They’re hard on the eyes, sometimes. The speed is wrong, the print’s bad, the title cards jump or jitter, and it all seems so maddeningly old-timey and irrelevant. Sometimes that’s so. There’s a finite number of times you can see people hit in the face with pies and find it amusing. But that’s just a small segment of the movies of the 20s, and a misunderstood one at that. There was more than Keystone Kops and moon-faced fat comics. There was Art! And even the moon-faced fat comic had his brilliant moments

Lileks

09.18.13

(Revised and reupped 03 2023. Also, prepare for a shift in the UI in some pages until I fix this site for the 19th time.)