Yeah, I'll Watch That Again (and Again…)

Some things just don’t fit
in a tweet.

Today I saw a tweet that said:

Name a film you can watch over and over and over again.[1]

A friend had answered it and I thought about the films that answered the (implicit) question for me.[2]

I immediately came up with fifteen films, though seven of them were films by the Marx Brothers (how I love those movies). I thought I was done. I thought wrong.

Then another hit me. A while later, two more, then another. Then nine more.

At that point I decided to stop making an ever-growing list on Twitter and instead concluded that since I have a blog, I ought to use it. I decided to omit short films from the list. There are certainly shorts that I have seen many times,[3] but I didn’t want to clutter up the list with a mix of feature-length films and shorts (so no short films were listed on Twitter).

Feature-Length Films I Have Seen More than Three Times
[Posted 4 March 2022, revised 5 March 2022]

The Addams Family
Animal Crackers
Auntie Mame
Barbarella
Beetlejuice
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
The Bride of Frankenstein
Casablanca
The Coconuts
A Day at the Races
Dogma
Duck Soup
Frankenstein
Ghostbusters
Go West
Help!
High Society
Horse Feathers
Little Shop of Horrors (1986)[4]
The Maltese Falcon (1941)[5]
Mars Attacks[6]
Monkey Business
The Muppet Movie
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Monty Python’s Life of Brian
A Night at the Opera
A Night in Casablanca
The Nightmare Before Christmas
The Producers (1967)[7]
Repo Man[8]
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Some Like It Hot
Star Wars IV: A New Hope
Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars VI: The Return of the Jedi
Time Bandits
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
The Wizard of Oz
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
The Women (1939)[9]
Young Frankenstein

The list started off at 30 films, grew to 34, and is now at 42.

And, for the hell of it…

Short Films I Have Seen More than Three Times
[Posted 4 March 2022]

Bambi Meets Godzilla
Duck Amuck
Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century
Duck! Rabbit! Duck!
Hardware Wars
Rabbit Fire
Rabbit Seasoning
What’s Opera Doc
The Wizard of Speed and Time

Both of these lists are subject to revision as I realize, “oh yeah, I’ve seen that at least three times.”

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1. The original tweet posed it as a question, but the it isn’t “what film can you watch over and over and over again?” but the imperative, “name a film.”  ↩

2. It’s that one in the previous footnote: What films can you watch over and over and over again? (Except I’ll use the plural here.)  ↩

3. Oh, fuck it, I’ll add that too.  ↩

4. I’ve seen the 1960 original at least twice, but probably not three times. The list of movies I’ve seen twice is fairly large.  ↩

5. There’s a 1931 Maltese Falcon. I’ve seen it once.  ↩

6. I’m cringing a little at this one. I saw it in the theater (and viewed it as Burton’s Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, a film I probably have seen three times). I saw it again on home video. I put it on in the background recently while I was doing some thing tedious and it was the most tedious part of the task. It’s a pretty bad film.  ↩

7. I’ve seen the musical remake once and am unlikely to do so again.  ↩

8. The first movie I ever went to on a date.  ↩

9. When the remake (2008) came out, I rewatched this.  ↩

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An Open Letter to Netflix

It's like a game! Can you find the three that match?

Update: I'm leaving this up, but as of October 13, 2015, everything I noted in this post has been fixed. See the end for further notes.

Dear Netflix,
It’s time to sit down and have a little talk about your interface. I know, I know, you were hoping that I was going to suggest that we “Netflix and chill,” but sometimes other things have to take priority. Yesterday, I sat down to see if there was something on Netflix I wanted to watch and experienced that same problem again, the one that makes me think that you don’t want to play nice. You know the one.

You see, Netflix, because this isn’t about me. It’s about you. Your interface is supposed to help me find a movie (or a television show) with which to pass the time. Lately, it seems not so much about what I want to watch, but what you want me to watch. Really, your opinions are not necessary here.

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An Esperantist on the Lam

Oscar Whitehead
The mad Esperantist

There was an odd overlap of the Esperanto movement and the theosophy movement, and so many early twentieth-century Esperantists were also Theosophists. The Theosophist advertised from time to time in Esperanto journals, and the Esperantists advertised from time to time in theosophy journals. Various Theosophic works were published in Esperanto, and Theosophic groups would have lectures on Esperanto. Despite all this, there is no esoteric aspect to Esperanto.

Most of the news items about the intersection of theosophy and Esperanto don’t have much of interest going for them. However, on May 3, 1914, the San Francisco Chronicle published a story that brought together Esperanto, theosophy, and (for good measure) kidnapping.

The background of the story seems to be that Oscar R. Whitehead, who had been an actor, decided that his half-sister, Helen Burns Whitehead, ought to be an actress, and so spirited her off to California, after her mother had said no. She vanished in late December 1913, when (as the New York Times put it) she was “lured from home by her half brother.” There was quite a difference in ages between the two; Oscar was forty-one years old, and Helen was eleven.

