And a great Every Frame a Painting film essay on his work: https://youtu.be/UWEjxkkB8Xs?si=n-4ZNr_cMnYVKijs
He was truly an innovator that makes today’s “films of people talking to each other” look amateurish.
A few months ago the local theatre was playing Sherlock Jr. with a live band, and it was awesome. Try to see it in similar circumstances if possible.
AFI in Silver Spring?
I feel you could have said the first part without attempting to critique films with a different aesthetic aspiration.
I just watched Eisenberg's "A Real Pain" last night, and there is no way that any of the things Keaton was good at would have improved that film at all. Which is not to say that Keaton was not an innovator .. just that there is more than one aesthetic goal for films, and room for all of them.
https://youtu.be/jGc-K7giqKM?si=0sOBkBrsYa4IBo5N
A lot of Keaton’s gags and shots are similar.
It reminds me of the glass eating trick by David Blaine, where the trick is to… just eat glass. It makes it quite bittersweet, as after all, those men are trading some of their wellbeing for some of their fame. Not sure how to feel about it.
Usually 90 of the top 100 shows on American TV are football games. It was 72 out of 100 in 2024 because it was an election year.
[1]: Not to mention daily zoom calls with a micromanaging boss and a mandatory video on rule.
I don't want performers to risk their safety, health and life for my entertainment. Obviously I cannot stop it, but I can stop watching those who engage in things like this. (And I don't just mean the stunt performer, but the director, the producers, the studio and the franchise.)
I have unsubscribed from youtube channels when I felt that they were pushing themselves in dangerous directions. It is not like that alone will stop them, but if I would keep watching I would be complicit in the harm which might befall them.
There is the principle attributed to Houdini by Penn Jillette that a performance/trick should not be more dangerous than sitting in one's living room. Especially when it appears dangerous. I don't know about the exact line though. Strictly interpreting the "not be more dangerous than sitting in one's living room" definition would disqualify any performance where the performer had to drive (or be chauffeured) to the location of their performance. And that would be a bit ridiculous.
Then stop reading about start up on HN as well.
In fact, forget about any extra ordinnary human achivement.
Done. Easy.
> stop reading about start up on HN as well
I don’t think there the motivation is to create entertainment though. But i don’t care much about that kind of content either.
> forget about any extra ordinnary human achivement
I disagree with that. Plenty of extraordinary human achievements were created under circumstances I find acceptable to celebrate and watch.
"""They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth."""
In terms of exploring the oceans my hero is Admiral Rickover and not Stockton Rush. Different kind of heroism. Not the lack of it.
I mean, they pretty much all do to some degree. It's not healthy on your body to do eight Broadway shows a week. Or to be constantly switching between all-day and all-night shoots on a TV show. And performing a role of high emotional trauma every day for weeks or months takes its own kind of toll too.
Obviously nobody should be at risk of life or of permanent injury, that goes without saying.
But getting bruises while doing stunts, that's just what being a stuntperson is. Nobody is forced into it. And this is why there are stuntpeople in the first place -- it's not just for skills. Sometimes the regular actor could do it fine, but there's no time in the schedule for their body to recover afterwards.
And i’m not forced to watch it. So all is fair.
Stuntpeople aren't getting blows to the head, generally speaking.
“One hundred seventy-three performers (80%) indicated at least one head impact/head whip during their stunt career. Of these, 86% exhibited concussion-like symptoms and 38% received one or more concussion diagnoses. Sixty-five percent continued working with concussion-like symptoms.”
Houdini died from a rather trivial stunt he performed many times before. A hit to the abdomen before he could flex his muscles most likely ruptured his appendix. Keaton died of lung cancer well past the end of his fame.
You can manage the danger of stunts, you can reduce it and prepare for anything that could go wrong. You can never completely avoid it and sometimes a single error is all it takes.
I think that is all I'm asking. Or not even that. Just saying that if they don't, i don't want to watch it.
> Houdini died from a rather trivial stunt he performed many times before.
The blows which allegedly killed Houdini were not suffered during a performance or stunt.
Brave Wilderness?
From Wikipedia: Garry Moore recalled, "I asked (Keaton) how he did all those falls, and he said, 'I'll show you.' He opened his jacket and he was all bruised. So that's how he did it—it hurt—but you had to care enough not to care." This would have been in about 1955, when Keaton (born 1899) was an old man and well past his heyday of really dangerous stunts (he once broke his neck during an early stunt).
And he usually had an amazing commitment to film in a lot of other ways. The first time he was shot in a film he took a camera apart to figure out how it worked, because he really cared about every detail (though in the middle of his career this really hurt him, as execs wanted to just trot him up in front of the camera as a high paid celebrity - they didn't want him wasting his valuable time fussing over details, or risk their investment letting him do stunts).