silent film

Movies to See Right Now (at home)

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Olivia Colman and Anthony Hopkins in THE FATHER, coming up at the Mill Valley Film Festival

This week: Not one, but TWO Watch At Home film festivals.

The Mill Valley Film Festival is always the best opportunity for Bay Area film goers to catch an early look at the Big Movies – the prestige films that will be released during Award Season. This year is the same – except we don’t even have to visit Marin County in person. Watch at home.

Cinejoy is Cinequest’s October virtual fest. More watch at home choices, especially focused on indie gems that you can’t see anywhere else.

ON VIDEO

Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story: “Actresses play characters, but stuntwoman play actresses playing characters, while driving fast and kicking ass.” Streaming on iTunes and Google Play.

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

On October 4, Turner Classic Movies presents an afternoon and evening of Buster Keaton that is one of the best programs that TCM has ever curated. First, there’s Peter Bogdanovich’s fine 2018 biodoc of Keaton, The Great Buster: A Celebration. I had thought that I had a good handle on Keaton’s body of work, but The Great Buster is essential to understanding it.

TCM follows with four movies from Keaton’s masterpiece period: Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and Seven Chances (1925). After 1928, Keaton’s new studio took away his creative control, and his career (and personal life) crashed.

This is a chance to appreciate Keaton’s greatest work. I just wrote about Steamboat Bill, Jr. for last year’s Cinequest. I’ve also recommended Seven Chances for its phenomenal chase scene, one that still (ninety-five years later!) rates with the very best in cinema history.

Buster Keaton in SEVEN CHANCES

BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHE: every cinephile should know this

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The documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache pulls us out of ignorance about one of the most important pioneers of cinema. Alice Guy was one of the first movie directors, one of the first producers and one of the first studio heads. She was one of the inventors of movie comedy, use of color, special effects and a host of other aspects of filmmaking that we take for granted today. She worked in all three centers of early filmmaking – Paris, Fort Lee, New Jersey and Hollywood. And she was a woman.

Alice Guy had been almost erased from history precisely because – and only because – she was a woman. But if we don’t know about Alice Guy, we are as ignorant as if we didn’t know about the Lumieres and D.W. Griffith. This is essential movie history.

Fortunately, more and more of her films are being rediscovered – found, properly credited and preserved. At the bottom of this post, you can watch one of her films, The Consequences of Feminism. I didn’t even know that the word “feminism” was extant 114 years ago, but the film still has #MeToo topicality. It’s a withering parody of gender roles and male entitlement. In the film, men and women have taken each others’ conventional gender roles. Men perform the thankless household drudgery while the women smoke, drink and play pool. Throughout, the women are outrageously sexually harassing the men, kind of like Mad Men in reverse. Of course, the men finally rebel at all the mistreatment.

Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blache is currently free on WATCH TCM and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Here’s the entire seven minute film from 1906: The Consequences of Feminism:

Movies to See Right Now

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Buster Keaton (right) in STEAMBOAT BILL, JR.

OUT NOW

ON VIDEO

My Stream of the Week is the Danish director Susanne Bier’s 2006 After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet) with the charismatic Mads Mikkelsen. There’s also a remake – a big Hollywood remake to be released this Friday also called After the Wedding. See this Danish original. After the Wedding was nominated for Best Foreign Language Oscar. After the Wedding, which I had listed as the second-best movie of 2007, can be streamed from Criterion and Amazon.

ON TV

On August 19, Turner Classic Movies presents an evening of Buster Keaton that is one of the best programs that TCM has ever curated. First, there’s Peter Bogdanovich’s fine 2018 biodoc of Keaton, The Great Buster: A Celebration. I had thought that I had a good handle on Keaton’s body of work, but The Great Buster is essential to understanding it.

TCM follows with five movies from Keaton’s masterpiece period:
Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The Navigator (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The General (1926) andSteamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). After 1928, Keaton’s new studio took away his creative control, and his career (and personal life) crashed.

This is a chance to appreciate Keaton’s greatest work. I just wrote about Steamboat Bill, Jr. for this year’s Cinequest. I’ve also recommended Seven Chances for its phenomenal chase scene, one that still rates with the very best in cinema history.

Buster Keaton in SEVEN CHANCES

DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME: eat your broccoli

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DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME

When there’s a movie that is supposed to be good for you, but you really don’t enjoy it, I call it an “eat your broccoli” movie, and the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time is an example.

