Kids love crap

First, a rather lengthy quote, though one that I hope is as intriguing to the reader as it is to me (from C.S. Lewis's essay "Different Tastes in Literature," reprinted in On Stories and Other Essays On Literature):

I was suggesting last week that bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only 'liked'; it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive. Now if I say that, I come up against a difficulty. It has never been better put than by that fine and neglected artist, Mr. Forrest Reid. In the little autobiography called Apostate he describes his delight, as a boy, in Miss Marie Corelli's Ardath. Even at that age the last part seemed to him 'so bad that it weakened the impression of what had gone before.' But that earlier impression remained. Perhaps wisely Mr. Reid has not risked an adult re-reading. He has feared that 'its gorgeousness would all too likely strike me as vulgarity, its passionate adventure as melodrama, its poetry as a crude straining after effect.' But none the less, adds Mr. Reid (who is as little likely as any man alive to be deceived in such a matter), there is no use in 'pretending that the old pleasure was not an aesthetic pleasure at all. It was. That is the whole point,' and he contributes the important suggestion: 'What I got then probably was the Ardath of Miss Corelli's imagination; what I should get now would be the very much less splendid Ardath of her actual achievement.'

This diagnosis may not be correct. Mr. Reid may have got the Ardath of the author's imagination, or he may have got the Ardath of his own; that is, he may really have been enjoying an embryonic composition of his own stimulated by mere hints in the book. But it is not necessary to decide between these two possibilities. The point is that, on either view, he was enjoying the book not for what it really was but for what it was not. And this sort of thing very often happens when the reader is imaginatively superior to the author, and is also young and uncritical. Thus for a boy in the first bloom of his imagination the crudest picture of a galleon under sail may do all that is necessary. Indeed he hardly sees the picture at all. At the first hint he is a thousand miles away, the brine is on his lips, her head rising and falling, and gulls have come to show that undiscovered country is near.

So far in my childhood movie series I've been pleasantly surprised by half-remembered movies like Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Dumbo; or I've been haunted and re-enchanted by perennial favorites like The Wizard of Oz; or I've been delighted to discover that my childhood tastes were actually quite good, with the rediscovery of the low-key and charming The Sword in the Stone. But now I've hit that disappointment which Forrest Reid was so fortunate to avoid by not re-reading his childhood favorite: The New Adventures of Pippi-Longstocking -- a movie that I loved as a child and wished were real (if only so Pippi and I could scrub clean our treehouse with broom-skates) -- is a bad movie. It is crap. It's tedious, episodic (in the worst way), badly acted, badly scripted, insipidly directed, and blemished by hideously 80s musical numbers (though I have to say, that title song is still as catchy as ever... Pippi Longstocking is coming into your world! That freckle-faced red-head girl you ought a know!). Tami Erin, as Pippi, is almost completely without charm, and her character, instead of being whimsical and carefree, is downright snotty and spoiled. I'm sure as a child I was on the side of Pippi. Today, I'm decidedly on the side of Miss Banister. Pippi is a brat.

It's not a mystery why I liked the movie so much as a kid: there are elements of a good movie here, but as is so often the case with bad movies, no one involved in the filmmaking process knew what to do with the real elements of entertainment that peeked through the dreck. As Lewis and Reid in the quote above point out, I was seeing the movie of my imagination, not the movie that was actually up on the screen. I was seeing broom-skates; flying on motorcycles and in "gyro-planes" with broken propellers; walking on walls and ceilings; living alone and eating pancakes in the middle of the night; having a talking horse and a monkey for companions; not having to go to school; ice cream fights and parades down main street; sticking your entire face into a cake for no reason; saving children from burning buildings by walking across a tightrope (Also: Did this movie contribute to my fear of fire? I would say yes, since that scene with the man throwing his cigarette into the pile of old mattresses and junk is less of a movie scene and more of a recurring nightmare that I've had for years -- Did it really all start with Pippi Longstocking?! The power of cinema, my friends...); being a pirate and having a cannibal king for a father. All these things and more, in my own imagination, were fashioned into a movie that was as carefree and adventurous as I wished my own life to be at seven years old. Through the cold, hard eyes of adulthood, I can now see that those things (the magic and wonderment) weren't really in the movie itself, at least not fully, or in any successful way was a work of art. They were only hinted at by the movie, hints and glimpses and unsuccessful attempts at whimsy that only became memorable because my own imagination absorbed them and made them into something with the power of a real work of art.

