Latest news with #BusterKeaton
CTV News
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
‘He blew my mind': Back-flipping B.C. brothers inspired by silent film star
"He blew my mind": Adam finds out how a pair of brothers are being inspired by superheroes and century-old cinema. If this were a decade or so ago, Graeson Cole-Murphy and his brother Caellan would likely be watching something with superheroes. 'When I was a little kid, I wanted to be the Incredible Hulk,' Graeson smiles. While Graeson was mesmerized by the Hulk's strength, his younger brother Caellan thought it would be wonderful to be a web slinger. 'Spider Man's cool,' Caellan recalls thinking. 'He can do flips, so I want to do flips.' But instead of turning to a YouTube tutorial, Caellan taught himself how to move like he was in a Marvel movie. 'He blew my mind,' Graeson says of his brother. 'And he inspired me.' So, Graeson asked his little brother to start teaching him. Today they are practising backflips in the park. 'It's scary,' Graeson says after flipping in the air. 'You kind of feel sick in your stomach because you don't know if you're going to land on your head.' Yet Graeson perseveres. But not to emulate some old superhero, not since he discovered the work of one particular old movie star. 'It's a video of Buster Keaton and his famous stunts,' Graeson points to the black and white video they're watching on his phone between flips. Buster Keaton was one of the 1920s' biggest stars. Before movies had sound, he made audience's laugh. Before CGI was even an idea, he made them gasp. 'I think it's incredible,' Graeson points to Keaton jumping between buildings, hanging off a train, and surviving a house almost hitting him. 'One guy who revolutionized stunting!' And now, more than a century later, Keaton is inspiring Graeson to pursue stunt work professionally. Caellan, on the other hand, is practising his super flips because he's been invited to play with a professional soccer team in Europe over the summer. 'Maybe I'll do it as a celebration when I score,' Caellan says. But there's one things Caellan and Graeson know definitely – no matter who inspires them to do cool things, being brothers encourages them to be better people. 'He's taught me about being responsible for myself,' Caelan says. 'And being able to self-reflect.' 'He teaches me not to give up,' Graeson adds. And they've both learned that even better than growing up to be like a comic book dynamic duo, is actually being real-life best friends.
Washington Post
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Diary of a mad Mumbai housewife
Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari's debut feature, 'Sister Midnight,' is an absolute original. Which doesn't mean this diary of a mad Mumbai newlywed doesn't have its antecedents and influences. In interviews, the British Indian director has spoken of his love for Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, and the film's careful framing of explosively reactive slapstick evokes both classic film comedy and the deadpan precision of Wes Anderson. Yet there are darker sources that take 'Sister Midnight' in disturbing, elliptical directions reminiscent of Roman Polanski's 'Repulsion' and Ana Lily Amirpour's 'A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.'
Geek Tyrant
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Video Explores How 1920s Filmmakers Pulled Off Death-Defying Stunts Without Dying — GeekTyrant
A new video from Lost in Time dives into some of the wildest and most iconic movie stunts from the silent film era. This is a behind-the-scenes look at how legends like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin pulled off seemingly impossible feats of physical comedy and danger… without modern safety gear or visual effects. 'In this video we're breaking down how they pulled off the craziest stunts in the 1920s from Hollywood legends Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. I have made 3D animations showing exactly how each scene was filmed, and it is amazing how creative they were back then.' And those animations really drive it home. Watching them reveals just how much thought and trickery went into making these death-defying moments is fascinating. This is just a reminder that the roots of modern movie magic were built with brains, not just bravery.
