Welcome to BlogHub: the Best in Veteran and Emerging Classic Movie Blogs
You can rate and share your favorite classic movie posts here.
You can rate and share your favorite classic movie posts here.
Dogs of War (1923, Robert F. McGowan)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 22, 2012
Dogs of War features some of Robert F. McGowan’s finest directorial work. Sure, he’s aping World War I movies–specifically trench warfare and no man’s land, which seem highly inappropriate subjects for comedy–but it’s incredibly well-directed. A lot of his setups read more
Cannery Woe (1961, Robert McKimson)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 21, 2012
Are all Speedy Gonzales cartoons the same? Cannery Woe opens with starving Mexican mice needing Speedy to get them cheese. Sylvester is guarding the cheese. Woe does have a couple minor differences though. First, none of the mice have to whore off their sisters to Speedy. Second, he doesn’t e read more
Helping Grandma (1931, Robert F. McGowan)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 19, 2012
Helping Grandma gives the impression directing Our Gang shorts for so long, McGowan lost (or never developed) any ability to direct adults. The way he holds shots on the kids, making sure they get their gags done, makes sense… even if it lacks any artistry. But in Grandma, he inexplicably hol read more
Here Today, Gone Tamale (1959, Friz Freleng)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 17, 2012
I hadn’t seen Here Today, Gone Tamale before, but I’ve seen Freleng’s subsequent Chili Weather. The setup is the same–these starving, but lazy, Mexican mice can’t steal any cheese from Sylvester the cat, so one of them whores out his sister to Speedy Gonzales. In Tamal read more
The Nightlife (1930, James Parrott)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 15, 2012
The Nightlife is an unfunny mess of asynchronous sound. If I’ve ever seen a Laurel and Hardy picture before, I can’t remember, and maybe starting off with one of their Spanish-language pictures was a bad idea. There’s no ambient sound for most of the short and it often feels like read more
Wild Wife (1954, Robert McKimson)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 14, 2012
Wild Wife is easily McKimson’s best cartoon (of those I’ve seen, anyway). I was going to start by talking about McKimson as an unlikely feminist, since Wife mostly concerns a housewife whose male chauvinist pig husband berates her for not getting enough done. The cartoon then flashes ba read more
Big City (1963, Paul Weld Dixon)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 12, 2012
Big City doesn’t have much ambition, so it should be hard to screw it up. But director Dixon manages. He’s not much for creative composition. City looks like a bunch of moving postcards, which is fine… it’s a travelogue after all. There is one sublime sequence of storefronts read more
Two Chips and a Miss (1952, Jack Hannah)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 10, 2012
Two Chips and a Miss is a weak seven minutes. While some of the fault is Hannah’s direction, it’s mostly just his animators. They’re incredibly lazy when it comes to their figures. Hannah’s even lazier when it comes to filling out the cartoon. Chip and Dale are both romancin read more
Now or Never (1921, Fred C. Newmeyer and Hal Roach)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 8, 2012
Now or Never takes a long time to get to the basic comedic plot–Harold Lloyd is stuck taking care of a little kid on a train ride. The kid, played by Anna Mae Bilson, is absolutely adorable and a perfect foil for Lloyd. She’s his costar, not romantic interest Mildred Davis, which is som read more
The Goddess of Spring (1934, Wilfred Jackson)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 7, 2012
The Goddess of Spring is the story of Persephone and Pluto. She’s the Goddess of Spring, he’s the Lord of the Underworld. He kidnaps her, life on Earth gets very cold. The cartoon’s striking because of the movement. It’s hard to describe the animation. The figures are proble read more
Hearts and Diamonds (1914, George D. Baker)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 5, 2012
Hearts and Diamonds involves a lovable fat man (John Bunny) out to marry a rich woman. Eventually it becomes all about baseball, which makes very little sense. It turns out the woman, played by Flora Finch, loves baseball so Bunny ends up holding a game to impress her. Until the game, which drags o read more
Slipstream (1989, Steven Lisberger)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 4, 2012
A lot of Slipstream plays like The Road Warrior with gliders. In this post-apocalyptic wasteland, everyone flies around because of a jet stream ravaging the surface. It’s never clear where this jet stream is located and not, in a geographic sense, because they always manage to safely take off and read more
West of the Pesos (1960, Robert McKimson)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 3, 2012
West of the Pesos is a hideous cartoon, with terrible animation and McKimson ripping off Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. There’s not much to amuse oneself with during the insufferable six minute cartoon, but there are some places to try. First is the whole Speedy Gonsalez thing. I mean, W read more
Krull (1983, Peter Yates)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 2, 2012
From the director of Breaking Away and one of the many fine writers of the Adam West “Batman” TV show…. Krull is just as unwatchable now as it was the last time I tried to watch it, some eleven years ago. As a kid—assuming kids are the best audience for the film—Krull never registered as something read more
Get Out and Get Under (1920, Hal Roach)
The Stop Button Posted by on Apr 1, 2012
Like a lot of silent shorts, Get Out and Get Under has three distinct phases. The first phase involves Harold Lloyd as a suitor for Mildred Davis. He’s got to race to stop her wedding. This phase sets a certain expectation for Get Out‘s pace; the rest of the short doesn’t live up read more
A Broken Leghorn (1959, Robert McKimson)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 31, 2012
A Broken Leghorn never confronts its bleakness or meanness. It opens with Foghorn Leghorn doing a good thing, tricking a presumably barren hen into thinking she laid an egg. But then it turns out to be a baby rooster, so Foghorn spends the rest of the cartoon trying to kill the adorable little roos read more
The Muppet Movie (1979, James Frawley)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 30, 2012
The Muppet Movie takes it upon itself to be all things… well, two things. It has to be appealing to kids and adults. The film is split roughly in half between the audiences, with the adults having more to appreciate in the star cameos–some cute, some hilarious (Steve Martin in short sho read more
The Seafarers (1953, Stanley Kubrick)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 29, 2012
Only half of The Seafarers really feels like Kubrick. While he handled photography and editing on the entire film, the second half moves out of his comfort zone (or interest level). The film’s a promotional for the Seafarers International Union; the second half has most of that promoting. Kub read more
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988, Frank Oz)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 28, 2012
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels manages to have a full, three act plot–with all the twists necessary for a confidence picture–but it also is constantly funny. Oz juggles his two leads but mostly relies on Steve Martin for the more immediate humor. With Michael Caine, Oz and the screenwriters te read more
The Last Hungry Cat (1961, Hawley Pratt and Friz Freleng)
The Stop Button Posted by on Mar 27, 2012
I wonder if anyone involved in making The Last Hungry Cat ever owned a cat. The premise is (for a Freleng cartoon) quite good. Sylvester is haunted–by an Alfred Hitchcock-like narrator–after he “eats” Tweetie. There are a couple big logic problems. The major one involves cat read more