A Personal Look at the TCM Classic Film Festival 2014

Friday is the first full day of the festival and it is always a doozy. I managed to see six films from 9:45am til well passed midnight. The first film I saw was the rediscovered British comedy On Approval (1934). Look for a review of this film later on, because there is just too much to say.

B.H. the Bear was TCMFF14’s smallest attendee

I was then joined by Peter (@peterapeel) for a screening of The World of Henry Orient (1964), which may well be my favorite film of the entire festival (a review of it will come soon as well). The next two blocks of films were all films I had seen – seriously ten films to choose from between 3PM til 8PM and I’d seen them all! I decided to see Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) because Allison Anders (@msallisonanders) was doing the introduction. It turns out Kristen had never seen it before, and watching her watch it for the first time was amazing. I followed this with Paper Moon (1973), which was supposed to have an introduction by Ryan O’Neal, but after he backed out Ben Mankiewicz stepped in.

A full midnight show of Eraserhead is what life is all about

My 5th film of the day was The Innocents (1961), which I watched with my friend Ariel (@sinaphile). Neither of us had seen it before and it freaked us the heck out. The people manning the line outside told me afterwards they had never seen an audience come out of a TCMFF screening so dazed. The last film of the night was Eraserhead (1977) at midnight introduced by Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt). I’d never seen a more full midnight show at this festival before. There were some walkouts (even before the baby showed up!) and afterwards Trevor (who had never seen a David Lynch film before) simply tweeted “What.” Indeed.