Telegraph
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why Buster Keaton – not Tom Cruise – is cinema's greatest daredevil
It's a miracle that Tom Cruise is still alive. During a four-decade-long career, he's dangled from a flying Airbus A400M, sprinted down the world's tallest building, corkscrew-turned a helicopter past a mountain and driven a motorbike off the side of a cliff. The trailer for the new Mission: Impossible film shows Cruise trapped in a flooding submarine and clinging onto the wing of a careering biplane. Surely he's now the greatest daredevil in the history of cinema? Well, not quite. That title should go to Buster Keaton, the doe-eyed, stoney-faced maverick of the silent film era, whose extraordinary stunts make Tom Cruise look risk-averse. The two stars have a lot in common. They were both obsessed with cinema as the supreme medium for telling stories; both transcended their positions as actors to become the presiding maestros of their films; and both were absolutely committed to performing their own wild, ridiculous stunts – often badly injuring themselves in the process. But while Cruise exploits his stunts for maximum emotional impact, Keaton was studiously undemonstrative, retaining his deadpan expression however surreal his surroundings. Whereas Cruise embeds his action sequences in complicated plots about the end of the world, Keaton contrived action sequences from everyday life. Cruise takes pride in having a superbly athletic body well into his 60s – Keaton just wanted his wiry, diminutive frame (two inches shorter even than Cruise's) to be as damage-proof as possible. It needed to be. Keaton put his body through more than almost any other actor in the history of cinema – only Jackie Chan bears comparison. He launched it through windows and walls, tossed it down waterfalls and between rooftops, raced it away from armies of marauding cattle and furious boulders, attached it to the front of out-of-control motorbikes and steam trains, and pinned it to the back of trams, vans and cars which yanked him along so quickly that his feet left the floor. He was born in 1895 to vaudevillian parents who almost immediately incorporated their son into their act. In fact, baby Keaton once pre-empted their intentions and crawled on-stage to interrupt his parents' performance. His first billing was at 11 months old, and his preternatural talent meant that he was soon listed above his parents on posters for their family's show. But the work itself was (literally) bruising, to say the least. 'My father used to carry me on stage and drop me,' Keaton recalled. 'After explaining to the audience that I liked it, he would pick me up and throw me at a piece of scenery.' Sometimes he would be thrown into the startled audience; once he thumped into a brick wall behind the staging. On another occasion, he flew as far as thirty feet. A popular incarnation of the Keaton family show dubbed Buster 'the human mop' and saw his father literally wipe the stage floor with his son (think Anton du Beke with Ann Widdecombe). Keaton was a vaudevillian by trade but his aspirations lay in Hollywood. A friend put him in contact with Rosco 'Fatty' Arbuckle, a famous silent film actor and impresario, and by the 1920s Keaton was starring in short comedies. 'From the first day on I hadn't a doubt that I was going to love working in the movies… I'd fallen in love with the cameras, with the rushes, the action, the slam-bang – with all of it,' he said. That quote could come from Tom Cruise, who reportedly watches a film every day and fights a one-man war against releasing movies onto streaming services without giving them a proper showing in cinemas first. Making films, says Cruise, 'is not what I do. It's who I am.' Keaton's stunts, like Cruises, were distinctively cinematic. They were of a scale and ingenuity that simply wasn't possible on stage. Look at his wild ride on a driver-less motorbike in Sherlock Jr., or his stroll through a hurricane in Steamboat Bill, Jr., as houses fly into his path and shatter in front of him. Although these sequences were impossible in vaudeville, Keaton retained that tradition's commitment to doing things for real. Cinema gave performers more opportunity for baroque trickery – as when Keaton steps out of the movie screen and goes on an adventure through different film reels in Sherlock Jr. – but it also allowed viewers to see miraculous set-pieces being done with real objects. As Keaton put it: 'The camera allowed you to show your audience the real thing, real trains, horses and wagons, snowstorms, floods.' And so when Keaton appears to crash out of a window, that really is him doing exactly that. 'For a real effect and to convince people that it's on the level, do it on the level.' That's Keaton talking but, again, it may as well be Cruise. When once asked why he insisted on doing his own stunt work, Cruise replied: 'No one asked Gene Kelly 'Why do you do your own dancing?'' Neither star could imagine doing things differently, no matter the cost to their bodies, which looked something like this: Cruise: Broken foot while rock-climbing up an inverted cliff face; broken ankle while jumping between buildings. Keaton: Broken ankle after tumbling down an escalator; sprained ankle after jumping between buildings and rolling down the side of a wall; hugely painful and prolonged inflammation of his elbow after falling from the top of a barn; multiple instances of nearly drowning while filming outrageous water stunts; broken neck after being bombarded with water (nobody even noticed for this particular injury 30 years, during which time Keaton had continued performing uncomplainingly). All this bodily commitment gave both stars unusual influence over their productions. By the mid-1920s Keaton was directing his films as well as acting in them – the critic Roger Ebert called Keaton 'the greatest actor-director in the history of movies'. Meanwhile, Cruise is a hugely involved producer with massive leverage in Hollywood and exceptional authority on set (memorably displayed when he ordered most of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning's crew to leave so that he could swearily berate two members who'd broken Covid restrictions). Keaton's authority was ultimately short-lived. He lost control of his own films to producer extraordinaire Irving Thalberg when he joined MGM and, besides, the coming of the 'talkies' meant that this most silent of silent comedians – who shunned even using intertitles – had a dim future after