(no subject)
Last night morganie and I went to the Stanford Theatre for a double feature of Never Weaken and Speedy, two silent films from before the Great Depression.
They were surprisingly good. They were really a glimpse into another time... a time when baseball was everything (and Babe Ruth was in movies) and when it wasn't an overly uncommon thing to run into people who had fought in the Civil War. In my opinion, the coolest part was seeing how different things were back then, despite bearing a similarity to how they are today. For example, at one point a guy got a brand new suit for a day at Coney Island with his girlfriend, and apparently this was a perfectly normal thing to do. The movie showed some of the rides they went on... A typical log ride, except that it bottomed out into a lake where a guy then paddled the boat back to the shore... A game in which you would get a prize if you could stay for three minutes on a 30-foot spinning disc without being flung off into the crowd of other people who had already been flung off it... A "test your lungs" apparatus in which you would blow on the same tube that everyone else had blown on all day, after the guy running it wiped it off with the same towel he had been using all day... A race horse ride in which you would cling to a mechanical horse running around the track, hoping to not fall off it at high speed and be struck by the other mechanical horses... And a bunch of other things that would never exist today.
This leaves me wanting to see more of these zany old films. Too bad Netflix doesn't carry that sort of thing.
They were surprisingly good. They were really a glimpse into another time... a time when baseball was everything (and Babe Ruth was in movies) and when it wasn't an overly uncommon thing to run into people who had fought in the Civil War. In my opinion, the coolest part was seeing how different things were back then, despite bearing a similarity to how they are today. For example, at one point a guy got a brand new suit for a day at Coney Island with his girlfriend, and apparently this was a perfectly normal thing to do. The movie showed some of the rides they went on... A typical log ride, except that it bottomed out into a lake where a guy then paddled the boat back to the shore... A game in which you would get a prize if you could stay for three minutes on a 30-foot spinning disc without being flung off into the crowd of other people who had already been flung off it... A "test your lungs" apparatus in which you would blow on the same tube that everyone else had blown on all day, after the guy running it wiped it off with the same towel he had been using all day... A race horse ride in which you would cling to a mechanical horse running around the track, hoping to not fall off it at high speed and be struck by the other mechanical horses... And a bunch of other things that would never exist today.
This leaves me wanting to see more of these zany old films. Too bad Netflix doesn't carry that sort of thing.