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Classic Movie Update, 6/13

Raquel.

By Jason Apuzzo. • The biggest classic movie news by far this week was the discovery in New Zealand of a treasure trove of silent films thought previously lost, including a print of John Ford’s film, Upstream.  LFM contributor Jennifer Baldwin covered this story yesterday, including the fundraising efforts of the movie-blogging community toward film preservation.  Check Jennifer’s post for full details on these efforts, as well as links if you wish to contribute.  You can also read more about the New Zealand discovery and ongoing preservation efforts in The New York Times or in The LA Times.

• The New York Times also did a joint review of the new autobiographies out by Raquel Welch and Pam Grier – Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage and Pam’s Foxy: My Life in Three Acts.  These two extraordinary ladies were the top cult movie heroines of their era, although Raquel’s career also crossed over into big mainstream faire.  Raquel recently had some electrifying appearances on Fox News (especially her hilarious interview with Neil Cavuto), and also guest hosted on Turner Classic Movies a few months ago.  Both of these ladies are still going strong, looking fabulous, and are dispensing a lot of good advice to the young women of today.  And can we all agree that Beyond the Cleavage is easily the greatest title ever?  (Surpassing even Russ Meyer’s 3-volume autobiography, A Clean Breast.)  You can buy both Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage and Foxy: My Life in Three Acts in the LFM Store below, along with some of Raquel and Pam’s best films.

• A new Charlie Chan box set is out from Turner Classic Movies.  Pick up a copy in the LFM Store below.

• Can it be 35 years since Jaws came out?  Apparently it is.  Next week marks the 35th anniversary of Jaws’ release!  I still remember seeing the film with my grandmother when it came out … and I still think it’s the best non-Indiana Jones film Spielberg’s ever made, with really nothing surpassing it as a thriller except maybe Hitchcock’s Psycho.  Jaws and Star Wars together are probably the greatest summer movies of all time, films that really defined the moviegoing era of the 1970’s.  There’s a documentary that’s been making the rounds the last few years called The Shark is Still Working about the making of Jaws and the film’s impact on our culture, and the doc just had a screening yesterday at the Portland Underground Film Festival.  Best wishes to the filmmakers on that, and Happy 35th to Jaws.  You can buy a copy of Jaws in the LFM Store above.

• AND FINALLY … Andy Warhol’s classic print of Elizabeth Taylor has gone up for sale. I have a bid in but it’s probably on the low side …

Posted on June 13th, 2010 at 3:51pm.

Forbidden Planet, Iron Man 2 and Soviet Cosmonauts in 3D!

By Jason Apuzzo. Just for fun on the weekend, we thought we’d post some 3D video.  You will need an old-fashioned pair of anaglyphic (i.e., red-blue) 3D glasses in order to enjoy these videos to their fullest effect.  If you don’t happen to have such glasses, you can get a free pair here, or you can even make your own.  [Another thing you can do is buy a DVD for an anaglyphic 3D film like Robert Rodriguez’s Shark Boy and Lava Girl.  Such DVDs always come with a few pairs of anaglyphic 3D glasses.]

• Up above, Andrew Murchie and the team at Enhanced Dimensions have retrofit the trailer for the classic 50’s sci-fi epic Forbidden Planet into anaglyphic 3D.  Take a look at it … preferably at a distance of about 3-5 feet.  It’s really fun.

• Ever imagine what Iron Man 2 might look like in 3D?

A company called 3DGuy converted one of the flashier scenes from Iron Man 2 into anaglyphic 3D, and you can check that out here.

Make sure to watch the Iron Man 2 video in the highest resolution possible for the best possible 3D effect.

• You can also check out a campy, eccentric little short film called “Glory to the Conquerors of Space in 3D,” from Atomic Cheesecake Productions.  “Glory” is about a retro-style female Soviet cosmonaut who has a strange series of pseudo-erotic encounters on a planet full of blue people.  [There’s no graphic imagery.]  James Cameron might want to take a look at this one.  The film played in Slamdance’s online competition in December.

[Editor’s note: “Glory to the Conquerors of Space in 3D” features some mature situations.  Viewer discretion advised.]

3D can be a lot of fun, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on 3D projects large and small here at LFM …

Posted on June 13th, 2010 at 1:36pm.

Island of Lost Films

By Jennifer Baldwin. For classic movie cinephiles, the discovery of old films once thought to be lost is one of the more thrilling aspects of our fandom. There are so many silent-era films that have been lost to the twin scourges of time and neglect that when a new discovery is made — such as the case with the recently discovered print of METROPOLIS containing footage previously thought lost — it’s the cinema equivalent of an archeologist discovering artifacts from a forgotten civilization.

