Nouvelles luttes extravagantes

I watched this Méliès short movie with sheer devotion. You don't need to "change lenses" to fully enjoy this one, because the humor of it is timeless, and the action is still very much enjoyable. A high quality, cartoonish comedic experience, very entertaining and surprisingly violent. Gotta love it! Round 2... Fight!

Fat And Lean Wrestling Match (1900)

*** (out of 4)

aka Nouvelles luttes extravagantes

This here is one of the director's most loved films. The film starts off with a fat woman and a lean woman wrestling but then they morph into a fat man and a lean man (played by Melies). This film is highly enjoyable from start to finish and contains some pretty good special effects. The highlight of the film is a hilarious sequence where one of the men gets decapitated and then ripped to shreds before being brought back to life again. The silly, child like humor throughout this short makes it one of the director's most loved films.

Most of the time when I view these pioneering efforts, I comment on how much one could do with so little. The plots are thin, but after all, it's 1900. This little wrestling bit is one of the best I've seen and I actually giggled as I watched it. It is especially engaging when the skinny guy (Melies himself) goes against the much bigger man. What transpires is ingenious, with some masterful animation. I especially enjoyed when the big guy flattens Melies and peels him off the floor. Great fun.

This funny and imaginative Georges Méliès comedy plays off of the popularity of fairgrounds-style wrestling, adding some humorous touches and a good assortment of the kind of special camera effects for which Méliès is so well-remembered. As with so many of his features, he manages to squeeze a lot of material out of a simple premise.

As the movie begins, the wrestlers are two women, but they are only the prelude. The 'main event' features two men wrestling, with some moves and mishaps that you could normally only see in a cartoon. It bears watching closely to notice all of the visual effects that Méliès slipped in, because they go past pretty quickly at times.

The camera tricks are quite good for 1900, and show both skill and imagination, in the ideas and in carrying them off. There are only a small handful of times when the illusion does not quite come off, and most of it still holds up pretty well even now.

At the very, very beginning of cinema, cinemagician Georges Melies refused to be caught between the boundaries of limit. Despite lack of cinematic technique at the time, Melies worked hard to crate what his imagination desired, and thus, film as an art form significantly developed in the process. This early action-comedy hybrid is a wacky, cartoonish depiction of a manic wrestling match made all the more insane by the constant disappearing, reappearing, morphing, etc. of the wrestlers. Men are torn apart and put back together, they are surrealistically flattened, and keep switching back and forth from being women. it's a ridiculous little movie, and hugely imaginative and impressive for its time, particularly in a visual sense. I was legitimately wow-ed by this film's special effects, even more so than with Melies' other movies. Remember: this movie was made back in 1901, well over 100 years ago, and yet it still is jam packed with some of the most magical cinematic tricks of all time 9not to mention, much of it is still also genuinely funny).