That cleaning scene where the kids skate around on brooms fashioned like roller skates is a perfect example. When I was a kid, that scene was the inspiration for many a dream of having a huge treehouse, a club house for my friend Andy and me, and we'd clean it by making broom-skates just like Pippi had used. It was my dream, for quite a few years after seeing the movie, to be crazy and wild like Pippi, to live in our club house and skate around with brooms on our feet. That it never came true only increased in my mind the fantasy and enchantment of that movie scene. And then I watched it the other day, and saw indeed those elements that had enthralled me as a child. But I also saw, couldn't help but see, how in the hands of a better director, a better script, and better actors, that scene could have truly been the scene of my imagination, instead of the weak, competent-but-completely-inartistic typical '80s kids movie crap-fest. Nearly every scene worth remembering was like that: a good idea ruined by poor filmmaking.

This whole experience seems to me to prove (in the way anecdotal evidence so definitively proves our pet theories) that kids, because they lack the critical eye, can very often fall in love with crap. They can dream and fantasize about and fashion great art from the most insipid hack work because they let their own imaginations fill in the bad spots. How many children a few years younger than I look back with longing on junk like Power Rangers and Pokemon, and how many of my own generation still cling to memories of things like, yes, Transformers. And that's just it: This junk is remembered not as it is, but as we wished it to be. The stories a child creates in his head of giant robots, of red-headed freckle-faced girls, of ninjas, are more thrilling than the swill that swill-makers peddle out every day for children to consume, but children consume it because children have the capacity to see beyond it to the stories of their imaginations, the stories that junk art is only able to hint at, but which provide the child's imagination with a thousand adventures and thrills.

I've decided to dump a few titles from my list of childhood movies I was going to rediscover, because I don't want to have my pleasant memories of these films dimmed by the reality that comes with viewing them with a more critical, adult eye. For some reason, call me crazy, I have a sinking feeling that if I watched it today, I wouldn't like Howard the Duck nearly as much as I did as a kid. Maybe I'll just let the memory of the movie endure, instead of crushing it with the weight of reality. Alas, for Pippi -- her movie, and my memory of it, were not so fortunate.

Snick, snack, snorum!

One of the joys of watching movies as a child? Funny hair!





A pretty relaxed movie (there's not much tension, even during the inventive wizards duel), with a plot consisting mostly of charming little episodes and the bare minimum of story (Wart learns brains over brawn, pulls the sword from the stone, becomes king of England, and... FIN). But I'm still charmed by Disney's The Sword in the Stone (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1962) (with story and character design by Bill Peet), even after watching it dozens of times as a child. I think the characters are the strength of the movie, from the curmudgeonly Merlin, to the really, really curmudgeonly Archimedes, to the perfectly revolting (Why, thank you dearie!) marvelous mad Madam Mim. From the swishy-ness of Pellinore's mustache, to the walrus stomach of Sir Ector, to the cro-magnon face of Kay, to the skin and bones (literally!) of Wart -- character design, voice acting, and the script all come together to create vivid, memorable characters, so that even though the story is slight, the characters are for real. Plus: Hokety, pockety, wickety, wack! Zim zaba, rim BIM! and Prestidigitonium! are just too entirely awesome to comprehend. Also: BLOW ME TO BERMUDA! never gets old. Heh.

Fantasia Will Amazia!

I fell asleep during Fantasia. It was re-released in 1990 for a 50th anniversary, I was nine and the daughter of a classical music buff (my mom), and so we saw it. Most lasting memory of the film? This image:


Yes, practically the first image of the film, I know. But at nine years old Fantasia is a little tough to take in a movie theater setting: you can't stop the movie for a lunch break or to run around outside for a few hours, you just have to sit there in the darkened cavern and try not to fall asleep. That silhouetted image of Stokowski was pretty powerful though; it stayed with me and not just because it was the first scene of the movie. There's something elemental about that shot, something basic. Who is he conducting? Who is he? The silhouette, the glowing blue background, it's almost like he's a phantom, a shade, calling forth images from some netherworld. I don't think it's an accident that the film includes sequences like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, or the Rite of Spring in which the conductor seems to be bringing the very world into existence, from a blue nothingness to a world teeming with life and dinosaurs. Watching the movie today, I still get a little thrill from seeing the conductor raise his shadowed arms. This is one of the reasons I wanted to do a childhood movie series, to re-experience those thrills, to remember what it was like to watch movies as a child and to see if the movies might still work their same magic, even now, some ten or fifteen years later.

