5001 Tweets at the Movies (2024)

A couple years ago I ordered a Passport drive thru e-bay but got it used because it was much cheaper. 1 TB was more storage space than I'll ever need but I figured it would be better than having to update my backup every few years. Anyway, when I got it it was full of files for entire movies, about 2000, most from before 1990. Like a year's salary worth of DVDs. Some are taken directly from Blu-Rays and some are what look like third-generation VHS copies with Turkish subtitles.
So I took the list of titles and put them in a program called the Randomizer and decided I was going to watch every one of them in my spare time and write about each one on Twitter using their 280-character limit (people have asked, it's 280 characters not counting the words "One-tweet reviews"), even the half I've already seen. With 280 characters I sometimes don't have room to mention the actors or directors or even whether I liked the movie or not, and that's kind of the idea.
Years ago, there was a bit on SCTV parodying awards shows with recurring characters of theirs, a vocal group called Five Neat Guys singing a piece about the nominees for that year which didn't say much about those films and didn't require having seen them. That was one of my inspirations. I can assure you that I've seen every one of these, though. The capsule review may not seem as if I have, but I do have to at least make sure what I say is accurate. Nobody's heard of most of these so theoretically I could be making things up, but I'm not.
Something could be a great movie except for one racial slur or a scene with domestic violence. Something people didn't bat an eye at once would make one blanch today. It also works the other way around. In olden days a glimpse of stocking was often seen as something shocking. (see what I did there?) The roles of genders and races have changed over the years, well-meaning white actors have played roles in [your color here]-face and the movies should be judged on the standards of when they were made. Things were different twenty years ago and they'll be different twenty years from now. I'm aware that as a white male that's easy for me to say.
I'm also well aware Hollywood has always been fraught with criminals and perverts and powerful men who prevented the careers of those less experienced, covered up their misdeeds and surrounded themselves with enablers, and how problematic that is. In this past decade alone we've seen the downfall of Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and countless others. But, I'm reviewing the films based just on content, not on the filmmakers. And they're not getting any money from me, or they're long dead. Don't fault me if I don't bring up their faults.
A question people frequently ask is “Why so many old movies?” Yes, most here are from before you were born, before I was born, some before our parents were born, some even before our grandparents were born. The short answer is, like I said, my plan in undertaking this project is to write about the movies I've acquired, and they're almost all of a vintage. Second, it's my own preference. There's over 100 years of mass media out there, why only follow things that are new? So many movies now are either heroic fantasy, remakes of older movies, and sequels. Drive-in fare on a big budget was something new during a time of experimentation, but it ended up becoming the standard. Before then a film didn't open everywhere at once with the dates for home release and television already set. Nobody knew or cared about its budget or how much it made, something in your area might even have stayed for a year or existed for a year before coming there. There were also different venues and therefore different contexts, something I will mention if I have enough words for it. A generation ago there were fewer theaters and more films, and studios were more apt to throw sh*t against the wall to see what sticks.
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