Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The General!

Article theme: Mr Confederate Man - Rebel Son

If there is such a genre as epic comedy, Buster Keaton's magnum opus is unquestionably the finest and greatest example. The logistics of The General alone are so much fun to consider, if it never got a single laugh it would still stomp sphincter as an action chase flick, mogging every other effort except arguably The Road Warrior with contemptuous ease. Orson Welles called it "possibly the GOAT, fr".

Me and who?

Keaton plays "Johnnie Gray", whose very name marks him out as an archetypal everyman in the Southern Confederacy. When the civil war breaks out, he rushes to enlist but is denied because the South needs him to fulfil his essential duty as a railway engineer. Like all train enthusiasts, Johnnie is way too autistic to reason this out, and thinks they just rejected him for service because he's a weird literal me with flat affect, which would also be a plausible explanation. His would-be sweetheart (Marion Mack) also runs with this and dumps his ass, despite which he remains resolved to win her back when she is accidentally taken hostage during the villains' Die Hard ripoff-esque plan to hijack a train for the Union.

Same, bruh.

Keaton chases the hijackers, they chase him; it's a plot born at the intersection of high-stakes action and Looney Tunes cartoon, but the progression of events, the tricks employed to hold up pursuers and the desperate scrambles to catch up to the trains in between flipping railroad switches and scavenging for firewood ramp up an only halfway-comic tension. Scenes behind enemy lines are as suspenseful as any Hitchcock picture. Throughout chase, counter-chase, evasion and climactic battle, Keaton's deadpan expression remains as constant as in all his classics. Given the real danger he faced on practically every project (YT comments sections remain packed with Joe Rogan fans echoing his account of how the master broke his neck in one stunt), the commitment to expressionlessness speaks of balls beyond our mortal comprehension.

Timing is everything.

"But Paaat, how can you praise a film in which the heroes Fought In Defence Of Slaaayveryyy?" You know, I could (and did, in a first draft) write a long, boring screed refuting every brainletism cited in defence of the boomer truth narrative of the American civil war, but I don't need to, because in 2022, ninety-six years after The General first dropped, Hollywood released a movie called The Woman King that lionised the Dahomey Amazons, a real historical faction of warrior women who fought (extremely poorly) on behalf of a guy literally called the Slave King because he captured and sold so many slaves. This means pro-slavery action is officially endorsed by the main propaganda organ of the libtard regime, proving damningly, if thunderously unsurprisingly, that all reb-bashers are completely full of shit and just hate white people.

*Dixie intensifies*

Presumably Keaton turning the tide of battle leads to a third timeline even better than the Berenstein one (let's call it the Berenstöön timeline) where the South goes on to win the entire war, executes L*ncoln, Sh*rman and Sh*ridan, phases out slavery peacefully, and establishes a pan-American Confederacy that stays out of World War 1 (if not prevents it through some butterfly-effect hoodoo), outlaws usury, bans advertising, crushes communism and cancels SNL in 1998. In such a timeline, we'd get movies like The General every year.

Sword & Sorcery Tuesday: Sorceress!

Theme: (Flesh and Blood) Sacrifice - Poison

In 1982, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred as Conan the Barbarian (1982). But did you know that 1982 also saw the release of 1982's Sorceress, starring hot twins as hot twins?

A threesome with hot twins is not incest unless their clits touch. A wise wino taught me that.

Evil sorcerer Traigon has promised evil god Calamari his firstborn as a sacrifice, but his wife refuses to tell him which twin was born first, buying enough time for Krona, the wise mentor from every shitty martial arts flick, to intervene and defeat him. Traigon's magic saves him to return twenty years hence, in which time Krona hides the twin girls with a family of his acquaintance, who decide to raise them in disguise as boys to throw off Traigon's goons who might come looking for them in the meantime.

Their magically glowing slow motion Baywatch run does nothing to make them less visibly stacked.

This might be the least convincing boy disguise since Princess Fawzia's in The Adventures of Hajji Baba, but it's got nothing on the authentic period detail of the setting, for Sorceress is best described as noncommittally ambiguously set in India:

This chick with the pet Bigfoot is as convincing as it gets.

This is more readily inferred from random dialogue and randomer plot beats than from the sets and costumes, most of which look more Greco-Roman: the warriors are referred to as kshatriyas throughout and, when the wise Krona returns in the wake of our heroines' adoptive family getting killed, he immediately commits suicide by sati:

Japanese men when they clock into work at 07:01.

