Finder of lost movies, loser of lost movies

I've mentioned the website Internet Archive on here a couple times, so I thought it was time to finally devote a proper post to it -- especially since I was planning a weekend of watching movies I had unearthed on this internet library that I couldn't find anywhere else.

That only half worked out.

The Internet Archive, which can be found at archive.org, describes itself thusly:

"The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."

Now, I'm not quite sure how this mission coexists with the copyright held on particular films, and the right for the owner to show or distribute those films in a manner that generates them revenue. But the fact remains that this free resource exists, is open to the general public, and contains, by its own current count, 16,255 feature films.

Not only have I used this resource to get my hands on several films I had to watch for various movie challenges and could not otherwise source, but sometimes I go fishing to see the availability of more common films, ones with a healthy expected digital rental market, just to continue to blow my own mind that this resource exists.

I don't want this to become a replacement for watching films that are available in other forms. For one, it involves me hooking up my computer to my TV with an HDMI cable, which is a bit of a hassle. Sometimes I'd just prefer to click a button on the TV. Then there's the fact that there's some buffering involved in most viewings, so it makes sense to pause it and let it catch up for a while if you have the time. 

But the way it gave me hope of seeing films I hadn't seen in ages, or had never seen, was exhilarating.

On Friday I watched the film whose poster you see above, Ken Annakin's The Pirate Movie from 1982.

Anyone younger than I am probably has no idea what this is. But imagine a spoof of Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance that was clearly inspired by the success of Airplane!, but in additional to parodies of the songs from that musical, there are also pop songs and gooey love songs written in 1982 that are meant to turn stars Kristy McNichol and Christopher Atkins into dreamboats who would appear on the cover of Teen Beat or the gone-but-not-forgotten magazine Dynamite, to which I had a subscription.

Don't remember Dynamite? Thanks again to the internet for obliging in a different manner:

Had this been McNichol's hairstyle in The Pirate Movie I might not have fallen hard for her. But she looks as she does in the poster you see above, and is spunky as heck, so it was love at first sight. 

It was sometime between 1983 and 1985 that I encountered the movie, as those were the years we subscribed to The Movie Channel and my mom recorded all sorts of movies on VHS that she never watched, that sat in plastic tubs in our basement with her cursive handwriting appearing on the labels. She recorded movies for me as well, and those were the movies I watched repeatedly as a kid.

Despite a mixture of incongruous ambitions that probably wouldn't fly today, The Pirate Movie worked on me like gangbusters as a ten- to 12-year-old. I laughed at the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker style jokes and swooned at McNichol as she sung about her character Mabel's tragic love with the pirate Frederic (Atkins). I'm sure I watched it ten times but if you told me it was 20, I wouldn't call you a liar.

But after about 1990, it was completely unavailable. 

More accurately, I should say I did not seek it out during the 1990s, as these were my college and grad school years and I probably wasn't seeking the jolt of nostalgia The Pirate Movie would have provided. I'm sure you could have found it on the shelves of video stores, at least for a time.

Suffice it to say that it did not make the transition to DVD or digital. Now that nostalgia is more important to me, I've casted about for The Pirate Movie over the past decade or so, sure I would brush up against it accidentally at some point. Never happened.

Until Internet Archive.

I hadn't actually thought to use Internet Archive specifically to look for The Pirate Movie until Friday during the day at work, when I must have been on there for some other reason. Upon finding The Pirate Movie, I was so excited to put it on that I actually started watching it while I was still working.

There's something else I should tell you about The Pirate Movie: Everyone else thinks it's terrible. In fact, in searching back for my mentions of The Pirate Movie on The Audient -- a little surprised to find there had only been one, or at least only one time I tagged the movie -- I found this comment on this 2010 post:

"I'm sorry, but there's no excuse for liking the Pirate Movie. It's one of the worst movies and waste of money of all time."

