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Kung Fu Hustle
Film Review  April 22, 2005
Description: Stephen Chow's chopsocky offering is a manic, hyperentertaining blend of classic kung-fu tropes, special effects, and outrageous comedy.

"...Not so Kung Fu Hustle, which would almost certainly generate enough excited word-of-mouth to find its target audience, even without the barrage of TV ads and print marketing. Of course, it helps immensely that that demographic is found under the heading "film fans." This is as pure and downright fun a cinematic experience as you’re likely to have all year: part chopsocky battle royale, part Chuck Jones-and-Buster Keaton-inspired gonzo romantic comedy, and part MGM musical run amok..."

Divine Intervention
Film Review  May 9, 2003
Description: It’s immensely inviting to dollop as much praise as possible onto Suleiman’s abruptly humorous comedy of manners about the Israeli-Palestinian situation. After all, what could be more ripe for targeting...

"...After all, what could be more ripe for targeting from the satirical landmine of black, bleak humor than the ongoing, seemingly unending conflict that plays itself out daily on the West Bank? If it were 30 years ago, Robert Altman surely would have taken a stab at the bloody headlines, M*A*S*H-style, as he did for Korea/Vietnam, but apparently that’s tough to do when the body counts are just a CNN away. And so we get Suleiman, a Palestinian filmmaker born in Israel who’s watched a lot of Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton in his day and – for better, and sometimes for worse – views the current, horrific troubles through the cracked and dirty lens of slapstick..."

The Bachelor
Film Review  November 12, 1999
Description: Chris O'Donnell as a nuptials-phobic bachelor who breaks into a sweat at the words “I do”? Sweet, clean-cut, boy-next-door Chris O'Donnell as the perpetual single guy, an unfettered Lothario? If...

"...Even in the hands of an actor better-suited than O'Donnell, it's doubtful that this movie would work, given its mediocre script. Allegedly a retelling of the 1925 Buster Keaton film Seven Chances, The Bachelor offers a simplistic story that can be summarized like a personals ad: Confirmed SWM must wed SF in 24 hours to inherit $100 million fortune..."

Blues Brothers 2000
Film Review  February 6, 1998
Description: Along with It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, John Landis' The Blues Brothers remains one of my favorite screwball comedies. Both films take the notion of chaos theory and...

"...Both films take the notion of chaos theory and apply it to filmmaking in ways so absurd and ludicrous that they hit a sublime high note in the comic register. There's a direct and easily traceable line to be drawn from the seminal work of Mack Sennett and Buster Keaton to Landis' original film, and this rip-snorting, charmingly silly sequel gleefully upholds that tradition..."

The Silent Enemy
Film Review  October 8, 1993
Description: Unfortunately, of the few of you who've seen the great silent films you've probably seen mostly lousy prints, faded and jerky. Silent films by the late 'teens were frequently gorgeous,...

"...Released in 1930, The Silent Enemy may have been the last silent film released -- except for the ever-reactionary Charlie Chaplin's City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) -- but it is not the place to begin developing a love for silents. Go to Vulcan Video and rent something as innocuous as Old Ironsides just to see how much fun they can be (not to mention how great are the films of such artists as Maurice Tourneur, Fritz Lang, Buster Keaton, Roscoe “Fatty'' Arbuckle, D..."

Project A -- Part II
Film Review  April 9, 1993
Description: Apparently quite a few people think this is one of Chan's best films. I guess I'm not one of them, because I still think that honor goes to Police Story...

"...And then, of course, there's the gags, including one involving Jackie and his immediate superior handcuffed together while fleeing from assorted thugs. Chan's sense of comedic timing rivals that of the great Stoneface, Buster Keaton -- he's that good but it's not quite enough to sustain an entire 105-minute film..."

Arts Review
Arts Review  January 29, 2010
Description: Palindrome Theatre's debut squeezes all the meaning it can from Beckett's bleakness

"...Subsequently, Palindrome's Endgame is very light on humor. Beckett's plays are full of homages to the clowning of Buster Keaton and Chaplin, and Endgame is no different..."

Peter and the Wolf
Arts Story  October 9, 2009
Description: Playwright Allison Gregory schticks it to the kids' classic in a new stage adaptation

"...AG: Whatever you would call Looney Tunes, we went in that direction. We went for physical comedy, kind of in the realm of Buster Keaton..."

Book Review
Books Review  September 18, 2009
Description: Doctorow fiddles with the facts of the real-life recluses, the Collyer brothers, to produce a rattling work of beauty

"...Homer's first love is an orphaned Catholic girl named Mary Elizabeth, his assistant at a silent-movie theatre where he plays piano accompaniment. It's a chaste unaffair, erotically powered by the feel of Mary Elizabeth's whispers at his ear, as she describes the action of a Buster Keaton film..."

What Comes 'Up' ...
Screens Story  May 29, 2009
Description: Director Pete Docter on the intersection of uplift and melancholy

"...In that tradition – of Buster Keaton's live-action "The Balloonatic" (1923) and Ub Iwerks' animated short "Balloon Land" (1935) and McCay's dreamy, cloud-shrouded Slumberland – comes Up, Disney/Pixar's enchanting new animated feature, which completely abandons logic and reason in favor of gorgeous, candy-colored uplift. Literally..."

