The Tenth Anniversary of The Unloved

Scout Tafoya’s ‘The Unloved’ is a heartfelt salvage operation into cinema’s outcasts — the forgotten glitter in neglected celluloid. A must. - Patton Oswalt

Who is this sensitive soul who looked around and thought, "the world needs more love," and then contributed that love through his art? Scout Tafoya - Critic, Director, Author, Actor, Editor - Renaissance Man. His film art is so deeply personal that it elicits a visceral reaction that hits you right smack dab in the middle of your heart. He's the real deal, as he says, "a student who went to a hippie school in the woods." And so he is unashamed to dispense his cinematic love to the Universe. Looking with a deeper eye into the soul of movies, sharing with us insights that may have skipped our attention the first time around. And with that melodic voice patiently telling us why we were wrong to dismiss this actor, or that scene, and urging us gently to look again, but with new eyes. Thank you, Scout, for your ten years of the "Unloved" series. And please keep shining a light on the good and the great in movies. And please keep dispensing that love. - Chaz Ebert

Today marks the tenth anniversary of Scout Tafoya's "The Unloved," a series that embodies Roger Ebert's passion for film right in its title. It's about spreading love to art, which is one of the powers of great writing, the expression of something that rises above traditional admiration to, well, love. Not only is it remarkable to do anything in this world every month for a decade, but to do something that's sole purpose is to further the worldwide appreciation of film feels special. And what I love so much about "The Unloved" is the sense that it is an endless project. There will always be films that need more love. It might sound cliched to say that I hope that we can do this again for the 20th anniversary, but I truly believe we will. (Also: Team Village.) - Brian Tallerico

Like so many great projects, Scout Tafoya's video essay series The Unloved originated with a person doing a thing he would have done anyway. If memory serves, I'd originally gotten to know Scout from talking to him at New York film events. He was an eloquent, funny movie buff whose tastes covered pretty much every kind of work you can imagine, from Iranian dramas to gutbucket '70s horror. But what really drew me to Scout was that he had a special passion for movies that he and perhaps one or two friends adored but everyone else treated with indifference (or worse). That's the impulse that birthed The Unloved, and perhaps inevitably, his first entry was about David Fincher's poorly received directorial debut "Alien 3," which Scout analyzed in terms of religious art, including Carl Theodor Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc." 

Scout's style as a filmmaker is as distinctive as that of any of the directors he analyzes: rather than dicing the movies into tiny pieces and using them as raw material for an endless montage, he honors the work by letting moments play out, the better to give the viewer a little taste of the work that inspired him in the first place. He also narrates in a whispery, almost conspiratorial tone, in sharp contrast to the carnival barker mode that tends to dominate YouTube film criticism. And he does not appear on camera himself.  

By Scout's own admission, the word "Unloved" is a bit of a provocation, something to get people through the door. By definition, if Scout made a video essay about a movie, it means at least one person loves it, and there are always plenty more people who love it, too; the internet makes it easy to find them, and in the early years of the series, they came looking for Scout to say things along the lines of, "What do you mean, unloved? I love it, and here's a review by somebody who also loves it!" 

But what's most singular about the series, to my mind, is how it builds a personal canon beneath a single byline while reinforcing the idea that, in art, real art, personality is more interesting than perfection. You don't get bonus points for neatness. Sometimes the messiest work is that way because it comes from a place of passion, obsession, anguish, frustration, or some other emotion that carries more negative than positive connotations. The imperfections are part of the art, sometimes the most fascinating part. Scout has managed to make a new "Unloved" every month for a decade now, a staggering achievement in itself, and let's hope he keeps making them until all the unloved movies rattling around in his mind have finally gotten the love he knows they deserve. - Matt Zoller Seitz

It's too often that when a movie is deemed "bad," the general consensus buries it. But any movie can be the source of endless discussion, even more so when it has a bad reputation to be challenged. Scout's video essay series The Unloved has been honoring that for ten years, for such a long period that some of his opinions have now become en vogue (like "Alien 3," for example, one of his Scout's first crusades). It's not that he's ahead of times, so much as it's what we see a lot of in his ten-minute essays—film history. He well knows of where world's greatest art form has been, and sees telling reflections that judging a movie within its failed moment does not allow. These connections provide context to artistic decisions either artistically conscious or baked into film's unconscious; his voiceovers guide you to how he caught these ideas, and why they thrill in him within a director's scapegoated work. I've always wondered why he does them at a certain volume. I think it's because you're not supposed to talk too loud when you're in church.  