An estimated 75% of all silent movies have been lost.  Dawson City: Frozen Time is about the discovery of hundreds of silent films.  It turns out that Dawson City, a mining hamlet in the Canadian Yukon, was the last stop on a movie distribution circuit.  When a movie played Dawson City, it was already two years after the initial release, so the distributors didn’t find it worthwhile to pay for the return of the film.  Accordingly, many movies from the silent era were stored or disposed of in Dawson City, where they were uncovered by a construction bulldozer in 1978.

That’s all interesting enough, and 5-10 minutes would be enough to tell this story, and then we could focus on the most compelling of the actual Lost Films, and that could make a fine documentary.  But the two hours of Dawson City: Frozen Time is a loooong two hours.

There are some interesting documentary nuggets.  One example is an illustration of how hand grenades were manufactured for WW I.

Baseball fans will treasure clips from the 1919 World Series, which is infamously known for the “Black Sox” scandal.  Some Chicago White Sox stars took money from gamblers to throw the series.  In Dawson City, we actually get to see some of the suspiciously inept plays by the heavily favored Sox.

The best part is about two-thirds through – a montage of found films.  The images are compelling, and the performances have a surprising magnetism.

By far the worst part of Dawson City is its off-putting score.   The drone of discordant chords (is that an oxymoron or just impossible?)  played on various keyboard instruments is distracting and then finally unbearable.  I was annoyed enough, but then The Wife, from another room in the house, called out, “That music is TERRIBLE”.

I need to tell you that I’m outside the critical mainstream on Dawson City: Frozen Time, which has an impressive Metacritic score of 85.   Major critics that I highly respect have described it as “instantaneously recognizable masterpiece”, “thrilling”, “hypnotic” and even “elevates…to the level of poetry”.  But not for me.

Dawson City: Frozen Time can be streamed from Amazon, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

 

DVD/Stream of the Week: SEVEN CHANCES – Buster Keaton’s genius on the run

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SEVEN CHANCES
SEVEN CHANCES

I thought that I knew the work of Buster Keaton, but somehow I had never seen Seven Chances.  It features a phenomenal chase scene that rates with the very best in cinema history – What’s Up Doc?, The French Connection, Bullitt!, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Keaton’s own The General.

Keaton’s character publishes a public offer of marriage and gets way more takers than he can handle. There’s a very funny scene where he sits in a church to reflect on his situation and woman after woman seats herself next to and around him; he is oblivious to the fact that each of them is there to marry HIM.  The church fills up with prospective wives, and, 30 minutes into the movie, he flees, with a horde of veiled would-be brides in pursuit. The chase is on.

Keaton is off and running and running and running, in a ridiculously long sprint though the city’s downtown and rail yards and into the hills.  Amazingly, he did all of his own stunts, including leaping over an abyss and being swung around by a railroad crane.  His race with a cascade of falling boulders is pure genius.  You keep asking yourself, “How did they perform that stunt with 1925 technology?”

Keaton understood the comedic power of excess, and the sheer magnitude of the frustrated brides is hilarious   I think I can see the inspiration for the hundreds of crashing cars at the end of The Blues Brothers.

SEVEN CHANCES
Buster Keaton jumps the abyss in SEVEN CHANCES

When he made Seven Chances in 1925, Keaton was only 30 years old and had just directed his first feature two years before.  He had just made the classics Sherlock, Jr. and The Navigator in 1924.  He was about to make his masterpiece The General in 1926 and Steamboat Bill, Jr. in 1928.  Talking pictures changed the industry in 1929, and Keaton signed a disastrous contract with MGM in 1930.  Keaton was to direct only three more features in his career (all unaccredited).  MGM took away his artistic freedom, and no studio kingpin knew what to do with him in the talking era.  Keaton took to drink and went dark for decades.

I watched all 56 minutes of Seven Chances once by myself and the final 26-minute chase scene again with my wife and nephew.  I viewed Seven Chances on Turner Classic Movies. It’s also available to rent on DVD from Netflix and to stream on Amazon Instant.  You can also find the entire film, probably as an illegal bootleg, on YouTube.

SEVEN CHANCES
The race with the boulders in SEVEN CHANCES

A baseball time capsule: The Busher

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On August 24, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting the 1919 silent film The Busher. It may not be a great movie, but it is an excellent document of baseball 90 years ago.  In 1919, John McGraw was managing the Giants, Ty Cobb was in his heyday, Babe Ruth pitched 17 games for the BoSox and the White Sox were fixing the World Series.  If you want to see how baseball looked back then (how the fans and umpires dressed, how the catcher squatted, etc.), watch this movie.