Yeah, I know it’s been awhile since we’ve taken a look at that poor, pathetic site, once in awhile I’ve gotten emails from some wondering if I was getting forgiving or “did you see what they said!” notes from you. Well, the truth is that between program notes, travelling, recording commentary tracks for Gierucki, and working on Volume Two of the Book, who’s had the time to go peruse that hotbed of idiocy, and when I have finally gotten a bit of a breather, and it’s too damn hot here to go outside much, jeez, there really hadn’t been much of interest or worthy jeering at going on over there the last few months.
It’s been pretty much as we’ve predicted, the looneys have definitely taken over the asylum at Nitratevile, and the boring looneys at that. In the last year, the newsgroup has really degraded to a sub-TCM newsgroup sort of place, of which it had been heading for some time. I saw during one recent meltdown on the group Mike Gebert bemoaning and wondering why folk who are in the film preservation business really do not frequent the place. I have an answer for you Michael, as one of the folk who actually work in this area of interest, the other folk I work with think Nitratevile is a joke, peopled with whining weirdos who are never satisfied with any DVD or Blu-Ray release, have no actual idea how these thing make it to their home screens for so cheap, and very quickly become nothing but an odd humming background noise of weirdness in the feedback channels, so their constant nitpicking and whining gets tuned out, or the people doing this, none of whom get rich off of it, start to wonder why they are bothering and become convinced that there is no real reason to be doing this and decide to go off and do something that makes more money and has more satisfaction to it (we call this Kalton Lahue syndrome, as that is exactly what he did way before the proliferation of the Internet.).
The group has become a total joke in terms of the amount of actual historical information it can provide, one recent researcher asked if anyone could supply them with info regarding the 1934 Warner Bros film SMARTY, and, apart from someone posting a couple of Facebook pages on Warren William (something you’d guess any researcher had probably already Googled), the thread quickly degenerated into whether or not another Warren William film, SATAN MET A LADY, was actually any good or not and ended in the pompous announcement by one NNN (Nitratevile Nameless Nincompoop) that he considered the film SIX HOURS TO LIVE “lost” because he couldn’t see it in a professional Studio DVD made from a pristine 35mm print. I don’t think it’s the film that’s lost.
What other brilliance of recent, I see Bob Fells continues to deface film stills, now not just with his box of computerized crayons, but with his actual face, as well as that of old movie stars badly cut and pasted onto stills from films that they were never in. Is this more of that “alternate” (i.e bullshit) film history that someone with such a shaky sense of actual film history is only able to come up with, now we must include a shaky sense of entertainment value as well, what else can one expect of someone who thought we’d be fascinated by the book he wrote and published about how he learned how to play the piano.
I guess the most airheaded post of late that I can find was the “report” of the recent Cinevent 46, which might have been interesting as it was written by one of the few people there under 40, perhaps under 30, I don’t really know, you can read it here if you want to refresh yourself:
http://nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f ... 14#p132639“Maliejandra” or whatever goofy made up Nitratevile non de plume she wants to hide under seems to have her feminist and PETA ideals offended by MR ROBINSON CRUSOE with Douglas Fairbanks, gad, these guys off “wasting months of their lives” (well, what else did guys have to waste months of their lives on, the Internet and Cable Sports Channels hadn’t been invented yet?) hunting Tigers down in Sumatra (down in, down in, down in Su-ma-tra Ra!!!!!), a plot point that is basically mentioned in a line of dialogue then forgotten, but it seems to bother her. Then, when Fairbanks ends up on his island, she seems to be more concerned for the continued cleanliness of his clothes than any actual adventure occurring in the movie. Then when the lovely Maria Alba shows up on Fairbanks Island and he rescues her from one of his animal traps and takes her back to his hut, Maliejandra hoots and hollers that the first thing she does when she comes too and discovers where she is wash the dirty dishes!
