My second Harold Lloyd short this morning was actually a little longer, that is twenty minutes as compared to ten. His Royal Slyness came out in 1920, and, like Young Mr. Jazz, was directed by Hal Roach. There's a fair bit of mocking of a fictional royal family, as one might expect from an American film from 1920, although the attempted revolution might have been a subtle dig at the fairly recently completed Russian Revolution.
So, not surprisingly, I've gone down a Harold Lloyd rabbit hole. Maybe, in the midst of this Trumpian madness, I needed some joy - which the world probably needed in 1919 as well. This morning, while waiting for the pellet stove to cool down enough for me to clean it, I watched a couple Harold Lloyd shorts, the first being Young Mr. Jazz. Not surprisingly, I tend to lump Lloyd in with Chaplin and Keaton, and I guess I'm still working out my order of preference (although the very fact that I made that statement shows what a dude I am). It's funny how consistently jazz was always held up as the very definition of bad behavior - we even saw it in Japanese films noir.
I enjoyed Buster Keaton's The General so much the other night that I've queued up several silent films. After watching the grim, but brilliant, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, I watched Take a Chance, a delightful 1918 Harold Lloyd short, to walk back from the edge. I suppose I shouldn't count shorts, or in this case a one reeler (which never go beyond 10-12 minutes), but all sorts of different options showed up in the 2025 list of books read, so I should be honest on this front as well. It's just another reason to love the Criterion Channel.
This month the Criterion Channel is featuring a Romanian New Wave collection, and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing all of them. I started with one that I had already seen, and I suppose the statement "I had already seen one of the Roman New Wave films" is a whole other degree of film whoredom. I was considering using Cristian Mungiu's 2007 film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days for a final project in my Images of Fascism class, although in the end it's probably too rough for my fragile little knuckleheads (which, obviously, has never stopped me in the past). It's set in the 1980s during the Nicolae Ceausescu dictatorship, and it tells the story of two college roommates, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) who set out to get an abortion, then illegal in Romania, for the latter's unwanted pregnancy. It caused a stir because of the abortion theme, although to claim that the film is only about abortion is like saying that The Deer Hunter is only about three friends who volunteer for the Vietnam War. It's a pretty nightmarish tale, and it speaks volumes about the inhumanity that authoritarian regimes engender. Anamaria Marinca is especially good. Highly recommended.
Mollie, the horizontal cat, was in a mood (mainly, I suspect, because Cici, the vertical cat, was spending the day at the vet) and simply wouldn't leave me alone as I was trying to getting some writing done. So, I finally surrendered, and sat over in my morning chair so that she could curl up on me and take a nap (proving, once again, who really runs things when you have a cat). I took the opportunity to watch another movie from the Mervyn LeRoy collection on the Criterion Channel on my phone. This was High Pressure, which was enjoyable, although also seemed the weakest film that I've seen from the collection so far. William Powell, as Gar Evans (his name is a little too close to mine), is, typically, great, and Frank McHugh is good in a typically Frank McHugh role as Mike Donahey. While I was watching it I kept thinking that the Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie Lover Come Back is sort of an uncredited remake. If you're a William Powell fan (and, really, who isn't?), you could check it out.
And now we're officially over halfway through my last semester. My great friend Kerry stopped by yesterday and noticed the number 13 that had just appeared on my door, and I explained the process. I think she was triggered by the number 13, and began to talk about the need for a public celebration of my retirement, which I thought had disappeared in the chaos of life at Champlain. I explained, truthfully, as I've explained before, that I don't want a big public going away shindig. I'm OK with a series of smaller gettogethers. but the thought of being the center of a big celebration just makes my skin crawl. I'm going to litter the road with as many roadblocks as possible to keep this from being scheduled, including a series of fictional trips back to Indiana. If not for this summer's two CFL trips I think I'd just get on a plane for Sicily as soon as my final grades are submitted.
Last night we finally got around to watching Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, which seems to be, along with Sinners, the two leading choices to win the Oscar for Best Picture (although I suspect that It Was Just an Accident or Sentimental Value are better pictures). Either way, as has been the case since 1986, I will not be watching the Oscars as I continue the boycott I started when David Lynch's Blue Velvet was not nominated (in an age when no one believes in anything or stands for something, I am the exception). Of the two, I would pick One Battle After Another, although I certainly would be happy with Sinners winning (as I said earlier, it is a wonderful film). Maybe it's the unabashed critique of Trump's America that pushes the arrow to One Battle After Another for me. There was an article on the BBC website recently which asked the question: if so many film critics view One Battle After Another as a classic, why did so few people bother to see it. They proposed several reasons, when the obvious reason is simply that Americans are morons. Highly recommended.
