Steve Bryant at Reel Pop drew our attention to these beautifully assembled little montages by YouTube user "barringer82", who ought to be working for the Academy Awards people. They're like eating peanuts. "The Films of the 1970s" makes a case for that era as a time when actors who knew what the hell to do with a long, unbroken silent take, in particular Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino, ruled the world, and it feels so perfectly assembled, as if flows from one clip to the next in synch with the music and Peter Finch's big speech from Network, that we couldn't care less that Blow Out was actually released in 1981. (It also made us realize, for the first time ever, that one reason that Finch works so brilliantly in that part is his vocal resemblance to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Before he actually appeared on screen, I thought the clip of him talking was from a fireside chat that FDR must have given after snacking on hash brownies.) "The Films of the 1980s" is remarkable for the way it captures what 75% of the population found delightful about that decade, with sneaking hints about why the rest of us experienced as a George A. Romero movie in 3-D Technicolor. (It goes on too long, but then so did the 1980s.) And "The Films of the 1990s" makes the second-best argument I know of for Magnolia as the key, unifying film of that decade. (The best argument for that has been made by myself, and I'm not sure I could ever get enough drinks in me again to repeat it.)
Barringer25 has also assembled video seminars on such directors as Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, P. T. Anderson, Michael Mann (parts one and two), and Martin Scorsese (parts one and two.)
