100 Movies and More
Like Dennis, I’m a new contributor to Newcritics, and I’m pleased to be joining an impressive list of authors, although now that I’m writing for a new blog, I’m suddenly confronted with a variation of writer’s block. So maybe I’ll start by acknowledging my double addictions to classical Hollywood films and to viral videos–an addiction I’m guessing a few other people share–and by pointing to my new favorite YouTube video, 100 Movies 100 Quotes 100 Numbers (via Michael at Zigzigger).
100 Movies is a montage video that counts down from 100 using quotes from Hollywood films, and while it serves as a gentle parody of the AFI countdown videos, it also wears its fannish enjoyment of movies on its sleeve, relishing in both classical and contemporary Hollywood films, citing actors from Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis to Emilio Estevez and Charles Grodin. It’s also one of the more interesting I’ve seen of the changes in movie watching culture over the last few decades, especially as those changes are discussed in Barbara Klinger’s insightful book, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home. In the book, Klinger links home theater systems, DVD libraries, repeat screenings (what I’ve called “comfort film” viewing), and internet film parodies to address many of these changes.
And while this montage certainly seems tied to both the impulses of “collecting” videos and to the pleasures of repeat viewings, I’m intrigued, in particular, by the degree of nostalgia I felt while watching the “100 Movies 100 Quotes 100 Numbers” montage. Klinger links the practices of film collecting and repeated screenings to a “nostalgic historicization of film that is embedded ultimately in the presentism of the digital aesthetic” (87). The montage clip certainly evokes nostalgia for the original source, but I think there’s something slightly more complicated going on in this video, in its playful use of quotes that contain numbers and in the jarring juxtaposition of films ranging from The Breakfast Club and North by Northwest with Midnight Run and The Maltese Falcon.
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