a bad director, but the screenplay here is rambling and kinda lifeless.  Beatty seems to have called in lots of favors for people to do this film, and so there are cameos galore, but the whole thing seems rushed to get all the cameos in.  I mostly liked the picture (the attention to detail is marvelous) but it’s not as good as it should have been especially with all the talent involved.

I get a lot of questions from folks.  What is your favorite movie?  I don’t have one.  Why do you like bad movies?  I like all movies, but I end up preserving ones that no one cares about and these are sometimes bad.

Everyone has a different taste in movies.  I personally like something different.  A formula B western or gangster picture is boring to me.  I’ll freely admit that I’m usually not up for your modern superhero pictures.  I haven’t seen Batman Vs. Infinity Wars Part 6: A New Beginning.  I don’t intend to.

I got some requests to do mostly older films and a few to mostly newer films.  I am going mid-way and on things that I don’t think many of you have seen.  Things that got swept under the carpet.  Movies that most of you have probably not seen.

Ishtar (1987) OK.  I’m right off with one of the worst movies ever made.  Except it’s not.  It cost way too much, because director Elaine May chose to work in an improvisational style and get as many takes as she could, which doesn’t work when you’re directing expensive mega-stars like Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman.  While this is sort of a tribute to the Hope/Crosby Road films, it’s also more than that.  It’s a sendup of our long-standing hypocritical Middle East policy.  It’s a salute to those of us who hope we are really talented, but are less so than we’d like to believe.  I often hear the complaint that Beatty and Hoffman are terrible singers, but that’s the point.  Paul Williams has not written bad songs for them, but songs that consistently just miss the mark.  They’re not horrible, but they never quite work.  Another joke is that Hoffman plays the ladies’ man and Beatty is the oafish guy that women dislike—just the opposite of real life.  And Beatty is so good at this that he almost makes us believe it.  Worthy of mention and Academy nominations are Jack Weston as their agent who doesn’t have much faith in them, and especially Charles Grodin as the corrupt government official who lies to everyone.  Ishtar may not be the greatest film ever made, but it’s a very good one, and most people who hate it have never seen it.

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) And again, I’ll get brickbats from a lot of people who think this is awful.  They confuse it with the inexcusable Space Jam, which I can’t even watch.  Director Joe Danté manages to infuse this with a lot of movie lover in-jokes that most people would never understand.  For example, Kevin McCarthy (the actor, not the congressman) wanders across the screen carrying a seed pod from Invasion of the Body Snatchers while crying “They’re here!  They’re here!”  My favorite is still one in which Brendan Fraser and Daffy Duck run off the ledge of a building into a waiting airbag, thereby interrupting the filming of a Batman film.  The director comes up to them and complains, “Hey!  That airbag cost a lot of money!”  It’s Roger Corman.  Another good one: the climax is in Paris, and if you’re watching, there is a poster for a Jerry Lewis movie on every street corner.  I love attention to detail like this.  If you enjoy film geek jokes like these plus a myriad of cameos, and, oh, yeah, a lot of well-done Looney Tunes thrown in, this movie is a howl.  The only thing I can hold against it is that it derailed production of Mike Schlesinger’s legendary Godzilla film…

The Power (1968) I’m always amazed at the number of people who have never seen this one.  The Hollywood legend is that somehow producer George Pal evaporated after making The Time Machine (1960).  And MGM seems to have wanted to make Pal evaporate, and I’m not sure why.  They didn’t promote this at all), hoping it would tank and they’d get rid of Pal.  It worked.  But if you look just at the cast and crew of this one: director Byron Haskin, composer Miklos Rosza, actors Michael Rennie, Richard Carlson, Nehemiah Persoff, Suzanne Pleshette, Earl Holliman, Arthur O’Connell, and George Hamilton, you might think that this is a can’t-miss picture.  And it doesn’t miss.  It’s kind of a hybrid of The Fury (1978) and North by Northwest (1959).  The basic plot is kinda clever, too.  A top-secret research facility exposes a super-genius so smart that he could cause hallucinations, move objects, and, well, kill people.  The genius then proceeds to bump off everyone who might be able to expose him.  One of my favorite scenes is with Arthur O’Connell going into his office to retrieve some papers.  He turns to leave, and the door to his office seems to be missing, replaced with a half-wall.  O’Connell returns with a ladder to step over the wall, and now it goes to the ceiling.  Suddenly, he realizes he might not be in his office at all.  This film has a great, chilling score, nice cinematography, and some wonderful creepy ideas.  It’s been unjustly neglected.   The bad guy makes you see what he wants you to see, so you’re never sure who he is, and you’ll be guessing until the last moment.  Again, it’s not a perfect film, because there are a few goofy moments that don’t really work.  Arthur O’Connell’s parents seem not much older than he was.  Hamilton’s escape from a firing range seems a little too convenient.  Suzanne Pleshette comes off rather flat and delivers her expository lines at the film’s conclusion in the dullest possible way, a rare misfire in a stellar career.  But those are minor carpings.  There are so many chilling scenes that I forgive it all.  Nehemiah Persoff’s death is just creepy.  The crosswalk changing from DON’T WALK to DON’T RUN is unforgettable.

