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 Shorts watched March 2024

Out West (1918, Roscoe Arbuckle)

Bullets and arrows to the ass and bottles to the head are minor invonceniences, if that. Roscoe is a vagabond thief sharpshooter who takes a job at Buster’s saloon and helps fend off the invincible but highly ticklish Wild Bill Hiccup. A very silly movie.

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Life is But a Dream (2022, Park Chan-wook)

Pretty good for a phone ad. Coffin maker steals wood from a famous fighter’s coffin to bury another famous fighter, the two ghosts agree to marry and be buried together. Ends on an underworld dance party, all pretty extravagant for a short.

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Wrecked (2013, Benson & Moorhead)

Shitty pilot crashes/destroys his plane in desert, needs water, makes radio contact with a bizarre unhelpful individual quoting annoying platitudes, who turns out to be a stoned music festival participant. Cute, better than the Park.

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The Heron and the Crane (1975, Yuri Norshteyn)

Animated birds and live-action fireworks. Crane would like to marry Heron, she refuses, then reconsiders but he refuses, then reconsiders, and so on. I thought there’d be some reconciliation and compromise, but nope, narrator says they go back and forth eternally.

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Hedgehog in the Fog (1975, Yuri Norshteyn)

Hedgehog gets distracted on his way to bear’s house to count stars, when he sees a white horse in the fog. Wanders in there, gets terrified by all the creatures, but they keep helping him and he makes it out. Beautiful movie, abrupt ending. How’d they do the fog? Characters remind me of the Winnie-the-Pooh Russian shorts (Khitruk was Norshteyn’s mentor).

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25 October, The First Day (1968, Yuri Norshteyn)

Ah, glorious October 1917, the people marching in one mighty red undistinguished blur while cartoon priests and fatcats run in terror. Lot of text slogans. Not my kind of thing, but neat layered images. Newsreel footage at the end with red flag waving over it, exclaiming that the people now run the country with no exploiters. Did it still feel that way fifty years later?

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Cowboy Jimmy (1957, Dusan Vukotic)

Wow, exaggerated looney Wild West characters, Jimmy arrives and kills a whole table of card cheats with one shot then throws them his smoke rings as wreaths, chases down the blackhat villain, who trips Cowboy J so he falls out of the movie screen and into the audience in front of a pipsqueak fan. The kid takes J to his wild west playhouse, where the child villain brutalizes the real cowboy until the kids all lose respect for him and carry him to the kino to throw him back through the movie screen.

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Cow on the Moon (1959, Dusan Vukotic)

Soccer hooligan smashes a girl’s model rocket, so she builds a full-size rocket to get even, knowing he’ll steal it, then she scares the hell out of him by pretending to be a moon person. The tormented cow thinks it was a pretty good joke. An even better frame-breaking gag than Cowboy Jimmy when she zooms out and tilts the movie’s background to get a cart up a steep hill

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You Ought to be in Pictures (1940, Friz Freleng)

While the animators are at lunch, Daffy talks Porky into telling Leon Schlesinger he wants to quit and go into features. While Porky is getting chased by security and thrown off sets, Daffy is auditioning for Porky’s job in Schlesinger’s office. Terrific live/anim hybrid. Top Looney story writer Michael Maltese played the guard.

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Happy Go Nutty (1944, Tex Avery)

Armed with a Napoleon hat and giant hammer, Screwy Squirrel breaks out of the nuthouse and gets chased all over by a guard dog. Good meta jokes, only one racist bit.

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Lambert the Sheepish Lion (1952, Hannah & Geronimi)

Lion is raised with sheep, “he was big but he was yellow.” Rhyming narration by Sterling Holloway. More tame / less fun than the others, but very professional looking, and who doesn’t like Holloway (reprising his stork role from Dumbo).

