Buster Keaton Short Films Blu-ray Box set

I bought the Buster Keaton Short Films Blu-ray Box set a couple of weeks ago. It contains the surviving short films he made with Arbuckle. Of those my favourite is The Garage(loved the revolving carwash sequence and the advert scene where Buster pretends to be a Scotsman.)I also love Coney Island. It also includes several short films featuring just Keaton and not Arbuckle. Of those I love The Haunted House, Neighbors and The Love Nest. I haven't finished watching them all yet, but am really enjoying working my way through. I've seen some of these before, but there are many here that are new to me.

The films look great and there are some good extras. The best extra(in my opinion)is the 184 page booklet, it features an interview with Keaton, plenty of detail about all the films and a round table discussion about Keaton and this film collection. I didn't know until reading this, that James Mason went on to own Keaton's home and discovered one of Keaton's lost films in the house.

I really enjoyed reading the 1958 Keaton interview, in one part he talks about how comedy had changed since the Silent era. Keaton mentions that physical comedy has been passed over for comic dialogue and how he finds that a shame. Personally I enjoy both forms of comedy, but physical comedy is much harder to do and comics who have this natural ability (like Keaton) are rare. It is easy to write funny lines, but much more difficult to physically cause laughter through a look or body language. Keaton made his comedy look so easy and wowed us with his stunts, his abilities still cause laughter today, proving physical comedy never really gets old.

I'm happy to have this in my film collection and highly recommend it to other fans.




Go to bed Frank or this is going to get ugly .