Well, what is she supposed to do, write her graduate dissertation, start a women’s shelter for other escaped Fijian Females? Hmmm, okay, Maria Alba is supposed to have escaped from a primitive tribe because she doesn’t want her front teeth knocked out as part of her forced wedding ritual, so go figure the women of this tribe have been basically taught to look after their men subserviently, and even primitive tribes have dishes, they eat off something, the disposable foam food packaging made out of cocoanuts didn’t come until Gilligan’s Island several decades later. We give Maria credit for having enough smarts not to want her front teeth knocked out on her wedding day (how primal and primitive, she should just get her tattoos and facial piercings like the civilized young Americans do!), but, I didn’t see a major Community College in her former neighborhood.
And let’s face it, this is Doug Fairbanks male mid-life crisis fantasy movie here, and Maria’s his male mid-life real-life girlfriend, but even in a pre-code movie the native girl can’t just boink the leading man without them at least being introduced.
Maliejandra is apparently bugged and bored by Douglas Fairbanks Sr’s modus operandi, dismissing most of his work with the word “Slop” in a later response to a poster kindly trying to defend the film. Apparently male fantasy movies offend her “sensibilities”, I don’t know why, seems there are plenty of female fantasy movies around, mid-life or otherwise, if those teenage vampire TWILIGHT movies are any indication, but it is rather difficult to take seriously the opinions of any supposed silent film buff so dismissive of one of it’s major stars, I’m not really big into Mary Pickford movies, and find the “30 year old woman dressing up as a little girl” thing occasionally creepy, but her films are well made, she’s a good actress, and I certainly wouldn’t call her films “slop”.
I guess the quality of films like BULLDOG JACK and DOUBLE DOOR can’t even elude the likes of Maliejandra, but she does not seem to figure out the point of the Lon Chaney “fragments” (in fact, she does not seem to understand the meaning of the word “fragment”, though she is apparently not the only one in current internet film world nerdom. Let’s quote Websters, indicating that a fragment is “A small part broken off or detached”, in others words, a teeny-tiny, eenie-weenie piece of something. Those 90 second clips that Silencebound guy is putting up on Nitratevile, those are fragments. Several reels of, in fact the majority of footage from, a silent feature is not a fragment. Call them incomplete features, call them “abridged” as Blackhawk Films used to do, but please, make some attempt at correct usage of the English Language and refrain from calling them “fragments”). She labels the film TRIUMPH lame, well, it is indeed no classic, but the point of them being shown is the opportunity to see Lon Chaney footage that has been uncovered and not likely to soon turn up elsewhere. She also says “so-much is missing” from THE ROAD TO MANDALAY, again, see correction regarding the use of the word “fragment”, the majority of the film is there. John McElwee got the point immediately in his review of these two films on Greenbriar Picture Show:
http://greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot. ... -fine.htmlEnough time has been wasted on a generally time-wasting review of the Fest, but part of the reason I have done so is a general feeling I’m gradually beginning to get about the pointlessness of trying to introduce the younger generations to the Golden Era of Moviemaking, they really do not “get” it anymore, they have been so removed from the period, have no concept of the history, and get weirded out due to their intolerance of the attitudes of the times (in fact, the so-called “politically correct” generation may be the most intolerant we have ever raised), that this writer and film preservationist is beginning to ask himself just who are we preserving this material for and why are we bothering? The main thing Maliejandra appears to be interested in is the costumes and clothing of the actors who are not Dick Powell, I am certainly not doing all this work getting the stuff out to be seen just for the creation of opinions so shallow.
In any event, I have spent enough time here giving the folk their jollies who keep this thread one of our record-breakers, for whatever reasons I cannot fathom, gad, several thousand hits since I last wrote something in March. If you are all fellows in contempt of the newsgroup, you’ll have to keep it going yourselves, there is just too much general blather in their shrinking post numbers to find new and original BS and idiocy to make fun of, the fact is that Nitratevile has become just too damn dull to wade through very often, if something really stupid hits the fan over there, let me know, and I might take a shot at it, but I really do have better things to do.
RICHARD M ROBERTS