Reviews in Passing
August 6th, 2006You can now buy food on Amazon, which seems like a pretty terrible idea. What is funny is they’re using the same template from their book/music/other crap so fucking bananas have “product features” and “If you like _, you’ll like _” only it’s a fucking avocado because you gave lettuce five stars. [I’m seethingly furious and hate everything in the world]. Check the reviews before you buy, friend.
I also got too much glee out of this online mag of cinema review, for one article on silent comedians for referring to the party where Fatty Arbuckle allegedly raped an actress with a bottle as “...little more than a one-man orgy featuring Fatty and half a dozen naked whores.” Elsewhere in the article, a footnote states “It was always difficult to imagine why a woman would want to mate with Harry Langdon,” which also makes me laugh. I think I like sex jokes at the expense of the long-dead.
I’ve also been obsessively watching silents lately, working my way (via Netflix) through 9 disks of the Harold Lloyd box set and catching Buster Keaton Mondays at Film Forum for the next two months.
Today I went to the nominally “dramatic” Douglas Fairbank’s Mark of Zorro... which was pretty much physical comedy seperated by wordy screen-filling intertitles and constant denouncement of “oppression.” Zorro was less a master swordsman in this incarnation than a master jump-over-a-lot-stuffs-man.
(Next I will write about the most specific downside of seeing silents in a live audience… there’s less distraction from the horrible rude/senile old people in the audience.)