2011 documentary
Rating: 16/20
Plot: This is a look at The National Film Registry which chooses films that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” to include on their “Great Big Lists of Movies That Are, Like, Totally Awesome.”
But really, it’s more of a love letter to movies and their importance in our lives and the history of our country. You do get some information about the creation of the Registry. It starts with color-happy Ted Turner yuckily proclaiming, “Last I heard, these were my films,” when criticized for making changes to great movies. You know, because people are incapable of enjoying a black and white film. You learn that they select 25 films per year and can’t include a movie until it’s ten years old (so I assume The Room made it last year? I haven’t checked yet.) but really, this is most interesting as a walk through film history and a glimpse at why movies matter with sound bites from people like John Waters, John Lasseter, Leonard Maltin, Zooey Deschanel, Christopher Nolan, Tim Roth, and most emotionally, George Takei. I liked a couple quotes from this, the ideas that “movies create order out of the chaos of our lives” and Walt Disney’s belief that for every laugh in a film, there should be a tear. I got a kick out of a magical film from ’25, an early sound film featuring Gus Visser and his singing duck. A commercial for paint called “The House in the Middle” was another amazing document, and I was really interested in censorship with the 1930’s Baby Face and the argument that censorship keeps one era from talking to another era. Film as a dialogue between the past and the present is a concept I’m not sure I’ve put much thought into, but it makes sense. There’s also a lot of footage of the people who work on preserving films and the sad statistic that I’d heard before that about half of movies made before 1950 are gone. That’s just so depressing. And you know what else is depressing and completely baffling? The Room is not on the list for some reason. At least Eraserhead is on there.
I’d recommend this to anybody with a love for movies.