by ·Comments Off on Chaplin’s First Nationals (1919-1922)

After the Essanays and the Mutuals…

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A Day’s Pleasure

Family vacation, but the family fades into the background as Charlie (1) tries to start the car, (2) fights with a big dude on a bouncy boat, (3) argues with an intersection traffic cop. I heard about three seconds of the intended music then switched over to Hesitation Marks.

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Sunnyside

A couple good jokes (sending his girl’s annoying brother to play in traffic blindfolded) but mostly plotty, as hotel odd-jobsman loses his girl to a city slicker then finds out he’d been dreaming the whole episode.

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The Idle Class

Two Charlies – the idle rich drunk neglecting his lovely wife Edna, and the golfing tramp who stumbles into a costume ball where everyone thinks he’s the husband, who is stuck inside his armor costume. The golfer whom Tramp Charlie has been antagonizing turns out to be Edna’s father. Lotta asses get kicked.

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Pay Day

The best of this batch, with great elevator timing and reverse brick-tossing gags. Episodic like the others, he works in construction, takes a lunch break, goes out drinking with the boys, can’t catch a bus, finally makes it home to his horrible wife Phyllis Allen. Edna barely appears, but Foreman Mack Swain played her dad in this and The Idle Class.

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The other three First National shorts were rounded up in The Chaplin Revue, then he got into features with The Kid and never looked back.

by ·Comments Off on 100 Yards (2023, Xu Haofeng & Xu Junfeng)

As the master dies, a duel between his top disciple QQ (Andy On, rookie cop of Mad Detective) and the master’s son Shen An (Jacky Heung of Chasing Dream), which QQ wins, taking over while the son asks for a rematch. I thought this meant Disciple QQ was the righteous leader and the son was the entitled guy trying to cheat his way into power, but I got it backwards. Anyway, the whole rest of the movie is rematches, QQ coming off worse and worse. It’s all nicely lit and designed, fake-looking in a beautiful way.

Meanwhile, Shen An has got a banker hotgirl (Bea Hayden Kuo of Tiny Times) but gets rescued by postal carrier Tang Shiyi, who knows the secret short sword technique QQ thinks Shen An is protecting. This all escalates to a video-gamey final wave battle in the castle before the the Martial Arts Circle breaks it up and sends everyone away for a few years to cool down.

by ·Comments Off on A Couple Keatons and a Tower

Convict 13 (1920)

Buster goes from incompetent golfer to escaped prisoner to prison guard via costume changes. He foils a one-off super-violent prisoner and a full-scale riot using makeshift weapons. More people get killed or injured by sledgehammers in this than in any other movie. His girl is the warden’s daughter, at least until he wakes up, the whole prison stint a dozing golfer’s dream. Running down the street from a horde of cops is always funny, as is the painter/bench bit.

When you are beginning to suspect that Joe Roberts is behind you:

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Hard Luck (1921)

These made a good double feature – from trying not to get hanged to trying to hang himself. Unemployed and suicidal (I cannot relate), Buster stumbles into a gig catching armadillos for the zoo. He never finds one – we get increasingly large fishes, a fox, some horse stunts, and Buster tied to a bear. As all movies must, it ends with him rescuing a woman from bandits. Pretty good shotgun shells-in-the-fire gags.

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The Black Tower (1987, John Smith)

Something completely different: male narrator is haunted by a tower appearing in all different parts of the city. He tries not going outside anymore, living on snacks from the passing ice cream van, then is hospitalized, then while recovering in the country he sees the tower again, walks up and steps inside. Story starts again with a female narrator who sees the tower while visiting his grave. Calm movie with various tricks and playing around, narrating over color fields later revealed to be closeups on household objects, editing back and forth in time to make buildings re/disappear, or masking the image so passing cars are swallowed by a mid-frame tree.

by ·Comments Off on Jean Painleve shorts

The Fourth Dimension (1936)

Right after I watch the movie Deja Vu there’s a “Deja Vu” title card in It’s Not Me, then the first Painleve film I find is showing time as an image flipbook and imagining that higher-dimensional beings can change pages at will. Pretty dry science film but it’s fun that scientists have always been excited about time travel.

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The Octopus (1927)

Pretty random assortment of live and dead octopus…
Great doc, because octupusus are great.

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Sea Urchins (1929)

More cool sea creatures which become increasingly disturbing as you learn more about them, zooming into their spiny surface to discover a horrid living forest of waggling suckers and claws

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Daphnia (1928)

Nothing cool or cute about the microshrimp “water fleas,” ghastly transparent insectoid monsters, silently battling their nemesis The Hydra by the million in every lake and pond.