Back in the day — before film preservation was finally acknowledged as a worthwhile historical enterprise — silent films and other older movies that were past their “sell date” were deemed to have no commercial value by the film studios (and were often dangerous to store, since the nitrate film stock used in the silent era is so highly flammable), and so these films were often left alone to deteriorate and die or were even melted down on purpose in order to extract the silver from the emulsion. Thousands of films are believed to be lost to history thanks to the ravages of time and neglect.

But these are exciting times. Not only the recent discovery of the lost METROPOLIS footage in Argentina, but now, a discovery in the New Zealand Film Archive of dozens of American films from the early part of the twentieth century, including a once-thought-lost John Ford silent feature called UPSTREAM (It’s a backstage drama! From John Ford!). Seventy-five of these rediscovered films are en-route to the U.S. right now for preservation and restoration.

If you love old movies as well as history, this is awesome news. But I’m not just writing about this because it’s awesome news. I’m writing about this because I want conservative movie lovers to get involved. Actually, I’m sure there are plenty of conservative movie lovers already involved but I just wanted to see if I could get even more conservatives involved because I believe it’s a cause that we on the Right should and need to be involved in.

Why film preservation? What’s so conservative about that? Well, the most obvious answer is actually the best one:  since conservatives are usually pretty keen on preserving and respecting our cultural heritage they should also be pretty keen on helping to restore and keep alive historical artifacts like old films. It’s as simple as that. These films are part of our history and as conservatives we claim to respect history and want to preserve American culture – well, here’s our chance.

Part of our mission here at LFM is to celebrate and promote cinema and the arts – and what better way for those of us on the Right to do this than by contributing to film preservation?

But conservative movie lovers should get involved in preservation efforts not only because it’s a good thing to do, but also as a way to show that conservatives are interested in culture in a positive way and not just as a means to score political points. I might be a little unfair in this critique of conservatives – because there ARE conservatives out there writing and commenting on film and culture that do it intelligently and with great love and enthusiasm – but there has also been a tendency for conservatives on the internet and elsewhere to simply bash Hollywood and retreat from the mainstream culture.

Standing up for our cultural past means more than just wistfully saying “I wish they still made movies like that today!” It means actually supporting and championing those cultural objects from days gone by. It means putting your money where your wistful heart is. There are opportunities now for ordinary film lovers to help save and preserve older films. Continue reading Island of Lost Films

The Fresh Prince of Beijing: A Guest Review of The Karate Kid

Jaden Smith, the new "Karate Kid."

[Editor’s Note: since the Chinese government exercised editorial control over the new Sony remake of The Karate Kid, LFM has decided to invite an officially sanctioned Chinese film critic, People’s Film Commissar Wo Fat, to do a guest review of the film.  This review has been translated from the original Mandarin by Jason Apuzzo, a long-time friend and golfing-partner of Wo Fat’s.]

By People’s Film Commissar Wo Fat. Greetings, dear readers of Libertas.  It is my pleasure to accept Comrade Apuzzo’s kind invitation to review the new American-Chinese co-production of The Karate Kid. I feel that by reviewing this most extraordinary and historic cinema co-production on the arch-imperialist website Libertas, that we are opening up a new era of cooperation and understanding!

With special assistance from the Sony corporation, we have made several changes to your original Karate Kid, a warmongering, Reagan-era film that was pock-marked – like the blemished faces of your pimply American teenagers – with the backward, revanchist rhetoric of that era.  In our new Karate Kid, we no longer have young New Jersey teenager Daniel and his economically disenfranchised mother seek a new life in the state of California.  Instead, we have young ‘Dre’ – played with scrappy insouciance by Jaden Smith (son of your American movie star, Comrade Will Smith!) – seek his fortune in a more suitable land of opportunity: mainland China.  In the new Karate Kid, a heartless American automotive company in Detroit shifts the job held by Dre’s mother to Beijing.  Since America offers no other possible job opportunities for her, she is forced to make the only economically rational decision: move herself and her son 10,000 kilometers to the (Far) East, even though they don’t speak Chinese!

Once in Beijing, young Dre begins to learn salient facts about our glorious People’s Republic!  For example, in his first encounter with Wise Mentor Jackie Chan, young Dre learns that unreliable electricity in Beijing has the side benefit of ‘saving the planet’ – unlike in America, where a consistent power supply in suburban homes causes excess fuel consumption.  True!  [Jason Apuzzo asks: didn’t this scene omit the fact that China is actually the world’s largest polluter, and that millions of Chinese citizens have been forcefully moved from their homes to make way for the enormous, electricity-generating Three Gorges Dam? [Comments edited by Wo Fat.]

A forbidden romance at The Forbidden City.