There's also a Viking who joins our underachieving crossdressers for no reason, along with his sidekick, a satyr who looks like Satan and communicates only in goat noises. I think this character was meant to be an endearing animal companion sort of like Chewbacca in Star Wars, but instead he's the creepiest little shit I've ever seen in a movie (though, in the interest of full disclosure, I've never watched anything with Ezra Miller in it).

Look out, Gimli! Fucking Beelzebub is behind you!

Finally, our discount fellowship pick up Erlick, the failson of a noble line of kings or something who is bumming around Eurasia cheating at dice and hoping to score. He's an amiably fun counterpart to the twins, and provides the movie with a scene of hilarity and suspense in which he's nearly impaled by sliding down a greased pole onto a sharpened stake:

I wish this dude had won an Oscar so they could show this clip of him narrowly avoiding getting bummed by six feet of spike set to some soothing classical.

More fun shenanigans later, Traigon attempts to sacrifice one of the twins, but the gang rally to save her, so he just yeets the ambiguously Indian femme fatale into the flames instead, which got a solid retard guffaw out of me and renders the entire plot moot, as Calamari is content with this last-minute substitute.

He looks so pleased.

But wait! The other twin remembers something Krona told them before taking a flame bath of his own: an incantation that summons a good god to do battle with Calamari:

In the cosmic game of rock-paper-scissors, ripped bat-lion shooting lightning out its eyes beats floating head with cosmetic burns.

Sure, you've never heard of Sorceress and it has nothing on Conan the Barbarian or Clash of the Titans, but it's a good-natured lower-budget spin on the same schtick, with enough bizarre left-turns and memorable quirks to make it an endearing also-ran, in the same ballpark as Red Sonja or The Last Legion, at any rate. Watch it after a long shitty day at work sometime.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week DOUBLE FEATURE: Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis! and Melody of the World!

Article theme: Speed of Life - David Bowie

Every list of "great films" features Soviet propaganda staple Man with a Movie Camera as its token silent, and it still makes for impressive viewing if, like an absolute pleb, you've never seen a city symphony before. Too bad it's a complete ripoff of experimental genius Walther Ruttmann's German kino Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, which dropped two years earlier and deserves all the credit for the template. Not that Berlin was the first city symphony of the silent era: 1921 short Manhatta mixed documentary footage of Manhattan with lame poetry, and Berlin itself was profiled in 1925's Die Stadt der Millionen. But Ruttmann's opus ditched intertitles altogether and took on the structure of a day, building from isolated trains at empty stations through the bleary mornings of street sweepers and paper deliverers through the explosive, swirling nightlife of a decadent metropolis.

We even drop in to the Tiergarten where this elephant siestas in the afternoon.

While Man with a Movie Camera features laughably clunky propaganda of young comrades shooting at cutouts labelled things like "UNCLE FASHISM", Berlin spells out no agenda, passes no didactic judgement on any particular subject. You can read into it whatever bullshit has been programmed into you, or simply view it as a frozen moment in history. Ruttmann followed up Berlin with the more wildly ambitious Melody of the World, which likewise sequenced clips as movements in a symphony without taking any particular stance toward its multifarious subjects. Melody combines footage from as far afield as "Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States of America, Holland, Greece, India, Siam, China, Japan, Panama, and Cuba", and packs in some kino match cuts beside its startling, intriguing and exotic depictions of recreations, fashions, religions, customs, conflicts, architecture and languages around the globe.

In fact, the only wholesome messagerino to slap you hard in the face is an earnest lament against the ugliness of war. Ruttmann would later serve as a frontline combat photographer and died tragically in the worst war of all, whose only purpose was to give today's warpigs rhetorical cover for their murderous crimes.

If it's so trite and unsubtle, how come you still haven't got the message?

But violence is only presented as one frayed thread marring the complex tapestry of life. The juxtaposition of images of comparable routines and rituals from different countries highlights as many differences as similarities, and renders the familiar as novel as the alien. The whole thing only further demonstrates how much more profoundly the love of humanity and curiosity about the world runs in problematic shitlords than in shitlib NPCs for whom travel pays off in status points among their bougie social cliques, to say nothing of how many wildly distinctive authentic cultures were still practiced less than a century ago, even in Europe.

I have no idea who these guys are but their Wayne's World headbanging routine is on point.

What does this guy write on his umbrella, and why? I don't know, and no voiceover or intertitle interrupts the moment to explain it.

Ruttmann has fun with the Kuleshov effect, splicing blatantly unrelated clips together to make it seem like the Monopoly guy was watching Southeast Asian Lordi rock the stage. The Kuleshov effect is understood intuitively by all template meme poasters, but clearly Kuleshov was so convinced it was his master breakthrough that it bears his name to this day, which is endearingly like if I dubbed 2+2=4 "Pat Bastard's Formula" or some shit.

