100 Years at the Movies (1994)

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

After all the glowing reviews, I guess I'm a contrarian, but I found the 8-minutes maddening. But what's to be expected from 10 decades of movies crammed into the space of a TV commercial. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't anything that literal. Each entry gets the space of an eye-blink, and while that's still enough to label some icons (Maltese Falcon; Public Enemy, et al.), the overall effect can be frustrating. I'm not sure what the producers at TCM had in mind, but maybe the best way to take it is as a flash card test on steroids.

This film was made to commemorate the development of film in the United States, thus you won't see any clips from foreign films in it - that was not what it was intended to do, on the 100th anniversary of the first film exhibition in the United States on April 14, 1894. That 100th anniversary is also the day that Turner Classic Movies began broadcasting - April 14, 1994 - and I believe this short was one of the first shorts broadcast on that channel. It consists entirely of very short film clips in rough chronological order with musical accompaniment that very much conveys the feeling of each era in film. There is no narration other than the words of the actors and actresses in the films in the short. Anything more would have ruined the magic that is this short.Produced by Turner Broadcasting Company, you'll see a heavy dose of the films that Ted Turner owned at the time - the RKO library, the pre-1986 MGM library, and the pre-1949 Warner Brothers library. Also, many silent films are and were in the public domain, so clips of very early films were possible. However, just about every significant film made up to 1994 is present, including films Turner did not own such as "It's A Wonderful Life", "Patton", "Star Wars", and "Schindler's List" at the very end, which actually won the Best Picture award for 1993.In some ways I'd like this short to be updated to include the last twenty years of film, but then they would have to ruin that perfect ending with the films of 1993 being crosscut with the one hundred year old footage of the trolley cars. I highly recommend this short - if you love film it will give you goosebumps.

This was put together in 1994 to celebrate the first 100 years of the movies. It starts with the silents and moves all the way up to 1994 ending with "Schindler's List". For a movie fan like me it's pure magic and loads of fun figuring out which clips come from what movie (I'm proud to say I got 95% of them). They reference and show classic clips from just about every famous film in Hollywood. Some go by a little TOO fast but I can understand that. Also the clips of music from various movies is fantastic. My favorites are the title music from "Gone With the Wind" and "Rocky" and "We're in the Money" from one of the Gold Diggers films. My only complaints (and they're tiny ones)--some of the clips are WAY out of place. I caught "American in Paris" in the 1940s section! And where was "Gigi"? It was one of the few musicals to win an Academy Award as Best Picture. There were other omissions but these stood out. Still it's a great short. Anybody who has even a passing interest in movies will love this. A 10 all the way!

No great theories to spin here, or trends to notice, or criticisms to unload. Quite simply, this is the most carefully chosen, best-edited, most entertaining montage/tribute to the cinema ever put together. Covering, as it says, the whole first century of the cinema, it consists entirely of clips from a cavalcade of box-office favorites and historically-significant films, edited in roughly chronological order, accompanied by equally-well chosen scores. Some excerpts are as short as two or three seconds, sometimes just a word or a gesture from a film, sometimes a famous line, sometimes a look on a beloved movie star's face, but always one of those indelible moments, those "pieces of time," as Jimmy Stewart called them, that are the shared heritage of everyone who loves movies.