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Felix in Exile (1994, William Kentridge)

A person sits in a bare room while a bunch of others bleed to death. Ah, he is a writer, either inventing or recounting the deaths, the animation leaves half-erased trails – a cool effect when you know it’s done on purpose, less so when you’re not sure if you got a dodgy MP4. His walls become covered in paintings of a woman in water, the bleeding bodies transform into landscapes, the woman is connected to telescopes and sextant, and appears as a constellation. It’s all depressive-obsessive. Honestly I messed up watching this after Tex Avery shorts – even though I noted it was from the 1990s I had Felix the Cat in my mind when I hit play.

by ·Comments Off on Experimental and Other Shorts watched March 2022

Earthearthearth (2021 Daichi Saito)

Opens with sunrise/sunsets, light tentatively emerging then retreating, broken up with ugly digital artifacting and with one of those a-g drone tracks that says “I didn’t have any sound in mind but I want to act like it’s a sound film so the viewer doesn’t put on an Abraxas album.” But the drone gets bigger and more complex as the visuals turn into fullscreen desert landscapes, superimposed over different ones, infected by huge color tinting – purple-blues, blue-and-gold. The radiation-green with Argento-red section is incredible, as the drone starts to sound like a processed bowed string instrument. I went back and forth on digital/analogue and finally decided it’s scanned film run through a panel of analog video processing effects – am I right? (nope, chemical-processed 16mm). Just a half hour of looking at lights flicker over mountains, but it’s the most times I’ve said “whoa” out loud while watching any movie this year. Eventually I started daydreaming about putting on The Grandmaster, but the Grainy Cloud Explosions finale was worth sticking around for.

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The Head That Killed Everyone (2014 Beatriz Santiago Muñoz)

Voice reads methodically, as if from a lesson plan, some lines about the energies that go into casting a proper spell. Then a woman does a long dance in medium close-up without music, just the sounds of the night and an approaching thunderstorm. Not as exciting as its title, which I took to be the opposite energy of that Flaming Lips song.

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13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (2020 Ana Vaz)

Another woman reading, this time onscreen but out of sync, a crackly vinyl loop overlaid on the soundtrack, until it suddenly is not. To be uncharitable to the experimental shorts, they revel in adding and removing elements on a random timeline. Title card. Instead of seeing a scenario, we see someone with eyes closed, her voiceover telling us the scenario she’s envisioning. After a couple of those, the camera at least shows a scene that kinda represents what the person dreamed. I think each title card is a line from the opening monologue, so each chapter expands on a section of that. And they mention blackbirds pretty often, though any birds the camera or mic pick up seem pretty incidental to their “what are images, what is the meaning of anything” conversations. Forgot I wanted to save this movie to double-feature with There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting on a Horse.

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Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995 (2020 Ute Aurand)

Silent defocused montage of extreme close-ups on colorful things – flowers, farm animals, gramma. A personal diary-travelogue short, a-g-style.

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What Distinguishes The Past (2020 Ben Russell)

Long take of a fireworks display in reverse motion, neat. I’m glad I watched this, because it’s got a playful reversal on what I consider (based on Let Each One and A Spell to Ward) to be Russell’s signature: handheld cam following a person walking in real-time over terrain. This time the people are walking in reverse, shot from the front, composited into the terrain, and it’s all over in four minutes.

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Kyiv Frescoes (1966 Sergei Parajanov)

After Pomegranates and Ancestors, it’s fun to see a Parajanov with modern costumes. This picks up the pace from Pomegranates, practically playing like a silent comedy, though one with impeccable compositions, prominently placed symbolic objects, and few (but some!) actual jokes. Besides being a playful compositional art object, it’s a choreographed dance film and I dunno, maybe a history lesson. I know I’m ridiculous for thinking this might have been about actual Kyiv frescoes, imagining a tour in the style of Varda’s Les Dites Cariatides.

This was to be his followup feature to Ancestors but was shut down during production, so these scenes are outtakes from that project – then he’d develop this new style into Pomegranates. Per The Calvert Journal:

Parajanov intended to set this loosely-structured metaphorical film on the day of the city’s liberation from Nazi troops — but wanted to centre it around a museum, praising beauty and art rather than heroism and patriotism. The production of the film was terminated by the state studio, who deemed Parajanov’s experiments inappropriate for the subject.