The Unloved series has always been a pivotal part of RogerEbert.com, and not just for how it gives Scout's taste the platform it deserves. But because in the middle of watching a video essay about a critical assessment you may or may not share in your guts, a sentiment is clear: Watch more movies. There's always going to be more to love, and more to talk about. - Nick Allen

One of the first installments of Scout’s “The Unloved” series I can recall obsessing over was his video essay on Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies,” which emphasized the extent to which Mann’s experimentation with digital cinematography transformed his approach to period filmmaking and elevated his story of brutal gangsters and dogged lawmen into a vivid, unsettling reflection on our relationship to history and its narratives of violence, self, and celebrity. Throughout this essay, published ahead of Mann’s “Blackhat” hitting theaters, Tafoya discusses the initial reception to “Public Enemies,” his own reappraisal of Mann and cinematographer Dante Spinotti’s use of digital cameras, and the impact of this stylistic choice on the film’s interrogation of image-making—individual and collective, cultural and romantic—throughout American history. As Tafoya illuminates, a fascinating effect of “Public Enemies” looking and feeling the way it does is a certain construction of reality, the sense that audience members could at any point reach through the screen and grasp the past, coming face-to-face with those mythic figures that loom impossibly large in our popular imagination. “In quieter moments, Mann and Spinotti zero in on Johnny Depp’s pores, which means looking directly into the scarred face of infamy: movie stardom,” Tafoya notes. “It turns legend into fact. But the mere fact of seeing the very real and very human face of Depp turns an actor into a person—and his elemental performance, million-dollar smile, and feline eyes back into a legend.” Tafoya’s video essay on “Public Enemies” is also an archetypally polished entry in “The Unloved” series: precise, perceptive, and made with a combination of visual flair and poetic commentary. “Life and death have never looked so real and unreal at once,” Tafoya offers as a parting line. “This is how we lived. This is how we died. It has always been so.” - Isaac Feldberg

Scout’s essays are a treat when he validates my affection for an under-appreciated film, and he somehow nearly always surprises me by focusing on elements I overlooked. But I enjoy even more his essays for films I do not like. I can’t say he has ever persuaded me to change my mind, but I love the way he sees them and his willingness to speak out on their behalf. - Nell Minow

I never thought that, ten whole years ago, I'd watch a video essay about a maligned David Fincher movie and gain not just a colleague, but a dear, dear friend.

And yet, that's what happened in my cramped garden apartment in Chicago, huddled over my laptop, staring with rapt fascination at a new video essay I'd stumbled across on RogerEbert.com. The film in question was David Fincher's "Alien 3," a film I genuinely believed that only I loved—a blockbuster franchise turned into a melancholic, industrial tone poem, one which threw caution to the wind and disrupted the feel-good ending of the franchise's prior entry by killing off the found family that survived it. In so doing, it became a fascinating portrait of its own failure, where Ripley, like her then-freshman director, stalwartly resigned themselves to the grim, beautiful fate destiny had carved for them. And here was a young man, a gifted writer around my age with twice my talent, articulating those feelings of messy rapture through a signature, aching rasp, one weary but tinged with wonder. 

I felt like I'd found a long-lost sibling, someone who adored the same messy art I did and dared to tell the world without fear of reprisal. The online film world of 2013 looked far different than it does now—we weren't as quick to reclaim forgotten favorites as we were now. We still reeled from the post-MST3k, CinemaSins, Nostalgia Critic world that armed a generation of film dorks with the cynical, smarmy language we'd use to dismiss anything that didn't flatter our own sense of pattern recognition. Plot holes. Awkward continuity. And worst of all—sincerity. Ew.

But in Scout's throaty, impassioned pleas, I, and many others, found the courage to love again. We, meaning critics, do this because we love movies—not in spite of their flaws, but often because of them. "John Carter"'s boundless, perhaps reckless genre ambition. "Tron: Legacy"'s metatextual remarks on the way nostalgia-driven IP keeps us frozen in the past. These and more played host to Scout's unabashed cries for recognition, his essay series a collective plea to not shoot something down because it fell short of greatness. Instead, he asked us to lift up the misunderstood, the awkward, the sincere, all in the name of the art form to which we'd dedicated so much of our time and energy.

Over the years, I'd reach out to Scout, first as a fan, then as a friend. I brought up his Unloved essay on "Sorcerer" when I did an episode of my former podcast, "Alcohollywood," which deeply flattered him. From there came Twitter correspondence, then real-life visits, to eventual collaboration. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, he and I hosted a little-seen, ill-fated Twitch streaming show for Consequence I so aptly titled COVIDEODROME. Sure, it was fun to talk about new releases or interview folks as varied as Rosalind Chao and the cast/crew of 1991's beautiful, forgotten indie Western "Thousand Pieces of Gold" (delightful) and Stephen McHattie (a certified kook in the most fascinating way). But the real appeal for me was in shooting the shit with Scout on a regular basis every week—two lost souls keeping each other alive when the outside world seemed determined to kill us.