khaosworks | Nov. 18th, 2002

I can't really explain why I like old movies. Maybe it's the fact that actors were more multi-talented back then - they could sing, they could dance, they could act, and often all three at the same time. Maybe it's the fact that things were simpler, or remind me of a mythical better time. Or maybe it's the fact that films focused less on pyrotechnics and special effects (or skin) and more on just telling a plain story, or even tell a story without any deep intention for it to be picked apart by film students. Maybe it was just plain entertaining. I don't know. Maybe it's a combination of all three.

I've told this story to people countless times. To be honest now, I'm not even sure whether it really happened this way or that it's become part of my personal mythology. No matter - the story as I remember it now is this: when I was 12, during the school holidays, I was bored and went to the Toa Payoh Town Library. At that time the library had just installed a new Audio-Visual section where you could borrow video tapes and watch it in the library itself. This was 1982, before video rentals were a reality, and VCRs had only surfaced just a year or so before. I'm not sure why I picked those particular films to watch - I guess I had heard about them, or the titles just jumped out at me. I know for sure the two SF movies I picked out because I had read about them in an SF encyclopedia as being classics. Whatever the reasons, that morning and through the afternoon, I spent about six hours or so watching Psycho, Spellbound, The Day The Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet.

Pretty intense stuff for a 12-year-old, and the impact was incredible. In one day, I fell in love with Ingrid Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock's direction, Bernard Hermann's music, 1950s SF movies, therimin music (you know, the spooky ooo-eee-ooo UFO type music so common in SF films in the 50s) and hell, old movies in general.

Why this reminiscing today? The special edition of Singin' In The Rain is out, and I grabbed it like a crack addict. Newly restored, with documentaries and commentary. Smokin'! I still can't watch that movie without grinning like an idiot three quarters of the time, or singing along to every song. I don't think I've seen a single movie in the last fifteen or so years that just gives me that much joy - even Galaxy Quest didn't quite manage that, although it came really close.

Out now, and on their way from Amazon.com, is the Criterion editions of Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound and Notorious, and the underrated To Catch A Thief. In a month or so, Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard and Mel Brooks' The Producers. And I really got to think to myself, not for the first time, why doesn't Hollywood make movies like that anymore?

On Saturday, I was wondering out loud to a friend why Warner Brothers hasn't released its library of cartoon shorts on DVD (although it's done so with some of it on VHS and VCD). Or even weirder, why doesn't the Disney Channel show its old shorts that I grew up with on The Wonderful World of Disney. One guy said that kids today only like the flashy stuff like Pokemon, but surely kids can't have changed that much - and it's just a matter of really, exposing them to the good stuff at the right age. There's a whole century of incredible film out there I loved as a child growing up and still love as an adult, and it's a real shame that it's not being made more available, even in archival format. Maybe it's not as hip, but damn it, it's still good.

(the conversation also meandered into racism in early cartoons and comics and being made fun of in high school because one accidentally let slip that one liked Dean Martin songs, but that's another subject for another day)

I can tell you one thing - my kids will know about this stuff as they're growing up.