🎥 Group For Movie Lovers - Movie Addicts Club [Open for Recruitment] 🎥

Bump. Thank you.

This is my first review so don't expect too much.

“The General” is a classic silent chase comedy released in 1927 which was inspired by a real historical event “Great Locomotive Chase”. The film’s core character is the silent comedy pioneer Buster Keaton who co-directed it with Clyde Bruckman.
Critics and audiences in 1920 did not appreciate this movie; however, Buster Keaton always referred to “The General” as his best film. After years, critics reevaluated the film and decided that it is one of the greatest films ever made.

Noël Carroll divided the movie in two parts, the first where Johnnie pursues “The General” and everything goes wrong and the second where Johnnie pursues to retrieve his loves, but this time Johnnie has full control. He argues “The General” deals with, “The most recurrent themes in Keaton’s narratives and gags: the question of mastering and understanding causal relations in a world of things, on the one hand, and the question of correctly locating and precisely orienting oneself within one’s environment on the other hand”.

The story is built around a train engineer, Johnnie Gray (Buster Keaton) who has two loves in his life, his engine (“The General”) and Annabelle Lee. As soon as the movie starts, the American Civil War breaks out. Gray, pressured by Annabelle, does his best to sign up for the Confederate army, but he is refused because he is more valuable as an engineer than as a soldier. Despite this, Annabelle thinks that he is a coward, “I don't want you to speak to me again until you are in uniform”. Soon a group of Union spies steal his train, “The General”, with Annabelle on board, planning to destroy supply lines between Chattanooga, Tennessee and Atlanta. Johnnie immediately goes in hot pursuit of the train and the lady.” From this point, the movie follows Gray’s actions attempting to rescue his love.
This pursuit proves the genius and cinematic technique of Keaton, evidenced by hilarious sight gags, perfectly timed stunt work, sublime slapstick and physical humor in his own style. Back then, to shoot a movie like this was more dangerous than we think. Keaton was exposed to the risk of serious injury or even death during the many physical stunts.
“Keaton defies logic with one ingenious silent comic sequence after another, and it is important to note that he never used a double and did all of his own stunts, even very dangerous ones, with a calm acrobatic grace.” (Roger Ebert)

A part of the climax represented most expensive scene in the history of silent movies (over $40,000, which is over $550,000 by 2012 standards), when a bridge collapses and the train falls into a river. The production company left the locomotive in the river, and it later became a tourist attraction until 1945. Last scenes are represented by the final battle, the victory of the Confederate army and enlist of Gray to the army.

Despite his well known nickname "The Great Stoneface" Buster Keaton is very expressive and his capability to juggle with emotions so easily and make them look natural proves again his genius. His character and face fits perfectly in this type of comedy making his performance phenomenal.
Often we ask “What's your favorite scene?" and most of the time is quite easy to answer, but with this movie is hard to choose a scene; It is very good from beginning to the end, is very well balanced, and you can be easy caught in the series of comic events.
“The General” can offer a lot of fun to watch, but it is very dense in terms of actions so if you don’t watch many silent movies, you should know that you have to be more focused on those. In my opinion, everyone who likes silent movies or wants to try one, should watch this because it is a masterpiece of it’s genre.

From this movie we can learn at least two things. One comes from Buster Keaton, and it’s about to risk anything for your dream, and the other one comes from Johnnie, who teaches us that sometimes we can reach what we truly want from roads which at first sight don’t seem to take you where you want to go.

Thanks for reading!

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Awesome train, thanks for the ride.

I'm going to bump this thread. I haven't entered the train yet (which is a really, really nice one), but I will. I do have an interest in entering your Group, but I will be heading to bed shortly (I work nights) so won't be able to write up a review until after I'm done (it would probably be around 2-3am EST).

I hope there will be a possible slot left for Group entry by then. If not, I will still check the train out more closely and give another bump or two.

I do want to verify something, however. In some places above, it says movies/series yet in other sentences it seems to mention movies only. I watch a lot more television series than movies, so are reviews for television series acceptable or just movie reviews? I do see that the name of the Group is Movie Addicts Club, but I figured it couldn't hurt to ask.

Bump!
Thx for the train to every contributor.

Awesome ! ty!

Great train! I have some wishlisted games in there, thank you. Bump.

Moviebump

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Awesome train! Thanks for the great gibs =)

Bump!

BUMP ! THANK YOU !

Bump & Thnks

Have a bump :)
I'm not good at reviews, even in my native language, but thanks for the amazing ride :3

Bump 'N' Thanks !

Bump - thanks for the amazing train!

Joined one, thank you for the chance

Thanks and bump. Nice group but the rules are a bit too rich for me.

bump

Brump :3

Bump and some review from me. English isn''t my native language, so it was a bit hard to translate. =_=

Nolan's Memento, despite all stiffness of chrono-reversed structure, as a typical postmodern chaos, nonlinearity and indeterminism.

The movie itself leads us to spectacular turning ethical/aestheticl hierarchy upside down by means of inverted spiral narration("This Is the House That Jack Built" backwards). Moral essence has to admit defeat before truly aesthetic principle led by strict storytelling rule.
Simple story about revenge and some positive markings to Guy Pearce's character(displaying as Victim and just disabled person) are doing their job. Every viewer puts himself in Leonard's place and empathize more with his memory . Every viewer starts his own game of predictions and judgements, And every viewer becomes Leonard's partner in crime, slowly and insensibly. Partners in crime not by will, but with the help of skilled play-performance. That could be great metaphor to Deleuze notion of "Desiring machines". Leonard is driven not by completely personal moral or physical trauma, his primary aim is almost ephemeral, but by reprocessed outside desires. And of course the motion-picture turns out to be easy disproof to western interpretation of Evil(so called Scholastic "will" can be named one of cardinal ideologies of western world ). Action and deed versus motivation and free will.

Bump - Indeed a nice group concept, I wish there was such a group years ago when I first joined SG.
Also thanks for the train ^^

I'm not such a fan of writing reviews and such. But thanks for the train. Bump!

Bump for an amazing train! Thank you so much for the Ga's.
Personally, this is my favorite club I'm in and everyone in it is great. Definitely a club worth joining, I have no regrets.

BUMP