The Great Buster

Fine documentary on the life and art of silent film star Buster Keaton. Written and directed by Peter Bogdanovich (THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, PAPER MOON, MASK), this was the last film he made as a director, and it's fitting that his final film is a love letter to one of the early stars of film and follows his career from the days of silent films through the Golden Age of Hollywood, all the way through the 1960s on the eve of the New Hollywood revolution. Not only does the film celebrate the life and art of Keaton, the film serves as a document of the evolution of American film and the Hollywood studio system. Featuring contemporary and archival interviews with diverse personalities, including Dick Van Dyke, Johnny Knoxville, Paul Dooley, French Stewart, Richard Lewis, Carl Reiner, Bill Hader, Mel Brooks, Cybill Shepherd, Werner Herzog, Nick Kroll, Quentin Tarantino, Leonard Maltin, Ben Mankiewicz, and Norman Lloyd. While the film serves as a loving celebration of Keaton, it's not particularly revelatory. It works best as an introduction to Keaton for the uninitiated, but is nonetheless worth watching for Keaton fans for the many interviews and rare archival footage of Keaton and his work outside of his classic films.

A 2018 documentary on one of the kings of silent film Buster Keaton directed & narrated by the late, great Peter Bogdanovich. Most people will say Charlie Chaplin others my say Harold Lloyd but in many circles the undisputed silent film champ is Keaton. Tracing his roots as a vaudevillian who was the child in a family act, he soon gained the eye of Fatty Arbuckle who gave him a chance to make shorts w/his studio which afforded him to make feature length productions gaining him worldwide fame & notoriety but as bad follows good, things turn when he became a contract player for MGM. Never having owned his material didn't give Keaton the cache that Chaplin would command so his inventiveness (he was a consummate tinkerer figuring out his gags in advance) were relegated to the sidelines as his talent was further wasted when talkies took over. Happily he found appreciative fans overseas in Europe where he would be feted for his past triumphs & although later in life during the 1960's, dying from cancer he'd continue to work (appearing in some of the Beach Blanket films & tons of ads promoting different products but really a return to form as they were essentially the same kind of shorts he perfected some 40 years before). W/talking heads as varied as Richard Lewis, Dick Van Dyke, Mel Brooks, Werner Herzog, Johnny Knoxville, Bill Hader & former Pathmark shill James Karen to name a bunch, we're giving an unsung cinematic hero his due. My only complaint is the film finishes about 90 minutes in but Bogdanovich tacks on another half hour to illustrate his greatness w/a collection of his most famous sequences making this portion of the doc almost an afterthought but ultimately servicable.

People's collective sense of humor change with time. But, this reminds me of people frantically trying to keep up with technology that is supposed to make their lives easier. Just as we become more and more addicted to and dependent on technology and all its modern gadgets - we gradually lose our own resourcefulness and creativity.

This is what happened in movie industry with comedies (and not just comedies). First we had silent B&W movies where you needed to be a genius to make audience laugh with no use of sound and color, with things you could barely call special effects today and smart use of dialogues only when necessary. A while later, it was easier for actors and directors as they could use all those things to make a good movie. Need for ingenuity lowered.

Then suddenly, the only thing that worked was actors swearing in almost every line they spoke. Nowadays, almost exclusively, directors rely on swearing, sarcasm and cheap irony (in other genres blood, nudity, violence, etc.).

Need for ingenuity practically disappeared. Or do we need it more than ever?

One of such original genius of the silent era was Buster Keaton. And he pretty much did all his best work himself - he wrote the scenes, directed them, acted in them and pulled many highly dangerous stunts to achieve perfection each time. This documentary by Peter Bogdanovich (Petar Bogdanovic in Serbian - he's my countryman :)) puts the Great Buster under the spotlight right in time as the cinema is crying for it. And it will serve as a quality intro for announced restoration of the comic's top movies. Bogdanovich's choice of talking heads is questionable, but some of them are obviously selected to draw the younger audience.

It is truly a celebration of Keaton's legacy but also a reminder what the real, healthy humor is all about - not vulgarity and humiliation, but simplicity, originality and inventiveness. This brilliant comic was known as the Great Stone Face, but - as pointed out by Cybill Shepherd (and as told by John Ford once) - you act with your eyes, not with your face.

I just hope that at least a part of today's spoiled audience that only ask for new, loud, fast (and senseless) movies will recognize the great value of Buster's works - all presented timely and nicely by Bogdanovich - and discover it for themselves. I sure will, although I decided this already after watching The General.The Genius Buster - the one we need today...

If you are not familiar with Buster Keaton, I guess this is not a bad place to start. However, unlike it's subject matter, this documentary is quite mediocre. In this age of great documentaries, this one still starts and ends in a traditional way - by starting with Buster's birth, career, etc. Even structurally, the docu is not well thought-out, suddenly showing a greatest-hits type compilation at the end, after having finished Buster's life story with his death. It has nothing new to add or show, except a few talking heads on what Buster meant to them. Most of these had either no connection to Buster, or they are not appropriate people to speak to (I mean, do you really care what Johnny Knoxville thinks of Buster Keaton?) It's a pretty lazy piece of film-making that is also not very well-researched.If you can, try to catch the three-part 1987 British docu called "Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow".

An excellent overview of Buster Keaton's life and work. The man was such a genius and seeing this touching documentary made me smile. I liked seeing all the miscellany and smaller things he did in his later life, even the commercials, because I had never seen them before. I also liked getting a little excerpt out of so many of the early two-reelers, and of course those extraordinary moments from his major works. I'm not sure about all the choices Bogdanovich made in terms of the celebrity interviews and would have preferred a little more depth in places that didn't get it, but it does show the scope of the influence Keaton had. In the end I appreciated the balance in the documentary, between all of the little clips and rare bits (running the risk of turning attention away from the major films) and the truly amazing physical comedy in those epic moments (running the risk of just becoming just a montage of film clips). It's not perfect, but I saw and learned new things, and was touched and inspired afterwards.