Last night I revisited Season of the Witch; not the Romero movie-which has never been experienced by me-but rather the totally forgettable 2011 film starring Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman. That is still a movie which isn’t 1 star bad but rather 2 star lousy. At least this time it wasn’t a bad theatrical experience like the first time. Now, the rest of this is a review I wrote on Letterboxd a few days ago but neglected to port over here. That is the 1919 13 minute short Billy Blazes, Esq., starring Harold Lloyd:
A fine short as long as you can wait 5 minutes to see Harold Lloyd… and accept there being a minor yellowface character. It wasn’t the plan to see another silent short already but something less than 15 minutes in length fit my schedule the best. This ended up being not my favorite Lloyd by any means and this set up a story for the first 5 minutes before the star first shows up. There also is a Chinese waiter at the town’s saloon who is a yellowface character that walks and acts funny-that is unfortunate, although at least the Criterion Channel had a warning in their description that this stereotype was present.
There isn’t too much else to say about this—this is a Western where Lloyd doesn’t do too many pratfalls although at least there’s some nice physical dexterity, perhaps the most impressive of which was seeing how he rolled his own cigarettes. There’s a heel, a damsel in distress, and a fraidy-cat sheriff; that was as complicated as it got. Believe it or not, Harold played a badass cowboy instead of the sheriff. There are better shorts in the collection of Lloyd that’s currently on the Criterion Channel although this wasn’t lousy. From skimming around I know that some of the material there has been restored while others like this haven’t been.
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