Young Comrade Dre also develops a schoolboy crush on a cute Chinese girl named Meiying (played by Wenwen Han).  Meiying is an aspiring violinist, trying to rise in China’s glorious and edifying music world.  Dre’s vitality  and rough American charm (son of Will Smith!) warms her heart, and brings added zest to her music playing … and isn’t this a marvelous metaphor for Chinese-American cooperation?  Young Dre even lets Meiying listen to hip-hop music off his Sony music player, a product that neatly matches the Sony computer screens and Sony TV monitors placed conspicuously throughout the film.  The Karate Kid is part of the Sony product line, after all!

Anyway, young Dre’s growing affection for Meiying gets him in trouble with some local bullies who are friends of her family’s.  And here I want to point out: the bullies depicted in this film are not normal figures in the New China.  They are counter-revolutionaries, and enemies of the people!  The People’s Republic has graciously consented to allow this depiction of anti-social behavior in order to further the plotline of Sony’s film, but the actors depicting these bullies have since been reprimanded and are currently serving 70 years’ hard labor in a coal mine in Shanxi. Continue reading The Fresh Prince of Beijing: A Guest Review of The Karate Kid

Discovering Good Kids’ Movies

By David Ross. The sight of pelicans trudging through the black crud of the gulf may particularly resonate with parents. This is rather what it’s like to raise a kid these days. You try to fly above the mess, but you wind up covered in muck and drowning in sludge. The difference, of course, is that BP’s gulf catastrophe was accidental, while the engineers of the kiddy culture execute a conscious and cynical plan. With all of this in mind, let me – vigilant father of a four year old – share a few of our happier experiments in what my daughter calls “watching.”

The live-action children’s films and TV of the last thirty years are largely moronic and corrosive. They militate against the values and mores of the adult world (discipline, delayed gratification, respect for legitimate authority, etc.), and acclimate kids to a norm of cliché. I wonder how many of the missing kids on the back of milk cartons we can attribute to the cliché of would-be adventurers sneaking out the window and climbing down the vine trellis? The best bet is simply to write off this swathe of cinematic history, the manipulative cultural politics of E.T. and Sesame Street included (see Kay Hymowitz’s classic essay in City Journal.)

My chief counter-recommendations are Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet (1944), both starring Elizabeth Taylor and a roster of outstanding British character actors. I’m tempted to call these the best live-action children’s movies ever made. Both films are morally sophisticated without crossing the line into adult difficulty, and there is enough suspense at enough different levels to rivet the whole family. Other live-action gems are Cheaper by the Dozen (1950), starring the eternally charming Myrna Loy, and The Trouble with Angels (1966), starring Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills.

From "The Trouble With Angels."

The Trouble with Angels – which may be my very favorite kid’s movie – tells the story of a teenage troublemaker (Mills) who is sent to a convent school run by a formidable mother superior (Russell). Mills engages in various subversive high jinks – powdered soap in the sugar bowls, etc. – but gradually comes to respect the nuns’ example of quiet dignity and selflessness and in the end decides to join the order herself. What’s striking about the film from our twenty-first century perspective is how firmly and confidently it’s on the side of adult authority rather than teenage rebellion. The film takes for granted that Mills and her fellow students are ignorant and immature and that they require adult guidance; so too the film takes for granted that adults have something to teach.

The Trouble with Angels is no masterpiece, but it reminds us how radically the culture has changed. Far from teaching what it means to be an adult, today’s kiddy fare ceaselessly sounds the trumpet of revolt against parent and school, commitment and discipline, anything that thwarts the impulse of the moment. Practically, such films do the bidding of a trillion-dollar advertising-entertainment nexus that sees in every emancipated, impulsive child an emancipated, impulsive consumer. The contemporary American adult, meanwhile, submissively accepts the dismantling of his own authority, having absorbed over a lifetime the Baby-Boomer doctrine that the stern adult is always the bad guy. It occurs to me that an entire counterrevolutionary parenting philosophy is contained in the simple injunction to behave more like Rosalind Russell in The Trouble with Angels and less like Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame. Continue reading Discovering Good Kids’ Movies

“The Young Marines”

By Jason Apuzzo. Later today we’ll be posting a review of Sony’s Karate Kid remake. The Karate Kid, as everybody knows, is about a young kid who trains himself in the martial arts in order to protect himself from bullying and to rebuild his self-esteem.

The Karate Kid reminded me of a nice little short that I caught recently called, “The Young Marines.” “The Young Marines” is about the Young Marine program, that serves a similar function for young people – and also puts them on a path to serving their country.  Enjoy.

Footnote: unlike with The Karate Kid, the Chinese government did not have editorial oversight of this short.

Posted on June 11th, 2010 at 9:11am.