![]() ![]() Keaton lives out his horror of law enforcement. ![]() One of seemingly countless Buster Keaton shorts that, pound for pound, contain more excitement and invention than the entirety of most contemporary action franchises. Watching Lloyd’s “ Safety Last!” or Keaton’s “ The General,” both monuments of the art form, is almost like seeing movies for the first time, so bright are the laughs and so kinetic is the action. It’s hard to fathom how, after the subsequent century of filmmaking that followed the silent era, when nearly every trope was repeated endlessly, the works of these two geniuses still pop off the screen with endless, vibrant ingenuity. They’re a delight to watch and crackling with invention, and I almost constantly find myself wondering, “How did they do that?!”-not just the mind blowing practical stunt work, but also the hilarious gags that somehow still seem fresh. These are mostly one- or two-reelers, short films that go down incredibly easily. To balance out my cinematic diet, I also watched a pretty healthy portion of classic silent cinema, which accounts for the unusually high number of movies in my roundup for the month: twenty-eight total, eight of which starred Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton, and all of which are about a hundred years old now. Movies make no sense! I’m okay with that. Sometimes we can’t explain how we react to movies, mostly because movies are not inherently logical. It was mostly unremarkably acceptable, even kind of enjoyable! I won’t even attempt to analyze the reasons why. Like, I did not find myself actively disliking what was on the screen. So as you can imagine, I did not expect to like it-the whole production gave me so many reasons to hate it, in fact! But for some reason I was fine with it. Well, it wasn’t so much the movie itself that spurred me to go as it was my kids, who wanted to see it. What got me out of the house and into a seat at the theater last month? Illumination Entertainment’s incomprehensibly tolerable “ The Super Mario Bros. ![]()
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