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The Balloonatic (1923 Buster Keaton)

The most random of the shorts, moving from a haunted house to hot air balloon to canoe, with fishes and bulls and bears along the way. Buster is a ridiculous idiot here with moments of brilliance – and the girl he keeps bumping into is mostly capable with moments of incompetence, so they’re made for each other. Phyllis Haver is his lead actress – a Sennett and DeMille star in the silent era, before something went wrong 40 years on; she took a lot of pills and died.

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The Blacksmith (1922 Buster Keaton)

I suppose he’s more capable here, but mostly oblivious. A blacksmith’s assistant, he ruins two cars and two horses, and gets the blacksmith (Big Joe Roberts, of course) arrested, ends up on a chase, hopping a train to elope with customer Virginia Fox. The casual use of hot metal and blowtorches produce some wincey stunts. Better use of a balloon in this short than in The Balloonatic.

by ·Comments Off on In the Good Old Summertime (1949, Robert Z. Leonard)

Named after the song, for some reason, since mostly it’s a Christmas movie – a semi-remake of The Shop Around the Corner, with Van Johnson as the insensitive lunk. Tom Hanks and Jimmy Stewart are extremely likeable actors, offsetting the insensitivity of their character, but here the producers were mostly focused on finding excuses for Judy Garland to sing old-fashioned songs, so they changed the shop to a music store, hired a bunch of comedians for the support roles, and accidentally cast a lunk to play the lunk.

Cuddles Sakall (this is his latest film that I’ve heard of) is their boss, a music store owner who plays his expensive violin very badly, with his Devil and Miss Jones costar Spring Byington as his secretary/fiancee, plus nordic-sounding Minnesotan Clinton Sundberg (Good Sam), and Buster Keaton! Keaton gets to smash the offending violin (actually another violin, long story) and directed the chaotic scene when Judy and Van meet – which we knew because the P-Bog doc just showed it. Van’s violinist friend was actually a violinist, who had just appeared on a Life magazine cover.

Opens with heavy narration, which thankfully peters out. Judy looked and sounded great onscreen – this was a brief productive spell between The Pirate and Summer Stock during the period when she kept getting fired from movies. Mostly she sings period-appropriate songs for shop customers looking to spend 15 cents on sheet music, but she gets to stretch out at a company party, following a lively barbershop song with the crazy-energetic “I Don’t Care.”

by ·Comments Off on The Great Buster (2018, Peter Bogdanovich)

Rounding up some of the foremost comics and filmmakers, P-Bog opens with the greatest authority on film history – himself, of course. It’s extremely easy to find people with nice things to say about Buster Keaton, and to fill the rest of a 100 minute documentary with highlight clips from Keaton’s terrific films, and P-Bog does exactly that. In fact, the whole thing begins to feel like an advertisement for Buster and his great features – and it is, produced by Cohen Media Group, who is currently releasing the Keaton films on blu-ray, and also happens to own the Landmark theater where this doc played. But even if P-Bog doesn’t turn in something on the level of his epic Tom Petty doc, this was a fun way to revisit some Keaton. He peppers the “sad later years” section with highlights from Keaton’s forgotten advertisements and cameos, and puts this section in the middle of the film, so he can start strong with the shorts, and end strong with the features.

by ·Comments Off on Movies from a Hundred Years Ago

I was going to watch more of these, loaded a Borzage thing and a Lubitsch thing on the laptop, but for months I haven’t felt like continuing, so I’m pulling the trigger.

His Wedding Night (1917 Roscoe Arbuckle)

Roscoe is a soda jerk who also keeps an eye on the perfume counter and gas pump. Gags about Al St. John trying to steal his girl, Buster Keaton delivering a wedding dress, and Roscoe putting chloroform in a perfume bottle to prevent customers from over-sampling the expensive stuff all come together magically in the end. Arbuckle’s a strong dude, picks up romantic rival Al and hurls him across a room. Arbuckle also sexually harasses a woman and a donkey, and pretty quickly learns to use his chloroform bottle for evil. Very nearly cinema’s first gay marriage before Keaton is unmasked.