I've seen Fantasia since that day seventeen years ago. In fact, I remember getting the VHS tape out on many a lazy summer vacation day just to watch the Night On Bald Mountain sequence over and over again. And I do remember watching the Sorcerer's Apprentice section of the film in the theater, as well as the funny hippos and alligators do their Dance of the Hours ballet, and of course, A Night On Bald Mountain. I think the part that put me to sleep in the theater was the Rite of Spring section; Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is not exactly a kid-friendly piece of music (I think it's tough even for adults to get through). And I'm sure I slept straight on through the Pastoral Symphony and was only awakened by the peppiness of Ponchielli. At least, that's how I remember it. Funny, even as a kid, the most kid-friendly section -- The Sorcerer's Apprentice -- was probably my least favorite part. For some reason, it seemed so contained, so ordinary compared to the wild worlds of stuff like the nature ballet of the Nutcracker Suite or the phantasms of A Night On Bald Mountain. Mickey Mouse and inanimate objects coming to life? That seemed as ordinary to me as a Saturday morning cartoon.

Watching the movie again now, I can't say my opinion has changed about The Sorcerer's Apprentice -- still my least favorite section. Which is funny, since apparently, that section always seems to get the most praise from both critics and casual viewers alike. Though I do love this shot:

That's pretty frightening: an army of brooms, marching in lock-step, uncontrollable, single-minded in their mission of aquatic destruction. I feel like I'm watching a Leni Riefenstahl film by way of Fleischer Studios. Also somewhat scary? This guy:

According to the animators interviewed on the DVD re-release documentary, this cocked-eyebrow face was modeled after a face Walt Disney himself often made. I once dreamed of being a Disney animator, but I wouldn't have wanted to see that creepy eyebrow pop up whenever Uncle Walt was displeased with my work.

Even though the Sorcerer's Apprentice wasn't and isn't my favorite part of the movie, I did spend a lot of time copying Mickey's image from it. Like I said, I wanted to be to be a Disney animator when I was between the ages of seven and eleven. I spent hours copying this image:

I think I remember it so clearly because it was one of the first things I drew free-hand that people thought I had traced. Nope! All done free-hand, no tracing for me! At nine years old, I was so proud.

Watching the film again a few weeks ago, I was, frankly, kinda blown away by it. As a child, certain sections were powerful and made an indelible mark (see: Night On Bald Mountain), but the film as a whole wasn't something I remember wanting to watch, the way one would want to pop in Lady and the Tramp or Back to the Future or Goonies. Watching the film now, I'm struck by, yes, certain sections (see: Night On Bald Mountain), but also by the film as a complete film. Each section could be watched individually, each separate short film existing independently of the others. But I think the sum of the film is actually greater than the parts. Or, to put it another way, I think each individual part comments on and enhances the enjoyment and understanding of all the other parts. The film starts out with Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the "abstract" piece of music ("music for its own sake" as the film describes it) that is accompanied by meshes of color and squiggly lines and generally abstract animation, but notice this image towards the end of the piece:


In this piece, "pure" music with no story or dominant idea contained within the music itself, and the Disney animators happen to stick a sunrise/sunset into the thing. Later on the sun will show up as a destroyer of the dinosaurs in the Rite of Spring section:


After Zeus's thunderstorm in the Pastoral Symphony:


And then finally, the last shot of the film, after the nightmares and spectres of Bald Mountain have gone back to their shadows, the pilgrims make their journey through the forest with lighted lamps (metaphors for the sun?) as Schubert's Ave Maria weaves its way into the soundtrack, and they walk into a cathedral made of trees, which open up to reveal the rising sun in all its glory. The music builds, the light grows stronger, and at last, a sunrise, an eternal symbol of hope and the film ends:




And gosh, don't those hills look a little bit like those weird rolling hills from the first section, the Bach Toccata and Fugue?:


The sun imagery is just one repeating theme throughout the film, and I think nature imagery as a whole is the dominant visual theme of the movie. Nature as living thing, maybe even magical (Nutcracker Suite); nature as volatile force, creator and destroyer (Rite of Spring); nature as divine (Pastoral Symphony); nature as healer, giver of hope (Ave Maria). There is also the theme of creative forces, which I mentioned earlier, of creating new life, as represented in the Rite of Spring section and the Sorcerer's Apprentice section. Even in the Toccata and Fugue abstract section, there's a sense that the music itself is somehow willing these images into existence. And the section least thematically tied to the others -- the Dance of the Hours comedy -- still has in the background the changing times of the day: the brightness of midday, the pallor of dusk, the haunted dark of night (which, of course, happens right before the Night On Bald Mountain sequence -- again, each section builds on and comments on the others).

I watched the movie twice in two days when I rented it recently -- a response I was not expecting, frankly. And then I watched it in pieces again for a third time, and each time I watched it I noticed something new, or I caught a new connection, or a new theme. I even noticed things that I've seen echoed elsewhere in other films. This image, for instance:


looks almost identical to the last image of Peter Jackson's The Two Towers (minus the nazgul and fell beasts, of course), where the camera pans up and reveals a hellish shot of Mordor, looking like something out of Dante's Inferno (or now, as I see, out of Disney's Fantasia).

I mentioned the word "elemental" earlier, in reference to the silhouetted conductor's image, and I think that word sums up the experience pretty well. It's animation and cinema on that pure level, on the level of just moving images, as if one is seeing color and line and form all explode for the first time. The emotions and themes of the piece are basic as well:

Fear:


Life:


Death:


Beauty:


Joy:


Evil:


I have to say, I was exhilarated after watching the film recently. I know Pauline Kael called it kitsch, but, if it is, it's the most dazzling, ambitious, and thrilling kitsch I've seen in a long time. There's a sense, after watching it, that one's just witnessed the birth of some new kind of life.

Sometimes Cinematic Perfection is Boring: Pinocchio vs. Dumbo

Pinocchio: I remember nearly everything about the film -- as I was rewatching it for the first time in probably thirteen years, as each scene began, as each song started up, as each character arrived, it all came rushing back to me in an instant, and I remembered everything completely. It was like thirteen years had never happened, that's how clearly I remembered the film as I rewatched it. I'm convinced now that I must have watched Pinocchio A LOT as a child (though I don't remember watching it that much...) because the experience was so familiar. If nothing else, Pinocchio as a whole made a much stronger impression on me as a kid than Dumbo did. And yet, watching it now as an adult, I have to say, it's lost some of its impact. The Pleasure Island sequence in particular, a sequence that scared the pants off me as a child, doesn't seem to pack the same punch. I can certainly understand, watching the film as an adult, why and what it was about that sequence that so disturbed me as a child (I hated when people transformed into things), but now I find it doesn't even really give me a slight chill, not even in remembrance of past frights:


Dumbo, on the other hand, a film I remember finding immensely sad, almost unbearably sad, but not really remembering too much else about, is, upon rewatching, a kind of delightful discovery. I know Pinocchio was painstakingly crafted and Dumbo a slapdash product; I know Pinocchio has better songs, better animation, and a better narrative; I know Dumbo plays too easily and too readily on our heartstrings, while Pinocchio has sentimentality without being cloying. But, gosh darn it, I like Dumbo better. And this isn't a "when I was a child" reaction. I'm not sure which film I liked better as a child; in fact, I think I disliked both in a way, Pinocchio for being too scary, and Dumbo for being too sad (and also a little scary -- hello clowns and pink elephants -- for some reason, this image in particular used to scare me; I'm sure this is what prompted Dumbo's mind to invent the pink elephants):


But today, Pinocchio, though I still like it very much, comes off as a little too didactic and overly cute, while Dumbo seems almost experimental, like Merrie Melodies meets Expressionism meets Charlie Chaplin meets LSD. There's a part where Timothy the mouse tells Dumbo that there are plenty of famous guys with big ears, and he doesn't mention who, but it's obvious we're meant to think of Mickey. This kind of self-referential humor is something I'd expect more from a Warner Bros. cartoon than a Disney feature film. Coming after Snow White and Pinocchio, two features that practically define the detailed, pretty, and naturalistic style of Disney animation, Dumbo really feels like the animators were trying any new thing they could think of. Take a look at this shot:

Is this Disney or an impressionist?

