Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tabu!

Theme: Leah - Roy Orbison

Hipster objections aside*, Robert J. Flaherty invented the documentary with his Eskimokino Nanook of the North and F.W. Murnau cut such all-time classics as Faust (but is better known for accidentally ruining vampires with the death-by-sunlight gag, which later halfwits would play literally, in the biggest nerf ever suffered by a stock monster). It may come as no surprise then that when these two titans of silent cinéma teamed up, they unleashed a kino for the ages. Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, set on Bora Bora, is the best movie of all time you'll see this week, and concerns the doom incurred by two young lovers who breach a Tabu (1931)!!!

>tfw no etc. etc.

Reri (Anne Chevalier) is the young maiden selected to replace a late vestal virgin on a neighbouring island. I'm not sure if this was a real tradition but the Society Islands did have an elite caste of Arioi, who were permitted sex but not children; any that were born to them were ritually killed. Anyway, this de facto abduction-in-tribute of a daughter of Bora Bora is framed as a great honour by the foreign emissary, which I find hilarious. But Reri's bf (Matahi) is heartbroken and defies the Tabu (1931) to run off with her, prompting sinister old fart Hitu to hunt them down as they seek refuge among sailors on another island, where this dude does the best dance of all time of the week:

>ywn bust these sick moves why live?

WILL our young lovers outrun their destiny? CAN Hitu recapture Reri? IS the Tabu (1931) a lazy metaphor for Murnau being a bumboy? Fortunately, NO to the last one: whatever the great filmmaker's extremely dubiously alleged proclivities, he had the Tolkienian taste to avoid clumsy allegorising in favour of a nonspecific but endlessly applicable and thus timeless idea. Tabu doesn't even stipulate whether the Tabu is meant to be a good thing or a bad thing. It's the one-in-a-zillion film that's actually content to let the viewer ponder it over for himself. Perhaps Murnau shed his didacticism as he did his intertitles: all the text in Tabu is artfully framed as actual writing in-story.

There's no intertitle for what this kid yells so you're free to assume it's the funniest slur.

Also, Murnau was said to be exceptionally tall, with heights from 6'4" to 6'11" variously cited, so even if he did rail dudes that's basically like a normal guy railing bitches, but in this house, Murnau was a STRAIGHT king.

The wet dresses, topless chicks and Baywatch bounce per reel of footage tells a distinctly hetero story, and for 1931? Forgetaboutit.

Flaherty only directed the opening sequence and seems to have become quite disenchanted with the project and ceded it mostly to Murnau, but it was his familiarity with the locale and love of the world cultures first ignored and then homogenised away by the steamroller of libshit modernity that fired the project and made it viable to begin with. None of these cultures can exist on their own terms anymore, as every manifestation of them is now filtered through self-consciousness and anticolonialist self-righteousness, like when those Māori assclowns do the goofy haka dance in the New Zealand parliament while wearing suits**. Only le problematic shitlords like Flaherty or Mel Gibson can pay authentic tribute to the great and terrible cultures of the world that was.

"Check these dubs" - Bora Bora anon.

*Waah, waah, he broke the rules of documentary filmmaking that were made up after the term was first coined to describe one of his own films! Shut up, bitch!

**The Māori eagerly adopted European technology from the off, specifically muskets, which they immediately used to murder one another en masse, most egregiously the pacifistic Moriori of the Chatham Islands. You'd think this would make them by far the least sympathetic anticolonialist hypocrites, but the same sort of thing happened throughout North America too, so they're more or less average in that ignoble regard.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Chandu the Magician!

♪It's the
Eye of the tiger
It's the
Thrill of the fight

The worst thing to happen to movie discussion was when fedora neckbeards started calling clichés "tropes", built a website about it that turned into a 2009-era Epic Cringe Compilation, then became he/hims and kept calling clichés "tropes", only with their made-up stories being about owning chuds in line for Starbucks instead of slaying forty bullies with their trusty blades.

This was every millennial who now calls you an incel.

The reason this is gay is because it has resulted in all movie writing trying to comment on "tropes" instead of telling a story anyone might want to watch. A perfectly good movie can be and has been made using nothing but clichés strung together, all the more impressively because it pre-dates many of them even being clichés. Based on some Shadowesque radio play long forgotten, 1931's Chandu had a becaped hero raiding tombs and rescuing princesses from black-clad villains who captured scientists to build death rays long before the first Superman comic dropped, and longer before Lucas and Spielberg ripped off the formula and killed cinéma with their merchandising-friendly pulp pastiches.

No smartphones, no bathetic quips, just an evil megalomaniac and his flunkies living in the moment.

Frank Chandler (Edmund Lowe) heroically culturally appropriates the mystic arts of Indian yogis to battle Roxor (Béla Lugosi, fresh off his star-making turn in Dracula). Lugosi was always disappointed at his frequent typecasting but it was his own fault for being far too entertaining as a villain. Roxor has so much infectious enthusiasm for mayhem you soon find yourself half-rooting for him. When his death ray is complete, he spends several minutes of screentime gleefully imagining what cities he's going to blow up with it, having made no plan whatsoever beyond actually having it.

"No! No, you can't bury him alive!"
"Why not?"
- actual dialogue

The camera effects and miniature work are impressive for the early 1930s, when the death of the silents largely resulted in static, verbose productions. Cameras dive and circle like seabirds all over the place. Chandu conjures a mini-me to keep tabs on the inebriated comic relief sidekick, which has no plot relevance but they could do the effect, and to 99% of viewers it still might as well have been magic.

"I can do that with a green bedsheet in my basement!" - 50,000 guys who never will.

Chandu received a serialised sequel in which, strangely enough, Lugosi played the title role. It's fun, as those old serials were, but this one has everything you need. It can play back-to-back with the 90s Shadow and Phantom, John Carter and the Brendan Fraser Mummy flicks and not feel out of place. Reject TVTropes; retvrn to cliché.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Tilly and Gus!

Would you buy a boat from this man?

As movie genres go, comedy is deader than the western. I couldn't even name a comedy movie released this decade, much less one worth watching. Perhaps Judd Apatow killed it with his sub-Paranormal Activity levels of effort in sitting SNL also-rans in a room and having them exchange improv not funny enough to get laughs and blow the take, then calling it a movie. An ignominious end to a genre that was at the forefront of innovation back in the silent age. The action genre never got close to producing anything as good as Girl Shy's chase scene until 1980, and Keaton and Lloyd pioneered test screening to fine-tune their routines for maximum laughs in what was then an admirably humble act of deference to populist taste, not the pantomime of corporate greed and soulless incloosion we think of now.

Test audiences now: omg this is giving me anxiety, change everything at once!
Test audiences then: throw a real baby in the ocean bitch, i dare you

While the dawn of the talkies at least temporarily (I'm being kind) retarded the artform in general, comedy stayed strong into the 1930s thanks to a small number of vaudeville veterans stepping up to the plate. The Marx Brothers took full advantage of sound technology to engage in rapid-fire wordplay, but W.C. Fields best kept the torch of silent-era setpiece shenanigans held high. To the extent that he indulges in verbosity, it often sounds like he's just mumbling to himself, and he was often known to show up drunk on set and wing it.

His movies often drop a fully-formed routine into the mix with the bare minimum of plot relevancy because it's funny, sort of like a vignette in a Godard flick except the audience enjoys it too.

While Groucho, Chico, Harpo and Zeppo had fixed personas, Fields's character lurched arbitrarily from hapless sitcom dad to slick trickster archetype to slovenly funny drunk to sharp-tongued cynic from one film to the next and sometimes in the course of a single vehicle. His charismatic comic DNA can be found in iterations from Homer Simpson to Basil Fawlty to Tony Soprano, making him somehow the Ghengis Khan of iconic characters. Against all probability, yet forged inevitably through his rigorous tours of duty on the vaudeville circuit, it all worked and gelled into a sort of avatar of entertainment itself, a carnival barker at the gates of cinéma.

Pls make like a duck and wipe your feet on entry.

To be honest, most Fieldskinos could qualify for Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week, but there's not much you can write about a comedy except to give away the jokes, so we may choose to let this stand in for the ouevre as a whole. At a 55 minute runtime as slim as its star is not, Tilly and Gus might be the most concentrated distillation of the Fields picture. There's no time for the charming musical detours that give that variety-show flavour to other entries, just an amble through comic scenarios that culminates in a high-stakes steam boat race. Watch Tilly and Gus today.