FilmJerk Favorites

A group of unique directors and the essential works that you've got to see.

||| Buster Keaton |||
Buster Keaton

If you like Chaplin you will absolutely love Keaton, who is widely acknowledged for being one of the greatest directors of all time, a great screen legend and one of our finest actors, as well as one of the three top comedians in silent era Hollywood, and a true pioneer for the independent filmmaker; producing, controlling and owning his films.

Offered as one of three films in the Buster Keaton Collection, The Cameraman is Buster at his deadpan funniest. After becoming infatuated with a pretty office worker for a Newsreel company, Buster picks up a movie camera and sets out to impress the girl, which makes for some very interesting, visually groundbreaking and cleaver footage, capturing the essence of what it was like to be an innovative cameraman.

Based on a true incident, “The General” is a classic of silent screen comedy. Keaton is a Southern engineer whose train is hijacked by Union forces, which leads to a classic locomotive chase and some truly impressive and hilarious stunts, some of which could only be produced by CGI today.

Sherlock Jr is one of the comic's most inventive efforts (introducing a concept oft repeated) depicting a movie projectionist entering the film he's running in order to solve a jewelry theft. Known for doing his own stunts as well as filling in for his costars, Keaton actually fractures his neck on screen as the water from a basin flows from a tube and washes him onto the track.

Recommended by CarrieSpecht

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The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

By EdwardHavens

February 9th, 2005

Whether you are heavy into ornithology, or wouldn’t know what ornithology was unless you Googled it, Judy Irving’s touching and poignant documentary “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” is an unexpected pleasure and a fascinating look into a beautiful and rarely seen world.


Going in to the film, I had a certain apprehension about the subject. Having lived south of the Bay Area in Santa Cruz for nearly fifteen years, I was slightly familiar with the birds from my visits to the now-closed Northpoint Theatre, only a few blocks from Telegraph Hill, but I had never once thought of taking a few moments out of my carefully planned trips (each way was a two hour drive) to investigate or learn more about this strange spectacle. Now that I am nearly three thousand miles away in New York City, and cannot just hop into a car on a free day and see this phenomenon for myself, I naturally want to go discover this wonder for myself. That is the magic of Ms. Irving’s film, and of her subject, Mark Bittner. Bittner was one of the myriad of people who came to San Francisco during the heyday of the hippie movement, looking for a better life than the one he would have had in his hometown. His dreams of becoming a musician never quite panned out, but rather than settle for a menial desk job, Bittner floated through a series of temporary jobs and temporary homes for more than a dozen years, until settling in to a decrepit house on Telegraph Hill.

When we the audience first meet Bittner, filmed in 1999, he has already become a minor personality, having been written up in newspapers and magazines around the world, having become without any formal training somewhat of an expert on the Cherry-headed Conures parrots and their behavior. Bittner has named every one of the birds and can recognize each of them by a specific trait in the feather coloring or unique ding in a beak. And while, with his baggy clothing, straggly beard and long wispy hair, Bittner appears to be one of those legendary San Francisco eccentrics barely able to string a sentence together without sounding like a Cheech and Chong cousin, he becomes surprisingly articulate when talking about the birds to anyone who asks.

Any good story must have some conflict, and “Wild Parrots” is fraught with hazard: the birds, by the many hawks which circle the San Francisco skyline and have no qualms about having Conures for lunch; Bittner, by the new owners of the property he has been living on, who sympathize with their “tenant” and respect what he has brought to the community but wish to renovate the home he’s been squatting in. And while not everything ends happily ever after, the film has one of the sweetest and most unexpected conclusions one will ever see. Judy Irving, whose work has been feted at Sundance and the San Francisco Film Festivals as well as Emmy recognized, discovered Bittner and the wild parrots while working on a six-film series about the Bay Area’s wildlife, and initially planned on using up a few leftover rolls from another project on this peculiar man and the parrots he took care of. It is the world, however, who has benefited from her decision to continue shooting, for the story she discovered is more captivating and enchanting than most of the rubbish being passed off as “entertainment” in multiplexes today. “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” will make your spirit soar and reaffirm your faith in humanity.

My rating: A+