And before that we got an anthropomorphic, cartoony train:


And the use of silhouette for shots of human characters, especially the clowns, somehow made them scarier and more menacing, at least when I was seven. It was also a nice device for separating the human world and the animal world, turning the human world into a strange, unwelcome, mysterious place, and giving the viewer a real sense of the animal point of view:


It's like the animators just stuck in a bunch of crazy art things that they wanted to experiment with. Nothing shows this clearer than the Pink Elephants sequence, which comes out of nowhere, means nothing to the overall story, and yet is totally unforgettable, and for some inexplicable reason, just totally right for this movie. This is some freaky stuff, yet perfectly suitable to a story about the circus, a relatively freaky place, especially for kids:

Fantasy turns back into reality but the line between them is blurred.

Dumbo as a story, as a narrative film certainly doesn't stand up to Pinocchio, which has stronger themes and tells a more interesting story, but Dumbo is so freewheeling, and yet so basic and simple, that it has a freshness that Pinocchio, for all its true strengths as a film, can't seem to match. Pinocchio feels older, much older in fact, than Dumbo [though Dumbo is unfortunately very dated in its racist depiction of the minstrel show crows who help Dumbo learn to fly]. In that sense I'm drawn to Pinocchio because it's nostalgia in two respects: nostalgia for my own childhood, and nostalgia for a bygone era -- Pinocchio feels older than its 1940 date; it feels like something from the turn of the century was finally discovered in 1940:

And Pinocchio does have better songs.

Also, there's some scariness:


But Dumbo, for all its flaws is simply more interesting. I think my reaction to it has a lot to do with my affection for noble failures; I seem to fall in love with movies that have obvious flaws but also flashes of real brilliance. The whole is not as great as some of its parts, and yet those parts are so interesting, engaging, intriguing, whateveradjective, that I can't help but love the movie. Sometimes cinematic perfection is boring; sometimes a movie is so good that there's nothing to think about or muse over afterward. Dumbo is not like that; Dumbo is the kind of film that worms through my brain and I can't get it out. It's not so much the story or the songs but the images and essential emotions like fear, shame, sadness, and joy. Plus, who can resist this level of cuteness?


Who doesn't cry when they see this?


And who doesn't freak out over elephants in mind-bending Technicolor?


My reactions to these scenes are too strong to dismiss simply because the film is weak narratively. Pinnochio is Disney perfection, but Dumbo is Disney intoxication.

Memories are films about ghosts

Remember this? Somewhere, long ago, we all saw it, the sepia-colored herald who roared a promise of Kansas farm girls and cyclones and over-the-rainbows, and led the way to the fevered pop of glorious Technicolor. If we want to talk about the experience of cinema during childhood, especially an American childhood, there seems no better place to start than the first frame of The Wizard of Oz. It's hard to know if The Wizard of Oz was the first movie I ever saw -- and in fact I'd wager it probably wasn't (who knows what my parents plopped in front of me when I was a toddler) -- but it was likely the oldest.

The oldness of TWoO impressed itself on me from the first frame, the moment the old MGM logo snarled me to attention. Other movies didn't start like this. And what do those strange words -- Ars Gratia Artis -- mean? And why did the picture look like it was colored with coffee stains, like the yellowed photos Grandma kept in a dilapidated box in the attic? This movie was different, I could feel it even at six years old; this movie was OLD. The old hung off it like it hung off Aunt Carm's mink stole; it wafted from it like the smoke from a cigarette in a cigarette holder; the old crackled out from it like it crackled out from Grandpa's old Eddie Condon records. And that title card with the text!:

That was so strange, so confusing to my young '80s child eyes. What did it even mean? I mean, I could read the words, but what were they doing just sitting there in front of the movie? The very cinematic language of the movie seemed unusual, seemed distant and removed from the world of movies I was familiar with. Roaring lions, sepia colors, title cards filled with a glom of words. It was all very strange.

I must confess, black and white movies have always reminded me of ghosts. Like the home movies of ghosts, or some secret window into the dead past. I suppose it has to do with the idea that pictures and photos steal or preserve some part of the soul, if you want to put an explanation to it. But at six years old, all I knew was that old black and white movies were a little creepy, that they gave off a feeling of forgotten ages and death. Of course, I loved TWoO; I loved the songs and the adventure and the delirious fantasy world. But I also felt just the slightest tinge of unease; a feeling of OLDNESS hung off the thing and it was enough to set a six-year-old slightly on edge. Who knows what these ghosts might do?

And it all started with that roaring lion.

And that music over the title (remember the first time you heard those opening notes as the words "The Wizard of Oz" appeared? It wasn't the bright jaunt of the munchkins' song, it wasn't the lilt of "Over the Rainbow"... what was it? It was something slightly foreboding, something slightly minor, the blaring of those opening horns...).

And that strange, inexplicable title card message about "the Young in Heart."

And the yellowed image of a farm girl and her dog running down the road.

The whole thing seemed to my childhood eyes like a relic from an ancient past (which, of course, in a way it was and is), like a movie of ghosts. Even when the film shifted to color I sensed a paradox -- a vibrant magical world brimming with spark and pop, and yet hanging at the edges was a forgotten era long vanished. Ghosts and flying monkeys.

I'm sure I didn't know how old the film really was, and besides, "1939" would have meant nothing to me at the time except, "really, really old," and I'm sure I had no idea who Judy Garland was in real life, or who any of the actors were, or even what Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer meant. But with just that image of the MGM lion my kid self knew this movie was from another time, another world, of movies. In movies, even the studio logo has power and magic.

But what's curious is that no other MGM lion has ever affected me in quite the same way as the lion at the start of The Wizard of Oz. Even to this day, no other MGM roar, not even from another old movie, excites that same strangeness, that same oldness, like the roar in The Wizard of Oz.

Random stuff

Jim Emerson has a post up taking Anthony Lane and Armond White to task for their lame reviews of Borat, but I was actually more fascinated by the reader comments, many of which make some great observations about the movie. Check it out.

Also, one of the commentors links to a piece by Noel Murray at the A.V. Club blog which makes almost the exact same point I made in my review of Borat, namely, that it's not really the crackerjack social commentary it's being billed as.

Finally, I'm starting to get into a groove here with my blogging, like, actually posting on a semi-regular basis. Careful readers will have noticed that LeaJo's presence has been slight these past two months, but this is due to the fact that she actually takes her higher education seriously and doesn't goof around on the blog wasting time like I do. Despite its continuing damage to my grades, my blogging will not be abated. The future of the blog (hopefully) will include the following:

* A series of posts analyzing adaptations of British lit classics (these will not be the usual suspects, however, instead I'll be focusing on made-for-tv BBC versions and lesser-known, less-canonical works such as Douglas McGrath's Nicholas Nickleby)

* A series on my favorites from childhood, many of them considered "bad" by mainstream critics (Troop Beverly Hills, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Howard the Duck, The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking); some I will be watching for the first time since seeing them as a child, so it'll be interesting to see how they hold up

* Detailed analysis of several of my favorites including: Gone with the Wind, Libeled Lady, Gypsy, Ball of Fire, Stage Door, Waterloo Bridge, Dazed and Confused, and t.v. shows Freaks and Geeks, The Adventures of Pete & Pete, The Venture Bros., and Aqua Teen Hunger Force (no links for these, 'cause I'm tired of looking up titles on IMDB)

* A year-long (at least) retrospective of fantasy films (fantasy here being restricted to fairy tale or High fantasy or magical-world fantasy, not It's a Wonderful Life fantasy); I've long been a fan of fantasy as a genre, but fantasy films haven't really gotten the attention other genres of the fantastic like horror and sci-fi have gotten and I'd like to see if I could remedy that; I plan on looking at everything from silents to sword and sorcery stuff from the 80s, from live action to animation, from American to Japanese, from French to German, everything -- it's going to be a huge undertaking, and it'll take a long time, but I'd like to think it will be one of the defining features of this blog

And one last note: I've been totally digging Squish's Hitchcock series, mostly because he doesn't treat Hitch like some untouchable god of filmmaking, never to be criticized -- his views are fresh, unique, and funny. What's great is that Squish doesn't just parrot the accepted views on these films or on Hitchcock, and even while I don't agree with every rating (Suspicion is one of my all-time favorites, Squish gives it a 70%), I appreciate the critical eye he applies to these "canonical" movies.