More cheerful fare for your isolating days. These three comedies are currently showing on the Criterion Channel but you should be able to find them elsewhere.
Cheer You Up Movies 2
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Isolation Picks 2: It’s all about Comfort
I’m not sure when you started self-isolating, but we’re into our third week now. Today is the last day of March, so we can all bid adieu to a kind of crappy month and turn our thoughts to the next, kind of crappy month. Oh but it won’t be so bad because the weather will be getting nicer and nicer. Really, it will!
Here are a few more diversions for you, if you are in need. A Music, a Book, and a Treat, all warm and comforting. More cheerful movie picks to come tomorrow.
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Can you Spot the Surrealist*?
Here’s a little self-isolation game for you. It’s like ‘Where’s Waldo’ but way more intellectual…
(* and yes, I know I’m conflating Surrealism here with Dada and general Avant-gardeism, but I liked it as a title! Enough with the quibbling!)
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Why Watch Old Movies? or: The Consolation of History
(Yes, another blog post about the pandemic, or at least about watching movies during the pandemic. It does, however, apply to non-isolation movie viewing as well.)
So why is now a good time to watch old movies? As everyone is shut up at home waiting out the high tide of covid-19, I know many are looking to Netflix and other streaming services for distraction and solace. If you do, consider this: old movies may be more consoling than newer flicks.
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Criterion Channel List: Movies to Cheer You Up
I just put together a few titles for a friend and thought I’d put some of my suggestions here too. You can probably find these elsewhere, but they are all available on the Criterion Channel right now.
And, I might add, the Criterion Channel offers a 2-week trial period for free…
Dancey
You Were Never Lovelier (1942)
Director: William A. Seiter
Starring: Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth
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Isolation Picks
The thing about self-isolating for me, is that my days haven’t changed all that much. The biggest change, besides suspension of chauffeuring duties, is that now when I sit at home I know I’m not missing anything…
Anyhoo, for those of you less accustomed to hermiting, here are some of my current picks: a Music, a Book, a Chocolate, and a final bit of Bird Wisdom.
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Mack Sennett: The Limits of Slapstick (1928)
From “The Best Motion Picture Interview Ever Written”, by Theodore Dreiser, Photoplay Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 3, August, 1928, pp. 32-35, 124-129.
[Novelist Theodore Dreiser interviews the Master of Comedy Mack Sennett]
… One of the things I was moved to ask at this point was, slapstick being what it is, was there any limit to the forms or manifestations of this humor? And to my surprise, yes there was, and is.
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Book to Stage: Eldritch Manor
After many years writing tv scripts it was particularly liberating to work on my first novel. At last I could include any crazy thing that popped into my head – providing it made at least a tiny bit of sense – and no production people would yell at me. (“That can’t be animated! There are too many characters/scenes/locations/props! It’s impossible!”) And since it was a fantasy story, the sky really was the limit. All of which explains how Eldritch Manor ended up featuring an unruly mob of characters, an extremely busy plot, and magical marvels at every turn.
Fast forward six or seven years to last summer, as I struggled to distill Eldritch down for the stage, cursing myself all the way for cramming so much into that book. Hoist on my own petard, as they say.
The process began when Adina Hildebrandt, local independent bookstore big-wig and theatre school impresario, uttered the fateful words “You should turn this into a play!” I thought she was just being polite. Every time she said it for the next couple of years I thought she was just being polite. Sometime in the third year I began to think she might actually be serious.
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My Silent Movie Obsession
This was going to be a post about my latest writing projects, but after watching a seriously silly movie last night I decided to write instead about silent movies. I’ve loved old movies since I discovered the Late Show on the two TV channels we had in the 1970s, so I’ve always been a fan of the obvious stars – Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton et al – but recently I’ve been doing research for a new book (more on that in another post to come) and have been digging deeper for lesser known gems. I compiled a list of silents that I wanted to watch (yes, I created a spreadsheet for this. I love lists) and was happily proceeding in chronological order.
The very early shorts (1895-1905) are dominated by the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, then the Americans respond with some energetic though rather crude efforts like The Great Train Robbery. I spent many months watching the Biograph shorts directed by D.W. Griffith between 1909 and 1914, which are at the heart of the new book I’m writing, so I will definitely have more to say about them in future posts. During this period Griffith was churning out lively little potboilers at a rate of 2-3 per week, so even though many seem to be lost, there is still a lot to see!
After that I became interested in early films from other countries, beyond the obvious ones like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Battleship Potemkin. Thanks to the almighty internet, I have found some really fascinating Danish, German, Swedish, Italian, French, British, Russian and Japanese films.
And then, yesterday, I happened to come across this Silent Era List of the 100 Top Silent Films. Not only the top 100, mind you: this site also lists the next 200 films that didn’t make the top 100! Oy! So much for my progress; I now have over 400 titles on my list!
The Oyster Princess (1919), dir. Ernst Lubitsch
Last night I picked out one I’d never heard of: The Oyster Princess (1919), directed by Ernst Lubitsch. This is one of Lubitsch’s early films, made in Germany before he went Hollywood. What a weird little delight this is. It’s kind of a fairy tale, kind of a parody of capitalism, but mostly just wacky. Apart from the creepy tendency of the heroine’s father to peek through keyholes, this one even ages relatively well.
It’s one hour in length and quite fun. I will continue to share my early movie finds here, if there’s enough interest!
Postscript
Interested? Want to see some of these for yourself? As most silent movies were made between 1900 and the late 1920s, they are in the public domain and most are readily available online to stream for free. There are a lot of titles available on Youtube, as well as the two sites I go to most frequently, Internet Archive* and OpenCulture.
Want a list to guide you? This Top 10 Guardian list is a great starting point, listing the most critically acclaimed films. You can pick out a director you like and then hunt down their titles. Or you can go right to the mega list I mentioned earlier, at Silent Era.
*I really love this site, but I am saddened to hear that there is a copyright brouhaha brewing between them and authors over printed material they post on their site for free. I need to find out more before I decide whether to continue using this resource – if you know more about this please let me know.
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Color Catalog Center… Does This Spelling Drive You Crazy?
Labour-labor, theatre-theater, jewellery, jewelry… If you find the inconsistencies in spelling between American and Anglo-English irritating, let me tell you, it could have been much, MUCH worse!
My awareness of British vs American spellings began way back in Grade One. I was just learning to read and brought a picture book home from school that featured two adorable kittens and cans of paint. The word “color” in it surprised me, because I was pretty sure that wasn’t how you spelled that word. Then someone (parent? teacher?) told me that both spellings were correct. Wait… WHAT? Mind blown.
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