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Freshwater Assassins (1947)

This one has sound – enjoy some swinging horn jazz while underwater insects munch on even smaller insects, 24 minutes of weird shrimpies chowing down on each other.

by ·Comments Off on The Lodger (1927, Alfred Hitchcock)

There’s a serial killer murdering the blondes of London, but the movie is more concerned with showing us all the media technologies of the time (telegraph, newspaper, radio, electric billboards). Meanwhile after a performance of “Golden Curls,” the few performers who weren’t wearing wigs are worried about their walk home. Good music by Neil Brand, and I love the construction paper graphics on the intertitles.

Ivor Novello arrives, pale and scarved, at a boarding house, acting like a dramatic ghost while renting a room, and is assumed to be the killer so everything he picks up is implied to be a possible murder weapon. He likes local girl Daisy, which annoys her hanger-on Joe. First the landlady then the cops go snooping through Ivor’s stuff, then the real killer is caught off-camera but not before jealous Joe gets an angry mob to beat Ivor half to death.

Killer calling card:

British people must spend 15% of their day standing in shocked silence after something mildly disagreeable happened. Novello’s legacy: he would be portrayed ninety-some years later by the guy who also played young Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia 2.

POV: Ivor Novello wants to kiss you

by ·Comments Off on Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922/1968, Benjamin Christensen)

Is it artistically kosher to re-release a silent film replacing the intertitles with narration and scoring the scenes with weirdo jazz? Why yes, it should be done all the time. There are still plenty of dialogue titles in the reenactment scenes, Burroughs only acts as historian narrator, but it’s still a half hour shorter than the original so his buddy Balch (of Towers Open Fire fame) cut plenty. Good movie in any form, and maybe the only early 1920s film with an ass-kissing parade. The narrator assures us that according to modern psychology none of these women were witches; they all had hysteria.

I watched this between Cuckoo and The First Omen – Satan is having plenty of children:

Been caught cookie-stabbing:

by ·Comments Off on Four by Man Ray & Sqürl

The Starfish (1928)

He’s loving distorting the camera view and irising in, cross-fades, the poem as intertitles to the action. The starfish motion diorama halfway through is very great.

I stand by what I wrote last time. Watched the new restoration with music by Sqürl which I love whenever there’s guitar/feedback and/or drums (the all-keyboard sections feel too tame for these films). Man Ray and I were alive within a year of each other.

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Emak-Bakia (1926)

What I said before, and add double exposures, plus Man Ray inventing the anamorphic lens-twisting effect 55 years before The Evil Dead.

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Return of Reason (1923)

Film-surface object patterns, an underlit carnival.
Sqürl getting into it with the drums and keys, intense.

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Mysteries of the Chateau of Dice (1929)

Faceless dice men drive out from Paris, leading to some excessive shaky-cam driving scenes, arriving at a very modern castle. Judging from the sliding panels full of canvases it’s the home of a rich art collector – is this movie a tour of a rich benefactor’s fancy house, like that one Cocteau? Apparently.

by ·Comments Off on The Big Parade (1925, King Vidor)

I got a new dumb idea: to watch a bunch of movies called The Big ____ and call it The Big Movie Series. Not planning to rewatch The Big Heat (Lang) or The Big Boss or The Big Sky or The Big City or The Big Short or The Big Shave or The Big Snit or The Big Sick or The Big Picture… maybe The Big Lebowski or The Big Sleep… and I wonder if there’s an HD version of the extended The Big Red One yet.

our boys:

Idle rich pretty boy Jim (John Gilbert, star of The Merry Widow the same year) surprises everyone by enlisting in the army during WWI, teaming up with slack-jawed steelworker Slim (Karl Dane of fellow big movie The Big House) and officer/bartender Bull. At this point I got tired of hearing “You’re In the Army Now” on the blu-ray soundtrack so I put on Jason Moran’s album of WWI music, and loved how the slide-whistle song synched up with the Three Stooges-ass scene when Jim is walking with a barrel on his head. This is while they’re in France before the fighting starts, and Jim is falling for a pretty local (Renée Adorée, also Gilbert’s costar in Tod Browning’s The Show).

french girl:

Once they’re in the trenches, each gets his chance for heroism and revenge and death. WWI battle tactics are depicted as: walking in a straight line towards machine gun and cannon fire like robots until some yokel has the idea of throwing a grenade at the enemy. Only the rich guy gets to live, and back home his girlfriend and his brother try to pretend they haven’t fallen in love with each other while he was away, but he could care less, he hobbles back to France as if his beloved farmgirl really needs a yank with a wooden leg. But I kid, it’s a beautiful scene, made that much better by the Dirty Three album I put on after running out of Jason Moran songs.

my new motto: