Despite a welcome attention to the brutal facts of celluloid deterioration, Mark McLaughlin’s 1999 documentary about film preservation, written with producer Randy Gitsch, is basically Movie Restoration 101, a fund-raiser with a lot of emphasis on the sociological and historical reasons for this activity and almost none at all on the aesthetic reasonsor the aesthetic issues raised by different kinds of restoration and/or revision of primary materials. The fact that the interview subjects include Forrest J. Ackerman, Alan Alda, Stan Brakhage, Herb Jeffries, Roddy McDowell, Leonard Maltin, and Debbie Reynolds, along with a few techies, archivists, and bureaucrats, gives a pretty good idea of the spread involved. But critical perspectives on film restoration are few and far between: the overall message is that it’s a good thing, even though we don’t get a clear position about how such an activity might be carried out well or badly. 70 min. (JR)