Modeling:

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The Rough House (1917, Roscoe Arbuckle)

A psychotic chef (Fuzzy St. John), hapless grocery delivery boy (Keaton) and an idiot manchild (Arbuckle) destroy a house. Then the chef is fired and Arbuckle is the new chef. Friends are invited to dinner, one is a thief, cops arrive, many people fall down, and the house is pretty much destroyed again. Main value to be found in this pile of randomly-edited violence is Arbuckle’s dancing dinner rolls, apparently stolen (and perfected) by Chaplin for The Gold Rush.

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Dreamy Dud. He Resolves Not to Smoke (1915, Wallace Carlson)

Finally I am watching the movie with the greatest title of all time, and it’s a bit of a let-down… pretty much a tame Rarebit Fiend episode with a pipe-smoking boy and his pervert dog, full of horrible slang.

Urban Dictionary is conflicted about what this might mean:

by ·Comments Off on Our Hospitality (1923, Buster Keaton)

We managed to watch this despite obstacles (DVD gone missing, Amazon’s lies about runtime). Keaton’s second feature, a vast improvement over his first. Keaton takes a train to brutal, rural America to claim his family estate, which turns out to be a crumbling shack. So instead he focuses on the hot girl who rode the train out west with him (played by Keaton’s wife), but her dad (familiar heavy Joe Roberts) and two brothers are out to kill him because of a century-old family feud.

After a flashback open where Keaton’s dad and Joe Roberts’ brother kill each other, the first half of the movie is mostly the ride out west on a ridiculous wood-fired train said to be based on an actual vehicle. Second half is Keaton, having been invited over by the girl, unable to leave since the men won’t shoot him while he’s a guest in their home. He finally escapes dressed as a woman, then after a mountaintop chase culminating in one of the best stunts in movie history – Keaton swinging on a rope to catch the girl coming over a waterfall – they marry, ending the feud. Watched with Katy as history lesson after the first Story of Film episode, though we mostly forgot to analyze editing and obsess over the 180 degree rule.

by ·Comments Off on Battling Butler (1926, Buster Keaton & Eddie Cline)

Based on a hit stage play. Rich, useless Alfred Butler goes on a ludicrously well-outfitted camping trip with his valet and meets a beautiful mountain girl. But he can’t marry her without impressing her father and brother, strong wilderness men. Fortunately Alfred shares a name with an up-and-coming lightweight boxer, so they pretend that he’s “Battling” Butler, and he marries the girl. He’s off to the boxer’s training camp to keep up the charade, and Keaton goes from fake-training to real-training when the other Butler swaps roles with him, leaving Keaton to face the Alabama Murderer for the championship. But the boxer returns, wins the fight then gets plastered by Keaton in the dressing room after being a huge asshole to everyone.

Happy ending:

Battling B with Keaton’s valet:

The Haunted House (1921)

Crooks have a foolproof plan to avoid capture: make their hideaway into a haunted house. But first: Keaton and Big Joe Roberts are bank clerks, and Joe’s men are planning a heist. Keaton foils the holdup through incompetence, having spilled glue on all the money. Mistaken for a criminal, the cops are after him, and an angry audience is after the cast of a nearby stage performance of Faust – all end up at the house, with Big Joe’s thieves donning ghost costumes and pulling levers to turn the stairs into a ramp (which would be frustrating but not exactly scary). Keaton again foils the robbers and gets the girl (I forgot to mention there was a girl). Also Keaton gets konked on the head and goes to heaven then hell. And it’s only a twenty minute movie.

And this happens:

with Virginia Fox of The Love Nest, The Playhouse, Neighbors, etc.

The Frozen North (1922)

Keaton falls asleep during a movie and imagines himself in the sort of town where Chaplin would lose and then get the girl in The Gold Rush. A weird short which makes little sense, with Keaton as the bad guy: opens with him holding up a casino before he shoots a neighbor couple to death as a gag. He loses another girl, shacks up in Big Joe’s igloo, goes snowshoeing and ice fishing (what else can you do in the frozen north?) then gets shot going after that girl again. Apparently a parody of western director William S. Hart’s films – Keaton was feuding with Hart over the Fatty Arbuckle scandal.

Keaton emotes:

And turns into Erich von Stroheim:

Janitor Eddie Cline: