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.

The prequel to Airplane!, the prequel to Elizabeth Hurley

On Saturday night I watched a movie you'd think I would have seen ages ago. After all, when you really love a parody, you have a natural curiosity about the thing that inspired that parody.

The parody I love is Airplane! (called Flying High in Australia -- true story!), and the thing that inspired it is Airport, George Seaton's 1970 disaster movie. It's one of the famous 70s disaster movies with an all-star cast, alongside something like Towering Inferno. I saw Inferno way back in college, but it took until I was a 43-year-old man to finally see one of the granddaddies of the airplane-in-peril genre.

Although more plot elements of the original Airplane! are out of Airport '75 (or is it Airport '77?), there's no doubt that this movie provided the template for the jokes in the Zucker-Abrahams spoof classic. That's especially so because those other two movies were direct sequels to this one. Actually, in a bit of counterintuitive logic, Airplane II: The Sequel actually derives its plot about a crazy bomber directly from the first Airport movie ... with the notable change of the bomb in the suitcase being on a space shuttle instead of an airplane, of course. Sonny Bono memorably plays the bomber in Airplane II, while here the role is essayed by an actor named Van Heflin. But the details of the execution are almost identical, from both actors being twitchy and refusing to stop clutching their briefcases (called an "attache case" in Airport) to the rest of the passengers gathering behind Dean Martin and/or Robert Hays as he tries to talk the bomber down (having the passengers in the parody lean so far in as to actually absent-mindedly fondle Ted Striker while waiting to see what will happen).

I laughed repeatedly during Airport, but not primarily because of the hokey writing and dated pacing (it takes a full hour before the plane in peril even gets off the ground). No, it was laughter inspired by a new appreciation of how spot-on the parody in Airplane! is, including white courtesy vs. red courtesy phones, stands at the airport that sell life insurance policies, the self-serious air traffic controller jargon that makes excessive use of the word "niner," and the domestic entanglements/squabbles of the various professionals brought in to address the crisis.

All that said, I'm not entirely sure I can recommend Airport because of just how slow it is. For the first hour of the movie you'd think that the greatest crisis they have on their hands is a snow storm, and whether one particular flight from Chicago to Rome is going to get off the ground. Nowadays, flight cancellations are as commonplace as airline peanuts -- or perhaps more so, as many airlines have moved away from actual peanuts. (And in Airport, one passenger actually complains about a package of those freebie snacks being stale.)

Perhaps the single most surprising element that originated in this movie is the slapping of hysterical passengers, one of the most memorable scenes in the Zucker-Abrahams parody. There are two different instances of a hysterical passengers being slapped in this movie, though one is certainly played for comedy, as it's a priest doing the slapping. That was really the only moment in the whole movie where they appeared to be winking at us.

There's also a hilariously long amount of time spent on a subplot about a little old lady who flies airlines without buying tickets, as a stowaway. In the days after 9/11, it is simply inconceivable to us that there could have been a time when security was so lax that people without tickets could get on planes. A variation on this character shows up in Airplane! as well. Then again, when it's the guy who actually bought a ticket who tries to blow up this plane with a bomb, maybe little old lady stowaways should be the least of their security concerns.

Now for the other half of the title of this post. There are a lot of big names in this movie, from Martin to Burt Lancaster to George Kennedy to Maureen O'Hara. But there was one I hadn't seen in anything for so long, I had sort of forgotten what she looked like, especially since I'd never seen her in anything when she was this young.

Well, what she looked like was a lot like Elizabeth Hurley.

That's Jacqueline Bisset I'm talking about, and once I saw it, I couldn't un-see it. It doesn't hurt the comparison that she's also British, like the model-turned-actor who was once Hugh Grant's love interest.

I'll let you judge for yourself:

It's not only that I could see Elizabeth Hurley playing her in the remake -- if the remake had been made 20 years ago -- but part of me wondered if Hurley had actually jumped in a time machine and gone back to 1970 to star in the original.

They've both got aging well in common, as Bisset still looks beautiful at age 72, while Hurley might not even need the hypothetical Airport remake to have been made 20 years ago in order to star in it -- she just turned 52 yesterday and is still stunning:

A couple of foolish movies

Without really meaning to, my wife and I celebrated April Fools' weekend by watching a couple appropriately foolish movies.

They were appropriate not because they were about people coordinating elaborate practical jokes, but just because they were so darn silly.

It started on Saturday night, when we abandoned our plans to watch the first OSS 117 movie starring Jean Dujardin and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, subtitled Cairo, Nest of Spies. We'd already seen the second, subtitled Lost in Rio, and enjoyed it so much that were eager to save the first for a special occasion. Saturday was deemed not special enough when we took too long to get started, and weren't sure exactly how well our mushy Saturday night brains would handle the subtitles. So we exchanged one movie that would have been plenty silly for another that was probably even sillier, watching Airplane! instead. For only my wife's second time, and probably my dozenth -- but first in at least 20 years.

Cairo, Nest of Spies got bumped again on Sunday night, for approximately the same reasons. Its replacement was chosen even more hastily than Airplane!, which had at least been in our streaming queue already. In fact, it was because we had watched Airplane! that the Netflix website recommended we might also like ... Weird Science. Which I had also probably seen about a dozen times, again not in 20 years. In this case, though, my wife had never seen it. I seized the opportunity and pounced.

We enjoyed watching both quite a bit, though Airplane! holds up better than Weird Science, as you would probably not be surprised to learn. However, Weird Science did have the benefit of including two popular actors my wife was tickled pink to see at such a young age: Bill Paxton and Robert Downey Jr.

I won't go on at length about these movies, but I did want to say that I really seem to be embracing the 80s lately in my movie watching habits. While that's been a favorite ironic thing for film lovers to do, it was something I had never done, at least not for ironic reasons. But quite a lot of it I've done lately, and quite by accident. In addition to Airplane! (1980) and Weird Science (1985), take a look at some of the other movies I/we have recently watched from that glorious decade, about half for the first time and half for at least the second:

Running on Empty (1988)
Major League (1989)
The Fog (1980)
Howard the Duck (1986)
They Live! (1988)
The King of Comedy (1983)
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
The Road Warrior (1981)

And all of these viewings have been in the past six weeks.

In fact, I was going to make Dangerous Liaisons (1987) my next choice for our bi-weekly Tuesday night movie series (Lady's Choice Movie Night), since that eluded my wife as well. But after Running on Empty and Major League, I might like to give her a break from the bad hairdos and acid washed jeans (as though you'd find either of those things in Dangerous Liaisons). So I'm tentatively targeting The Chaser, a Korean film from 2008.

But I seem likely to keep the 1980s in my sights in other ways, if recent history holds.

Let's just hope that most of the 1980s movies we watch are as intentionally foolish as Airplane! and Weird Science.