And if Berlin and Melody constitute the perfection of montage cinéma, Ruttmann's early experiments like Lichtspiel Opus I-IV confidently blazed trails down which still other poseurs strolled, taking credit that was never theirs. Sure, they sort of look like screensavers now, but Ruttmann was so far ahead of the curve that everyone from his contemporary absolute-film dickriders to Stan Brakhage belong in a footnote to his bio. Use this knowledge to them-apples would-be hipster blowhards in your next /film/ flame war.

NEW EXCLUSIVE comic first look TEASER PREVIEW!!!

The Thinking Barbarian saga CONTINUES in LAST OF THE AMAZONS - Summer 2026!!!

Stayvun Goes to Hell: The Final Friday!

Today is a very special day, when Jason's birthday actually falls on Friday the 13th. Unfortunately, I already recapped all the Friday the 13th movies, so here's a Stayvunpoast instead. No, this has nothing to do with Friday the 13th, but then neither did the Friday the 13th TV show, so consider this a 4D clever meta-commentary on that.

Happy birthday, Jason!!!1

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Sky's The Limit!

Article theme: War - Edwin Starr

"Psst - Fred, don't look now but I think you're featured on Pat Bastard's blðg again."

Not only the best and most overlooked Hollywood musical, but also the greatest accidentally anti-war movie of all time, it's too obvious a pun to call RKO's 1943 opus The Sky's The Limit Fred Astaire's shining hour (because that is the title of its main theme song), but I just did, so now what, bitch?

Actually, I'm assuming it was unintentional - even a kino factory like RKO wouldn't have dared commit a major star like Astaire to a based isolationist peacenik project at the height of the hostilities - but, just as every Hollywood attempt to marry pozzed messaging with actual artistic talent ends in divorce, so too this effort to keep proto-neocon support for the worst and most destructive war in history high undermines itself so hard you might just start to wonder.

Never forget that the same balding twinks who smirk media literately over the ebin propaganda satire in Starship Troopers also soyface into lockjaw over the Holy War Against Fashism based on this sort of farcically corny agitslop.

Astaire plays Fred (perhaps a clue that this complex character is closer to the real him than his typically airy persona), a fighter ace directed to perform a PR tour from coast to coast on his fleeting leave from the Pacific theatre who goes AWOL instead. The reason suggested is just boredom with his obligations and a yen for anonymity in a country that sees him as a hero for killing le ebil Japs, but this is surface level motivation. Disaffection with the whole war fits better and is supported by the scenes where Fred berates an aeronautical tycoon over the fitness of his aircraft for combat purposes at an obsequious works party in his honour. Through this point he's been a charming prankster, trying to lose himself in the escapism of civilian life, but in this scene his unloading becomes impassioned, showing-without-telling of psychological scars a studio propaganda flick of the period would otherwise have swept under the rug.

"Young man, what are you saying?"
"Look, personally I just prefer allies who don't sink our ships, send letter bombs to the White House, bomb our buildings and frame the Muslim Brotherhood for it, buy all our politicians and run pedo blackmail rings on our own soil."
"I simply won't hear such Woke Right Anti-Semolina-Pudding! Out I say!" - actual dialogue.

But the unravelling of Fred is gradual, a calendar in which he ticks off the days of his dwindling leave acting like those clocks in Rumble Fish, reminding us of the time elapsing before his freedom runs out, serving as a minimalistic motif to keep the rude awakening ahead in mind throughout the dream that plays out for us in between. First Fred goes looking for romance, and finds it by inventing photobombing and otherwise trolling Joan Leslie's qt3.14 photographer into falling for his impish charms.

Remember, boys: if she never looks at you like this...

...She'll never look at you like this.

It's a great romance of the cinéma and our foreknowledge of its doomed fate only makes it more poignant and none the less enjoyable as comic entertainment. Crack all the celluloid-closet jokes you will about our Fred, his chemistry with Leslie speaks of straightness you or I can but aspire to (well, you, anyway). Nor can we deny the sack required to smash his "One For My Baby And One For The Road" routine, in which the great danceman opened a leg shattering glass this way and that in an outpouring of sorrow as primal as it is precise. "Can't act" my taint, guy who wrote his infamous first screen test notes, this is a performance physical and emotional that mogs the talents of every pretentious thespian ever to don tights and also unrelatedly play Shakespeare.

On this b└og we stan a STRAIGHT king.