Les affiches en goguette

I would retitle this the not very funny posters. It's the same old idea of a set of eight posters, with various subjects, coming to life. It's just that the things they do aren't very interesting. They dump stuff on people. They fight. Melies came a long way in his films. A few of these later ones just don't cut the mustard.

This short feature is based on some very amusing ideas by Georges Méliès, although they do not entirely come off due to slightly imperfect execution. It's still worth seeing.

The movie starts with a wall full of posters for various entertainers, which become the source of a series of antics involving passers-by. The story that follows is clever, but the visual effects in this one are below the standard you come to expect from Méliès. Instead of the usual smooth dissolves and careful background continuity, the special effects here unfortunately come across as a little clumsy.

It helps a lot that the story really is a funny one, with some clever ideas, and is worth watching. It's just too bad that the technical side of it was not quite up to the visual wizard's usual standard, because it could have been a truly fine feature if the special effects had worked better.

One fun and funny well liked and good short is "The Hilarious Posters" from 1906! Long before the days of "Amazon", "Ebay", or window shopping at "J. C. Penny", "Macy's", or "Victoria Secret's", or just cart shopping at "Wal Mart" or "Target" or even shopping at an auction or flee market this was the way people shopped they were lured into products by the art they saw on poster walls! However this short takes a clever and unique fun twist all of a sudden the advertising comes alive to send it's message to by passers! Also look for some parody as some "Keystone Cop" like characters are featured. Overall well done classic enjoyable short that sends a message to customers.

Another bizarre little tale from the warped imagination of French pioneer Georges Melies, this short film lacks his usual smooth technique but compensates by delivering a truly original and entertaining piece of nonsense.

The action centres around a set of posters that come to life and interact with each other and, eventually, on passers-by. The police get involved and it's not long before the arm of the law is being pelted with flour and soaked with liquor. Although the use of stop-motion here is a little ragged, Melies pretty much gets as much mileage as it is possible to get out of a wall full of posters...

Well, here we have the early roots of slap-stick comedy in a not so comical film short. It's cute in it's way but really needed more for me to find it funny.

5/10