Man With A Movie List

Director: Charles Reisner and Buster Keaton Year: 1928 Runtime: 1 hr 7 min Source: Youtube I've been talking up Steamboat Bill, Jr . for a while on this blog as a slightly underrated Keaton classic, so it's something of a relief that this film is as good as I remember.  I can see now that it wasn't Keaton at his most innovative - the film contains several large scale callbacks to his earlier works.  We have the collapsing carpentry of One Week , the meta cinema symbolism of Sherlock, Jr. , and the relationship between a man and his machine that underlies The General .  Keaton's general persona of a misunderstood weakling was well-established by this point, and he doesn't bring much new to this character. I would hesitate to say that it's his funniest film either, after having seen The Cameraman  (actually made after this film). Nevertheless, it's the first Keaton film I would recommend anyone to watch, since it just epitomizes what made him so gre...

Director: Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton Year: 1928 Run-time: 1 hr 7 min Source: Paid Youtube Most of the well-known Buster Keaton bits revolve around a set-piece - a train ( The General ), a build-it-yourself house ( One Week ), a movie projector ( Sherlock, Jr. ) - so The Camerman  is somewhat unique for giving us a chance to see what a great physical comedian Keaton could be on his own.  And there are some absolutely hilarious moments that rival anything else in his career, most particularly the dressing room scene. The plot revolves around Keaton's bumbling attempts to break into the early newsreel industry with a shoddy second-hand camera.  The camera's ability to either deceive or reveal is hinted at, but the message here isn't as poignant as in Sherlock, Jr.   The best scenes occur when Keaton tries to woo a clerk at the newsroom.  By this point, Keaton had mastered the "innocent idiot" character completely, and we alternately laugh at and root ...

Director: Buster Keaton (and Clyde Bruckman) Year: 1926 Run-time: 1 hr 15 min Buster Keaton is probably my favorite silent film director, and Sherlock, Jr.  and Steamboat Bill, Jr.  are right up there in my all-time favorites, just under Sunset .  But neither of those films have quite the prestige as The General .  The last giant Sight and Sound poll in 2012 ranks that film as the 34th GOAT, with Sherlock, Jr.  20 ranks behind it.  It's probably the most renowned film from my home state of Oregon. But as much as I love Keaton, The General  has always left me a bit cold.  Keaton plays a Southern railroad engineer during the Civil War.  Due to his important job, the South won't enlist him, although he thinks it's because he's too wimpy (the common thread to Keaton's characters being a feeling of masculine incompetence).  But when his girlfriend and his locomotive are kidnapped by a team of Union spies, he has to chase after them. I...

Director: Buster Keaton Year: 1924 Run time: 45 min Source: Kanopy When Buster Keaton started working in the film industry in 1917, he apparently had reservations about this new art form.  By 1924, he had changed his mind enough to direct film's first, and possibly its best, love letter to itself.  Sherlock, Jr. stars Keaton as a wannabe detective in the mold of Holmes, but Sherlock, Jr. is really all about life imitating cinema. The greatest scene - probably among the top ten special effects of all time - is the moment when Keaton's character, dreaming, steps onto the screen itself from the audience's position, where he finds himself madly transported between locales as the scenes change.  The genius of Keaton's stunts is that he makes it look simple, when really each shot required using surveying equipment to get his position exactly right. There are plenty of other great stunts here, but this is the first Keaton movie on the list where he has an interesting ...

Director: Buster Keaton and Malcolm St. Clair Year: 1921 Run-time: 22 min Source: Youtube I won't turn down two Buster Keaton films in a row.  While  One Week  was all physical slapstick and set-based humor, the comedy in this film is more situational, although it also dives heavily into surreal farce.  The classic persona he shows in his films feels a little more developed, with that stone face barely hiding flashes of distress. I couldn't possibly be the first to notice this, but Keaton shares a spiritual bond with Jackie Chan.  Certainly both performers were physical comedians of the highest order, and both suffered repeated injuries on set.  There are stunts in this film that boggle my mind, considering how little trickery filmmakers of the period had access to. I didn't care much for what plot there was in The Goat , but it has a manic energy and pacing to it that's kind of infectious.  One thing that impresses me about the silent age is ...

Director: Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline Year: 1920 Run-time: 22 min Source: Youtube Watching this after Tih Minh  was like a nice, glass of iced tea after a hot summer day.  I've always been a huge fan of Buster Keaton, and this list is a nice opportunity to see some of his lesser-known works as well as watch some favorites once again.  In this one, the classic Keaton persona hasn't really developed yet, but the slapstick and incredible stunts are all there. The film itself is a parody of an educational short promoting prefabricated houses, but anyone who's put together an Ikea bookshelf can understand the humor.  The bizarre misshapen house that gets produced due to some mislabelled boxes is one of the best singular props in early cinema - it alone makes the film worth it. As for the stunts themselves, they make it clear how Disney and Looney Tunes stole shamefacedly from Keaton and the vaudeville tradition.  Keaton himself is sometimes Bugs Bunny,...