Hopscotch (1980) Walter Matthau had a nose for strong screenplays.  Twice he appeared in great Peter Stone films (Charade [1963] and The Taking of Pelham 123 [1974]).  This time around, he was working with Brian Garfield, best remembered for his novel Death Wish.  Garfield wasn’t particularly enamored with the violent 1974 film version, so he challenged himself to write a chase story in which no one is hurt, but there’s still tension and a sense of danger.  Oh, and it’s funny, too.  The plot is simple: A CIA man (Matthau) is unfairly railroaded by his snotty boss (Ned Beatty) and decides to quit.  Except he doesn’t tell anyone he’s quit, and he goes on a merry chase, writing a tell-all exposé of all the stupid tales of his career.  The CIA wants him stopped, and the Russians agree.  It’s a complete delight as Matthau tours Europe, always a step ahead of the people who want to kill him, taunting them with a new chapter in every new locale. With a great supporting cast, including Sam Waterston, Glenda Jackson, Herbert Lom, and two of Matthau’s kids, this is a closet classic.  Apparently, it’s been tied up with legal issues, which is a real shame.  In my opinion, it’s superior to the previous Matthau/Jackson teaming, House Calls (1978).

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) Billy Wilder is a somewhat controversial figure these days.  A lot of his films bear a certain cynicism that many find somewhat off-putting, and Scott Eyman has shown that it increased through his career.  Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of his “greatest” film, Some Like It Hot (1959), which I consider too long and too slow.  So of course I’d love a movie that’s even longer and slower.  This one was once much longer, and was shorn of about 30 minutes of introduction.  Sherlock Holmes was always, in the books and in the films, a complex plot device to solve crimes.  His interactions with other people seemed a little forced to me, because he seemed to exist only to move the plot along.  That doesn’t mean he’s not a great character, because he has a lot of writer-friendly, usable quirks.  So Wilder’s twist on this is irresistible to me.  Let’s delve into Holmes’ personal life.  Was Sherlock gay?  That’s the first part of the subplots here.  Could he fall in love?  That’s the longer story.  I won’t spoil this for you, because most of the fun of the film is watching it unfold and being just a hair ahead of Sherlock as you figure it out.  The movie isn’t perfect: a plot point involving Loch Ness requires it to be salt water, which it isn’t.  Another twist involving Queen Victoria is marred by a performance that is too comedic and over-the-top.  But there are so many other pleasures here.  Christopher Lee makes a great non-canon Mycroft Holmes, and the scene in which he slowly dresses Sherlock down for being stupid is one of his finest career moments.  He’s wonderful in this scene, and of course Mycroft gets his own comeuppance soon after.  But the culmination of Sherlock’s romance is truly heartbreaking.  For the first time, we feel for him as a person, and it’s amazing.  Some of Wilder’s films do nothing for me, including the later The Front Page (1974), which managed to waste Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett by rewriting too much of the nearly perfect original play.  (Of course, the play was murdered once again by its much-worse remake, Switching Channels [1988]). As much as it pains me to agree with him, Michael Schlesinger is probably right that One, Two, Three (1961) is another underrated gem from Wilder, whose work is hit-and-miss for me. 

Real Genius (1985) This is a film that got doubly lost in a morass of too many other pictures.  In a summer where we had Weird Science and My Science Project, both of which were lousy, this movie appeared, and it was actually funny and fresh.  Real Genius also lost because of too many “horny teenager” pictures in the 1980s.  The reason that this one is different is that it’s got a tight script, zippy direction, and a fine cast.  A gifted freshman (Gabe Jarret) is recruited to a top college, rooming with an eccentric genius (Val Kilmer) as they work on an advanced laser.  Along the way they interact with an even more eccentric genius (Jon Gries) who lives in the university’s steam tunnels, and a hyperkinetic mechanical engineer (Michelle Meyrink) who seems to be working at all hours of the day and night.  The plot twists around their duplicitous professor (William Atherton, at the peak of his sleaziness) who has pre-sold their laser research to the military for nefarious uses.  This movie marks a change in the treatment of geniuses in movies.  In the 40s, we had the strange, insanely driven mad doctors. In the 50s, we had amoral scientists but also manly Richard Carlson-like folks.  After that, we had socially awkward geeks who couldn’t function at all, becoming the focus of derision (see Eddie Deezen in War Games for an example of this sort of character).  Real Genius moves the pendulum back in the right direction, with some social awkwardness, but a lot of moral ability and cleverness thrown back in.  This is one of my favorite films of the 80s, and one that holds up on repeated viewings.  I wish there’d been a sequel… maybe there still can be.  Martha Coolidge does a marvelous job directing this picture.  I wish she worked more often.  Like Michael Curtiz, Coolidge, so they tell me, can be… unpleasant… but wow, she can make good pictures.

