|
The Criterion Channel is now live, so I guess I can start this back up. Filmstruck had to ability to browse by year, country, etc. which helped a lot in narrowing down what movies to watch. CC doesn't. Just a search and a bunch of lists. Oh well, just means a bit more work in creating a list of movies to watch.
And the app so far is fairly buggy, but I expected that on day 1.
I didn't get around to watching most of the silent moves on Amazon. Just haven't been in a movie watching mood much lately. I did watch a few of the Fatty Arbuckle and Mabel Normand shorts, and they were bad. Not because the short itself was bad, but because whoever put them on Amazon slapped on some generic comedy soundtrack that didn't match what was going on in the short. On top of it, it wasn't just music. It really did sound like some comedy music radio show or something. It was odd to put that against a silent short, and completely ruined it for me.
I also watched College, a 1927 Buster Keaton comedy. A good comedy. I'd give it a solid 7/10. Not among my favorite Buster Keaton comedies, but it was a fun movie...except it did have one scene that has not aged well and made it very awkward for awhile...
But that's part of the dilemma with rating a really old movie. On one hand "It was a different time, and if someone wasn't outright racist, they were at least incredibly ignorant. It was 1927 after all and we can't hold them to a standard set nearly 100 years later." .....vs.... "Jesus fucking Christ, sab, , it's Buster Keaton in blackface swinging his arms exaggeratedly, obviously imitating a monkey, as he pretends to be a 'colored waiter'. That's not okay and you can't possibly give a movie with such a racist portrayal of black people a good rating! WTF!"
Without that scene, it's a 7/10 movie. With it...ugh, yeah, that scene is really bad.
Anyway...
Time to get back to 1934 I suppose. I'll get to those silent movies as I move along.
|