So in the 30+ years it's been since I've seen The Pirate Movie, I've had time to think of it as the ultimate guilty pleasure. Something I should be ashamed of liking, that when I did finally see it again, I would find to be terrible.

Guess what? I still love it.

Now, I don't think it's possible to separate out the nostalgia component. You can't see a movie you first watched 40 years ago with a clean slate that's unencumbered by your memories. Part of the joy of watching an old movie is remembering the line readings, the inflections in actors' voices during jokes, the jokes themselves, etc. For those of us who watch Airplane! today -- something I have now not done in probably 15 years -- you don't watch them to laugh anew, but to remember the laughs of yesteryear in jokes that you wear like a favorite bathrobe.

But I got the same joy out of watching The Pirate Movie that I would have gotten out of Airplane! or The Naked Gun, and I still fell a little bit for the spunky charm of McNichol, a truly charismatic performer who didn't have the career she should have had. Speaking of careers cut short, the film's hilarious villain is played by an Australian actor named Ted Hamilton (the whole film having been shot in Australia). Given how funny this blowhard is, imagine my surprise that The Pirate Movie was the only feature film he ever appeared in. (Actually, it wouldn't be too late to appear in another, as he's still alive at age 86.) The movie was obviously such a failure that he slunk back to a few guest appearances on TV shows, amassing only four more credits before his career ended in 2002. 

In honor of an actor who should have gotten more work, I invite you to watch this clip, to give you a sense both of his presence and of the movie's general Airplane!-style tone.

Now that I've discovered Internet Archive has The Pirate Movie, I think I'll make revisiting it a more regular thing. However its jokes land for you, I found it an incredibly good-natured movie that leaves me with a warm fuzzy feeling. It nourishes me like the best cinematic comfort food.

But I can't rely on its long-term availability on Internet Archive, because another movie I thought I was going to watch there is already gone.

I can't say for sure why Dominik Moll's Lemming had such an impact on me when I saw it in 2007. It's a four-person French psychological thriller that, if memory serves, involves mental breakdown, exchanging of partners, and weird noises in the night in an apartment. My memory of the movie is largely a memory of a mood. 

I was hoping to refresh that memory when I saw that Lemming was available on Internet Archive. In fact, I'm quite sure I wasn't imagining it, since I saw it fit to mention my planned upcoming viewing of the movie in this post. 

I arrived home too late on Saturday night from watching the Melbourne Aces play a doubleheader to be able to watch the 2+ hour movie then. So I teed it up for viewing last night instead.

And found no trace of it on Internet Archive.

I tried all sorts of different search terms. I tried the name of the director. I tried the name of the stars. I tried the French title for the movie (which didn't help, because it is also Lemming). 

Had I not actually seen this available on Internet Archive? I thought I had actually begun playing the film to test it out, which is what I do anytime I find a too-good-to-be-true availability of a film on a certain resource (usually YouTube).

Or did the copyright owner come and track it down after all?

It would be hard to say. I'm sure if a movie was once on Internet Archive but the site faces a legal challenge, they just purge the item in question, no questions asked. I'd say the mission statement of this site likely protects it from the notion that someone would be making money on the copyright, but that when someone comes after them, they just stand down straight away.

If that's the case, I wonder what the hell the Lemming copyright owner does intend to do with the movie, because I can't find it anywhere, and this makes me very grumpy. It's an especially strange outcome given that it stars Charlotte Rampling and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Alas, there are also the movies I haven't been able to find and still can't find. I hoped Internet Archive would finally expose me again to a favorite from the 1990s, Suri Krishnamma's A Man of No Importance, starring Albert Finney, Rufus Sewell and Tara Fitzgerald. You'll know how long I've been looking for this from another 2010 post, the second I've linked to in this post, in which it is one of a few movies I focused on that I already couldn't find then. The post even got its name as a riff on the title: "Movies of no importance."

Well, Internet Archive does have the trailer for the movie. But not the rest of the movie.

It may one day provide "universal access to all knowledge," but not today.