I absolutely LOVED this film. It is movies like this that remind me of why I started this project in the first place. It is so clever, so exciting, and so well executed that even today, it rivals all other action comedies. Buster Keaton is a genius, and he plays the engineer on a Southern locomotive. When the Union spies steal it, he chases after them to retireve it, only to wind up behind enemy lines and thrust into being a hero. If you thought two trains chasing each other on one rail would get boring, think again. The things this movie comes up with just leaves a perpetual smile on your face. I enjoyed this movie so much in its whimsical simplicty, it is easily now one of my favorite films of all time!!!
A truly inspired, technical, non-narrative film that really showed what the medium could do, even back in the 1920s. Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov decided to film a day in a Russian city...and that took 4 years. The film consists of shots of the city working, the filmmaker shooting the city, and the filmmakers editing together their film. It is truly groundbreaking and the kinetics of the editing were so far ahead of its time, that it defies logic. There is no story to tell, but it does show us how stories will be told for decades to come. Wonderful piece of work, and truly important to the world of cinema.
Quite an unnerving piece of work, this animation of George Orwell's classic is pretty powerful. If you held this up, visually, side-by-side with CHARLOTTE'S WEB, it would be hard to tell them apart. However, this film is by no means a children's film. With the story about farm animals rising up to take over the farm they are a part of, it is full of the "Power Corrupts" parable and is rather violent...and the communist allegory is certainly not lost. Most of my enjoyment of this film came from the shock at how grown-up and no less Orwellian it was simply being animated. You will be quite surprised too.
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These are Kevin's viewings out of the above Steven Jay Schneider tome Archives
May 2012
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