Talk About Cinema

No movie review today. Instead, I’m going to spend today talking about my personal favorite cartoon series: the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. These cartoons are just brilliant. Great animation, great writing, great voice work, great music, and a certain edge that has been lost in cartoons throughout the years. Of course, part of this may be due to the fact that the Warner Bros. cartoons were made specifically with adults in mind. Not that cartoons today can’t be made specifically with adults in mind; there are plenty of cartoon shows out there made specifically for them, but the Warner Bros. cartoons are the kind that can be enjoyed by both a kid and an adult at the same time, because while there is a certain edge to them, it’s not enough that they should be considered unsafe for children. There’s no bad language, no blood, very little that could be considered suggestive. They’re just fun cartoons that can teach serious life lessons to children without hammering them in....

One of my favorite comedians is Buster Keaton. His silent films are very charming due to his resourcefulness and athletic ability. As for his storytelling skills, while they weren’t as good as his contemporaries’, he could still tell an emotionally impactful story to his audience in films like Steamboat Bill, Jr. and Our Hospitality . He clearly had a lot of passion for what he did and cared a lot about the quality of what he made; one of his short films, The Blacksmith , was received so badly by test audiences that he ordered reshoots and he even shelved his first short film, The High Sign , when he deemed it to be a weak debut. Unfortunately, Keaton fell on hard times in the 1930s and his passion became less obvious at MGM where he was given little creative freedom and gradually put less effort into his performances. After his MGM contract ended, he went on to take on various roles ranging from short subject star at Educational and Columbia Pictures to gag writer for MGM. He starr...

Today’s subject is Mary Pickford, one of the most popular actresses of the silent era. Pickford got her start in films working for D.W. Griffith at the Biograph Company, eventually working her way up through the industry to the point that she became her own producer, making her films through United Artists, the company that she founded with Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and her then-husband Douglas Fairbanks. It is probably her United Artists films that represent her best work, notably Sparrows , a film that I hope to talk about sometime in the future. For now, though, let’s go back in time and talk about a film whose story should be instantly recognizable to many audiences today: Cinderella . For the few of you who don’t know the story of Cinderella , here’s a quick run-down: Cinderella (Pickford) is a kindhearted woman who lives with her evil stepmother (Isabel Vernon) and two stepsisters (Georgia Wilson and Lucille Carney). Having been denied permission to attend a ball held for the ...