Skip to main content

Sons of the Desert

Director: William A. Seiter
Year: 1933
Run-time: 1 hr 4 min
Source: Amazon Video

- This is the first and perhaps only Laurel and Hardy film on the list. As a comedy, it's very different in style than Duck Soup, and I liked it a fair bit more.  The contrast between the two characters is delightful, and there's no modern equivalent to the comedy duo riffing on each other like this.  (The only example that comes to mind is Conan O'Brien and Jordan Schlansky.)  There's also no cinematic clown quite like Stan Laurel.  Plus the theme of husbands dominated by their wives plays surprisingly well against today's expectations.

- Recently Steve Coogan starred with John C. Reilly in a biopic of Laurel and Hardy late in their careers.  I haven't seen the film, but I did see an interview with Coogan where he gave an impression of Laurel and one of his antics.  It was a funny bit, but at least compared to the Laurel of this film I'm not sure Coogan was the right fit.


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fétiche Mascotte (The Mascot)

Director: Ladislas Starevich Year: 1933 Run-time: 26 min Source: Youtube Notable For : The second animated short on the list from 1933 is this stop-motion piece from the Polish-Russian film-maker Ladislas Starevich.  Stop-motion is almost as old as cinema itself (Starevich had been innovating since 1912).  The craft here is as good as any modern film, and Starevich's twisted imagination is on full display, with dolls and household objects coming to life in a dark version of Toy Story.  For animation fans, it almost goes without saying that Starevich was an influence on Jan Svankmajer's work much later. Verdict :  Every frame is a bizarre delight. There didn't seem to be an overarching plan to this work (indeed, it's possible that The Mascot  is an amalgamation of several shorter films featuring the same dog character), and so the film veers from one strange scene to the next, with much of the second half taking place in some kind of tchotchke hell governe...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Trip to the Moon

Director: Georges Méliès Year: 1902 Seeing the painstakingly restored hand-colored print of A Trip to the Moon, in a literally mind-numbing 14 frames per second, makes it utterly clear that cinema is and has always been witchcraft. Every frame of this short feels bursting with magic, and even watching it on a modern TV in a space age that would have blown the mind of any of the actors of this film, you're left thinking "How did they do that?".
Post a Comment
Read more

Paisan

Director: Roberto Rossellini Year: 1946 The greatest innovation in cinema around this period is the emergence of mainstream films that are anchored so specifically in contemporary life, that were deliberately not timeless. Rossellini went further than anyone else in this direction - Paisan  deliberately interweaves stock war footage with staged settings, real actors with non-professionals, to create something that deliberately skirts the line between fiction and documentary. Paisan  is also the first great bilingual film on the list, not only featuring English and Italian but many different dialects, making the film extremely difficult for a native Italian to understand. The performances are often extremely stilted, and there are glaring editing mistakes, but many of the stories are extremely compelling. 
Post a Comment
Read more