Page Two: Looking Up
Columns  May 22, 2009
Description: Along the path back to wonder

"...Watching Nick Ray's In a Lonely Place for the first time (when it was screened by CinemaTexas on the UT campus), then taking the 16mm print home to watch two more times before morning. John Ford and again John Ford and even Ford again; Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, Charlie Chaplin but especially Mabel Normand, Roscoe Arbuckle, and Buster Keaton! Smaller but still intense explosions occurred when I saw Dorothy Arzner's Dance, Girl, Dance, Alan Rudolph's Songwriter, and the startling surprises of Martha Coolidge's Valley Girl and Real Genius...."

Page Two: Long Days of Journeys Into Nights
Columns  April 17, 2009
Description: In quest of a simple metaphor

"...(In the dankness, I watch the film, which is now showing Buster Keaton in his classic two-reel comedy Cops. In a scene similar to the one in Chaplin's Modern Times, Keaton, driving a horse-drawn wagon of furniture, accidentally joins a march – only it is a civic one, featuring all the city's police..."

Letters at 3AM
Columns  March 13, 2009
Description: How far are you willing to go to make a picture?

"...Biographies of the pioneer filmmakers outstrip their legends and read like novels – Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Buster Keaton, Roscoe Arbuckle, Lillian Gish, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Gloria Swanson, Cecil B..."

Page Two: A Cheating Top 10
Columns  January 2, 2009
Description: An introduction, then a list of lots of cool things, shoved into 10 slots, that are not necessarily related to 2008

"...Arbuckle had a long run at Keystone and then made a series of comedy shorts for Paramount. It was while making those that he met Buster Keaton, whom he featured in many shorts as well as taught about filmmaking..."

I Served the King of England
Film Review  September 26, 2008
Description: The new film from Czech New Wave hero Jirí Menzel presents a whimsical version of 20th century European history.

"...Starring: Ivan Barnev, Oldrich Kaiser, Julia Jentsch, Martin Huba, Marián Labuda, Milan Lasica, Josef Abrhám and Jiri Lábus. Jan Díte is a curious film creation: equal parts Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harpo Marx but with a self-absorbed indifference to the suffering of others to which none of those old-time comics (save maybe Harpo on one or two maniacal occasions) would ever dream of aspiring..."

Kabluey
Film Review  July 25, 2008
Description: Oddball tale of a directionless young man who moves in with his sister-in-law, whose husband is in Iraq with his National Guard unit, is quirky but unaffecting.

"...In one telling scene, Leslie’s little angels try to murder their intruding uncle by pouring drain cleaner down his throat while he’s sleeping … which might have had some emotional (or at least Shakespearean) resonance had Salman actually responded with anything resembling anger or disbelief – anything vaguely human, that is. Instead he lies back and takes it like Buster Keaton after an overdose of Nebutal (more dead than deadpan), and the movie continues on as it was, quirky and undisturbed, unaffected and unaffecting...."

WALL-E
Film Review  June 27, 2008
Description: By turns sad, hilarious, exciting, and ultimately, hopeful, this is a film of Great Truths masquerading as child's play.

"...WALL-E, however, is smitten almost from the moment of EVE's first appearance, and while the film eventually takes both of these ’droids off-world and into the sedentary, emotionally disconnected world of the surviving human race, the story remains focused on the blossoming romance between the little load-lifter and his blue-eyed paramour. This is Pixar's finest and most emotionally powerful film yet, and it draws on a wealth of cinematic resources that runs the gamut from Chaplin's best to Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, and even Martin & Lewis..."

Salute Your Undershorts
Screens Story  May 2, 2008
Description: The secret Hollywood history behind No Pants Day

"...New research has revealed that Trouser-Free Day was actually started in Hollywood in 1928 by a secret cabal of gin-soaked movie producers, writers, and actors interested as much in flaunting societal convention and toppling democracy as they were in making movies, a group that included such closet anarchists and degenerates as Norma Shearer, Conrad Veldt, Samuel Goldwyn, Adolph Zukor, Lillian Gish, Will Rogers, the entire cast of King Vidor's The Big Parade, and Wallace Beery (who, honoring the wishes of the other members of the group, kept his pants on). Rumor has it the party was the height of Roaring Twenties liberal immorality and political rabble-rousing (though no rabble were actually invited), capped off by a naked Buster Keaton reading aloud from Das Kapital and guzzling mulled wine while standing on Mary Pickford's shoulders...."

Letters @ 3AM
Columns  December 21, 2007
Description: Steve Erickson's new novel Zeroville shows what you have to go through to see how monotheism screws up your consciousness

"...What Zeroville is about (far more so than Finnegans Wake, and funnier – the way Buster Keaton is funnier and more profound than D.W. Griffith) is a verbal model of monotheistic consciousness..."

When Little Blue Men Fight the War at Home
Screens Story  October 5, 2007
Description: Scott Prendergast on 'Kabluey'

"...The result, shot in Austin in the summer of 2006, is a film that is funny, tragic, and human. Prendergast, who got his break in the Groundlings comedy troupe, wrote, directed, and starred in the film as a Buster Keaton-esque everyman who in wordless moments evokes laughter and pathos simply through the way his blue-costumed body moves..."

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