Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Moonshine 1918

  ★★★½ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  "Great stunt. His paycheck is well-earned."

  Arbuckle and Keaton are revenuers on the trail of moonshiners. Revenuers. What a lovely archaic term. Can't remember when I last saw that in the wild.

  Anyway. This is a hoot. Structurally it's a bunch of random gags glued together with fourth wall-breaking meta hijinks. Plot? What plot. Who needs one.

  Features one of the finest iterations of the clown car gag I've ever seen and a surreal bit involving an explosion that gave me a flashback to Lost Highway, I'm not kidding.

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  The Cook 1918

  ★★★½ Watched 16 Mar 2025

  Pure anarchy!

  I'd never actually seen anything starring Fatty Arbuckle before. He moves with an odd grace – Mack Sennett described him being as light on his feet as Fred Astaire.

  Among other things, this features BUSTER walking like an Egyptian decades before Steve Martin sang about his favourite honky (who was born in Arizona and moved to Babylonia).

  It's fairly shapeless – the gags are strung together in almost random order and it ends at an arbitrary point – but they're really damn good gags.

  Loads of fun.

Popular reviews

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  Scenes with Beans 1976

  ★★★½ Watched 19 Sep 2021

  Beans.

  Beans in the countryside, beans in the city.

  Beans driving cars. Beans playing football. Beans protesting.

  Beans, stop-motion beans.

  It’s cute, it's fun, it stars 3,000 allegorical beans.

  No jokes about musical fruit.

  Beans.

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  The Suns of Easter Island 1972

  ★★★★½ Watched 14 Mar 2025 3

  "The right to dream is as important as the right to bread."

  A truly original piece of cosmic sci-fi in which six people are drawn to Easter Island to witness a mysterious event. Formally eccentric, with a semi-docudrama feel, and absolutely stuffed with '70s-style occultism. The movie really commits to the bit – its tone is quite accurately captured by the tagline on the poster: "A tale filmed by Pierre Kast for the most childish of children – adults."

  Shot all…