Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Phantom of the Opera!

Theme: Five Cellars Below - Blitzkid

SPOYLORZ

"Is there a leak in here, or are you just glad to see me?" - actual dialogue.

Before it was a popular West End musical, The Phantom of the Opera was a novel of no small Frenchness. In between, however, it was chiefly known as Lon Chaney's most celebrated silentkino, which is still the best version of it of all. Like your humble blôggueriste, our titular protagonist just wants to be loved by the qt3.14 opera singer and can't understand why she can't look past my hideous countenance and rat-infested subterranean lair to see the sensitive young elderly millennial within, Lacey.

This is my go-to opener at speed dating.

While most horror literally-mes are low-functioning specials like Jason Voorhees and Leatherface, our Erik is a genius composer, much like me with my poasts, not to say engineer, whose labyrinthine cellars are bedecked with deathtraps of proto-James Bond villain scope and vision, which brilliantly serve to trip up our bumbling would-be Captains Save-A-Hoe but, alas, are not quite equal to preventing the enormous lynch mob that rampages through his tunnels at the end.

Just once I'd like to be in the mob instead of chased by it.

For the original ending followed the book in having Christine make out with /ourboi/, thus rendering him fakecel and redeeming him in the moral calculus of, I guess, those "reylo" fat chicks(?), IDK. Fortunately test audiences said "fuck that" (verbatim) so we got a much more realistic and satisfying ending in which the uggo patrol savagely beats him to death and dumps his mangled carcass in the Seine.

Average 1925 test audience member (colourised).

Naturally the great joy of this centenarian kinematographeme lies in its grandiose sets and gothic imagery. Setpieces of note include the chandelier attack and masked ball, but Chaney's makeup effects have garnered even greater notoriety, to the point where even if you are a blind homeless man in Papua New Guinea you will have seen his iconic Phantom face at some point, totally ruining the scene in which Christine just has to take off his mask because she can't decide whether she's horrified or wet af for him until she sees, which is hilarious, but at the time the hitherto-unspoilered reveal was said to send shockwaves of fainting anxiety throughout the 1920s audience. Of course, the same was said of later horror movies such as Dracula, Frankenstein and The Exorcist, so take it with a grain of salt, but I like to imagine /ourboi/ scared the hoes fr fr.

Remember: a wide berth is the same as aura.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Phantom Carriage!

Theme: Dark are the Veils of Death - Candlemass

Christmas has The Mothman Prophecies and Curse of the Cat People. Halloween has the Night of the Demons remake. New Year's Eve has but one kinograph of note, but it's arguably (and not even very arguably) the best silentkino and best Christian film of all time, and unlike most of my Greatest Movies of All Time of the Week, it might actually be the greatest movie of all time.

Big talk from a big bastard, you say? Well let me tell you a tale...

Victor Sjöström directs and stars as David Holm, an abusive, neglectful husband and mean drunk who delights in spurning offers of help from the local Salvation Army sisters and corrupting his peers with his nihilistic bullshit. In one scene, he tells a fellow consumptive (this was a disease in black-and-white times) that he coughs in people's faces to drag a few of them with him on the way out.

I mean this guy was a real jerk.

Silent cinéma is often ridiculed for its stylised performances, but Sjöström's showcase is uniquely compelling, probably because there's no vanity in it: his Holm is alternately loathsome, dastardly, pitiable, wretched, menacing, perversely charming and consumed with maddening sorrow. Windbag critics have made calling films "powerful" a punchline, but The Phantom Carriage merits the superlative and more. Anyway, Holm's degenerate existence is about to be rudely interrupted, for Death has come to him on New Year's Eve.

The ghostly transparency was cutting-edge at the time. 2bh, for what it is, it holds up better than most CGI from circa ever to now.

But while Sjöström's lesser pupil Bergman's later iteration of the Grim Reaper was more-or-less a hammy villain, Carriage's more unsettling vision has a mortal man enslaved to drive the titular cart to and fro nonstop for an interminable, enervating year collecting the souls of the departed until the next New Year's Eve comes round and his last client must become his successor - and it looks as though our miscreant protagonist is next up on the list.

Me working nights, or mornings, or on my day off.

WILL Holm be damned to drive the ghostly carriage? CAN he right the wrongs he's done in life before they take the lives of his beleaguered family? OR will it be the first one again, because I didn't have a third thing? I'm not telling, but the gut-punch denouement will have you searching your own compromised, endangered soul. Skip the forced party, hangover and chlamydia tests; watch The Phantom Carriage before the year is out.

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.

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.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Thief of Bagdad!

Article theme: Magic Carpet Ride - Steppenwolf

Ignore the 1940 Bri'ish talkie called The Thief of Baghdad; the 1924 silent epic is by far the greater film, even though it opens with the most boomerific platitude you could imagine:

This theme is actually developed pretty well in the movie, but literally spelling it out right from the jump is like opening your magnum opus with "don't forget to floss!".

A clear influence on Disney's Aladdin, Thief stars Douglas Fairbanks as the titular protagonist, who passes his days in the Arabian metropolis lifting purses from well-heeled merchants and food from some old Jew broad. Thankfully, it's a silent movie, so we don't have to listen to her kvetch.

Oh, you'll laugh at my "white girls fuck dogs" bit from my Die Another Day article, but for this you boo?

Much time is killed with Fairbanks and his old geezer sidekick (who completely disappears from the picture at some point; IDK) robbing marks and bouncing around like Mario before the plot kicks in. We're in no hurry, because the whole time we can look at sets like this:

Oh, big deal. That's probably a matte--

Uh...

Oh. Well damn.

Fairbanks disguises himself as a prince to compete for the princess's hand with three rivals, including our Fu Manchuesque villain (Sōjin Kamiyama):

LMFAO this is like if a Mongolian said "oh, there goes John Blon Flon of Muh Puh Guh".

Posing as a prince with a minimalistic cover story (he's from very far away), Fairbanks contrives to woo the princess (Julanne Johnston) in her chambers. I wouldn't mind a chance to slip into her chambers either.

Don't say it.

I'm not saying it.

But Fairbanks' ruse is exposed, cockteasing us with the prospect of a mauling by gorilla that never occurs:

Me leaving feedback on the Uber driver who sang along to Lady Ga Ga on his radio.

Instead, he's merely beaten with whips and tossed out of the palace, now feeling remorse for what he's done. The princess is distraught, fearing she now has to choose one of the other three suitors.

That's not the first time she's had a a string of pearls across her face. Alright, I said it, but you made me.

To stall their advances, she sets them a fetch quest:

Most reasonable wahman on Tinder.

CAN Douglas Fairbanks redeem himself and win the love of his princess?

WILL Cham Shang conquer Bagdad by force or deception?

IS this century-old movie better than anything you've ever seen, despite imagining yourself quite the kinosseur? Yes to all. The absurdly huge sets and orientalist maximalist design aesthetic mog the production standards of every talkie would-be adventure or epic combined. The effects don't merely hold up, but are altogether more impressive than more recent efforts because they were done without computers. There's action, romance, laughs, intrigue and spectacle for days. Watch The Thief of Bagdad, but don't show it to your kids too soon - you'll spoil them.

Ignore the little text in the bottom right of frame; the screenshots are from the most HD upload I could find in over eight seconds of searching.