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First a Girl (1935) — Review

Not a great title, but it's
a fun film!

If you’ve seen the 1982 Blake Edwards film Victor/Victoria, you know the plot of the 1935 British film, First a Girl, since the the later film is a remake. Well, so’s the earlier film, which is based on a 1933 German film Viktor und Viktoria, which was also remade (in German) in 1957. Wikipedia adds a 1975 Argentinian film, Mi novia el… (the title, according to Wikipedia was originally Mi novia el travesti—“My Girlfriend the Transvestite”—but censors made them chop the title). Before Julie Andrews sang “Le Jazz Hot” the story had been told four times, twice in German, although in 1982 it just seemed to radical that such a story could make it to the screen.

The films don’t map completely. It’s not like the 1931 Ricardo Cortez and 1941 Humphrey Bogart versions of The Maltese Falcon (Warner Brothers re-made The Maltese Falcon because the 1931 version couldn’t be re-released under the Motion Picture Code; leading them first to make 1936’s Satan Met a Lady). While the 1931 Falcon was too risqué for the screen by 1936, because of its suggestions that Spade has had sex with just about every female character in the film, plus there’s a stronger current of Spade gaybaiting men he doesn’t like, and Joel Cairo is more clearly depicted as gay, the British First a Girl seems to have made it past the censors, despite its flirtation with gay themes, as it opened in New York on January 3, 1936.

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Mrs. Brewster’s Esperanto Party

Bring your pennies to Brooklyn

Esperanto has a verb, krokodili, literally “to crocodile,” but it means to speak one’s native language among Esperantists. According to some, it is only possible to krokodili in the presence of an Esperantist who does not share the native language of the other speakers, an American and a Brit dropping into English despite the presence of a French Esperantist. It’s not clear when the verb came into use (probably the 1920s), but from the beginning there was certainly the problem of those who supported the idea of Esperanto without bothering to learn the language, including the first two presidents of the Esperanto Association of North America, George Harvey and John Barrett.

But when Mrs. Brewster held her Esperanto gathering in Brooklyn, on [date], the EANA was a few years in the future, and the American Esperanto Association had been founded just a month before in Boston. One of its founders, Charles Matchett, was coming to Brooklyn to give a talk about Esperanto (in English) at the Brewster’s home. Oddly enough, records make it clear that the address, 131 Rutland Road, was their home only briefly. Was the party so dreadful that they felt they needed to move from a home they had only recently occupied?

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An Esperantist in Motion Pictures

Esperanto: They ought to
make a movie!

There was little find about Creston C. Coigne, who as a young man in New York wrote a letter to the Sun which appeared in their November 25, 1916 edition, in part because Mr. Coigne died young. When he died, he was probably about twenty-six years old. The 1915 New York State Census says that Mr. Coigne was eighteen years old and worked as a motion picture actor.

It was a family business. The same census lists his father as a motion picture director and his mother as a motion picture actress. Coigne’s brother Armand, was at sixteen and a stenographer. His grandmother, Ella Brous, kept house for the family. The family business was named after him, Creston Feature Pictures. Like many short-lived silent movie studios, it’s a struggle to even find out what they produced. The Catalog of Copyright Entries does list both Ireland a Nation and St. Joan of Arc among their pictures. The firm did advertise that another film, The Scapular, was nearing completion.[1]

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Chef. A Tasty Bite

Last night, James and I finally had a chance to see Chef, Jon Favreau's new movie about a formerly innovative filmmaker chef, who breaks of a rut of blockbuster movies cooking the same old things by going back to his filmmaking culinary roots. When the writer/director/star is the guy who made Iron Man and Iron Man 2, you have to view it that way. To hammer the point home, he even included Robert Downey Jr. in the film.

(A digression: I have seen neither of the Iron Man films. We've been burned enough by comic book movies that "based on a comic book" is an automatic deal breaker in our household. Paramount's grinding down of the Star Trek franchise wasn't redeemed enough by J.J. Abrams's first film to get us to go to Star Trek: Into Darkness. And, sorry, Disney, George Lucas burned enough goodwill that I'm waiting for the reviews before deciding if and where I'm seeing Episode VII, even with the participation of Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher.)

I really liked Chef. Dustin Hoffman was fantastic as Riva, the restaurant's owner, who gives Chef Casper (Favreau) the monumentally bad advice to "go with the hits," suggesting that if the Rolling Stones didn't play "Satisfaction" people would burn down the theater (I suspect that at this point Mick Jagger is somewhat bored of that song, and I wouldn't want to see him perform it out of a sense of obligation). I must have groaned at the menu, because James whispered to me that it wasn't that bad of a menu. Yes it was. That menu was carefully honed to be as dull as possible.

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