Hollywood Shuffle (1987) I’ve long disliked the movies of Spike Lee, because they just seem so precious and preachy to me that I expect him to pass the offertory plate before the third act starts.  I recently had to watch Minstrel Show and I thought it was too obvious and strained.  Same for many of his other films.  So before you #cancel me for being racist, let me recommend this picture, by another, I think superior, African-American director.  Again, it’s one of my favorites of the 80s.  Robert Townsend, in his first picture, does something I’ve never seen Lee do: he simply presents his reality, spoofing it somewhat, and lets us make up our own minds.  Townsend’s visual style is straightforward, but his real gift is with screenwriting and handling actors.  Like Bill Cosby (#cancelledAgain), Townsend has turned his experience as an African American actor into something universal that we can all relate to.  His character works at a dead-end job at a hot dog stand called Winky Dinky Dog, and he hates it.  I identified with it so much that I used his boss’ speech (extolling the virtues of Winky Dinky Dog) as my computer start-up sound until my real-life boss saw this film and made me take the sound off.  The legend is that Townsend needed to sell the film to a studio before the end of the month because otherwise he wouldn’t be able to pay off his credit cards.  You’ve gotta love him for that.  I also love him for some of his other films, including the wildly underrated Meteor Man (1993).  Townsend is one of my favorite living directors.  Cancel me for that, buckaroos.

Avanti! (1971) Yes, another Billy Wilder, and yes, another one you haven’t seen.  I’m not big on any of Wilder’s Lemmon/Matthau films, although (as you can see) I love both Lemmon and Matthau.  Wilder seemed to become more and more hostile toward most of humanity as he progressed in life, and this movie is an example of that.  It does destroy some films like Buddy Buddy, but for whatever reason, there’s still some redeeming humanity in this one.  A lot of it comes from the transformation of Lemmon’s character, which works, and some comes from great support from Clive Revill, who makes his second appearance on this list, with a third to show up.  Even better is Juliet Mills, who is supposed to be playing an unattractive fat woman, and manages only to be charming, while being neither unattractive nor fat.  Wilder’s sexism is on display here, with Mills being referred to as “fat ass,” which is insulting to everyone, especially the audience.  However, getting past that, there’s a nice story here, with a nervous exec (Lemmon) being forced to visit an Italian resort to pick up the body of his father, who was killed in an unfortunate accident.  Mills is there to pick up her mother, also killed in an accident.  As the story progresses, we discover that it was the same accident that killed both people and that they were together having a once-a-year affair.  Of course, this is beyond bearable for Lemmon, whose father was a family man, and the endless red tape that the Italians put in the way maddens him.  Lemmon manages to build a giddy intensity that reminds me a little of One, Two, Three without losing the effect of the slow-paced local charm and lovely photography on the island.  It’s a great contrast, and it works very well in this unusual film.  I’m not quite sure why this never got a bigger audience.  It’s very funny and holds up well despite the sexist material that we get concerning Mills.  The ending is predictable, but it’s cute enough.  I wish Mills had been a bigger star.  She’s every bit as good as her more famous sister.  Acting talent runs in that family.  

Zorro the Gay Blade (1981) Everyone remembers Love at First Bite (1979), but this one was by a lot of the same people and it, alas, had distribution problems.  It’s a pity, because it’s really a much better picture.  A rich California plantation owner dies and leaves his secret to his son, Diego (George Hamilton).  Turns out the old man was actually Zorro, and now Diego must wear the mask to battle the new Alcalde (Ron Liebman).  Diego breaks his foot in an ill-timed jump… but that’s OK, because his identical twin brother (also Hamilton) shows up to claim his inheritance, and he, too, can be Zorro.  However, the brother, Ramon, is gay, and he has a great deal of trouble impersonating his straight brother.  Now, before I get #cancelled 100 times, this movie isn’t homophobic.  Yes, the bad guys in it make gay jokes, but most of them are dispatched by the end of the picture.  Ramon is treated respectfully by all of the heroes, including lovely Charlotte Taylor Wilson (Lauren Hutton), who has fallen for the straight Zorro and is unaware of the switch.  Hamilton has a reputation of being something of an acting lightweight, but he takes on heavy duties here.  Not only is he the two brothers, but he also plays Ramon imitating Diego, Ramon posing as their lost sister, and a mysterious priest who steals the Alcalde’s horse.  He’s marvelous.  Also marvelous is the support from his mute servant Paco (Donovan Scott), and the Alcalde’s conniving wife (Brenda Vaccaro).  Hutton leaves a little something to be desired, but she’s passable.  This is a grand film in he old Hollywood tradition, best described as Bob Hope by way of Mel Brooks.  It’s also somewhat in the Michael Curtiz swashbuckler tradition, and it steals a great bit from a Curtiz picture: the score is largely borrowed from the Errol Flynn picture The Adventures of Don Juan (1948), which was written by Max Steiner.  It’s been enhanced and rearranged, but the guts of it are still there.  That makes this film feel all the more like an authentic Hollywood Zorro picture.  It’s worth seeking out on DVD if you can find it.  Apparently, the new owners, Disney, have been wanting to cancel this one for a long time.