the introduction of sound. He began to drink heavily and struggled to receive work or recognition towards the end of his life, although he eventually found cinephile admirers in France. He died in 1966, aged 70. Yet Keaton's work has aged extraordinarily well. Its wordless simplicity gives it a direct power that doesn't date – shunning old-timey, 'I say, mister!' intertitles was ultimately a shrewd move – and those ultra-clippable stunts now appear precision-engineered for the TikTok age. (A montage of Keaton's best bits on TikTok has nearly 500,000 likes.) Almost 60 years after his death, we can safely say that the 'human mop' done good. But head-to-head, stunt v stunt, is he really more impressive than Tom Cruise? Cruise versus Keaton: Their best stunts head-to-head Leaps of faith Tom Cruise's rooftop chase scene (Mission: Impossible – Fallout) While filming this leap between buildings near St Paul's in London for Mission Impossible: Fallout, Cruise missed his landing and slammed his up-turned foot against the wall. He 'knew instantly it was broken' and the foot was still healing during the film's press tour. Buster Keaton's building jump (Three Ages, 1923) This jump from Three Ages was also botched – Keaton was originally meant to reach the second building but missed the ledge and fell down the side of the wall. Although there was a safety net to catch him, he bruised himself enough to delay filming. When the shoot re-started, Keaton built the rest of this elaborate sequence around his mistake. Winner: Keaton Swing time Tom Cruise climbs the world's tallest building (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) In Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Cruise's Ethan Hunt sprints down the side of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, before swinging around its sides, and then leaping towards an open window. That's really Cruise 130 floors up in the air, carried only by a single wire. It's stomach-turningly vertiginous cinema, and Cruise's most famous set-piece for a reason. Buster Keaton As the finale of Our Hospitality, Keaton swings to the rescue to grab his girlfriend as she plummets down a waterfall. The waterfall was built as a gigantic set on the Paramount lot, and the girl Keaton catches is a dummy (perhaps obviously, to modern eyes). But Keaton did the stunt for real, getting the final shot on the third take after swallowing a dangerous amount of gushing water on the first two. Winner: Cruise Motorbike madness The biggest stunt in cinema history (Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning) The marketing for Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning billed this as 'the biggest stunt in cinema history'. Cruise drives a motorbike over the edge of a cliff, before free-falling through the air and parachuting towards a steam train. An extraordinary moment, slightly undermined by excessive promotion that reduced its impact in cinemas, and the odd CGI ridge that Cruise speeds up before flying into the air. Buster Keaton The hero of Sherlock Jr, Keaton's masterpiece, ends up perched on the front of a motorbike without a driver, as it speeds through an incredible series of hair-rasing near-misses. Highlights include crossing an unfinished bridge by gliding over a pair of vans that momentarily fill the gap, dodging an incoming train by an inch and – in a potentially jarring tonal shift that Keaton somehow pulls off – flying through the air to kick a sex pest through the wall of a barn. Winner: Keaton Water shows Tom Cruises's explosive fishtank (Mission: Impossible) In the first Mission: Impossible film, Cruise's character smashes the glass of a huge aquarium and then leaps into the street as 16 gallons of water and glass cascade around him. Director Brian De Palma had set the standard for the rest of the franchise, but it says a lot about Cruise's work since that this is far from his most impressive stunt. Buster Keaton In Sherlock Jr., Keaton races across train carriages before grabbing a water spout to lower himself to the ground. In doing so he unleashes a torrent of water onto his head and almost drowns himself. This was the stunt that broke Keaton's neck – not that he noticed until three decades later. Winner: Keaton By a hair's breadth Mission: Impossible's wire heist The defining image of the Mission: Impossible series came in its first instalment. Cruise's character has to infiltrate a CIA vault by dangling from the ceiling – at one point dropping to within millimetres of the ground. 'I kept going down to the floor and bam, I kept hitting my face,' Cruise recalled. But the effort was worth it – the sequence is still the most nail-biting of the franchise. A house falls on Buster Keaton In Steamboat Bill, Jr., the facade of a hurricane-battered house falls onto our protagonist, who has the cosmic good luck to be standing in the perfect spot for an open window to save him. Had Keaton been standing two inches out of place in any direction then the collapsing scenery would likely have killed him. He later recalled that when the wall fell 'two extra women on the sidelines fainted and the cameramen turned their backs as they ground out the film'. One of the most memorable moments in silent cinema and Keaton's apotheosis.
New York Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Doubling Up: How ‘Sinners' and Other Movies Multiply One Actor
This year at the movies, you'd be forgiven for thinking you are seeing double — because you are. Since March there have been three films featuring stars acting opposite themselves. 'Mickey 17' has two versions (at least) of Robert Pattinson as an expendable working grunt on an alien planet in a futuristic world. Robert De Niro played two different mobsters in 'The Alto Knights.' And Michael B. Jordan just made his doubles debut as swaggering twins in Ryan Coogler's 'Sinners,' a vampire movie set in 1930s Mississippi. Having the same actor appear two — or sometimes three or four or more — times onscreen is one of cinema's most enduring tricks. And while the effect has long been a powerful bit of movie magic, the technology has evolved over the years. Here are some of the landmarks. An In-Camera Method to Buster Keaton's Madness The use of doubling goes all the way back to the silent era in this Buster Keaton short in which the protagonist, played by the prodigious physical comedian, dreams himself as every single person in a show — from the band to the audience members. (He also appears in blackface as a minstrel, an upsetting byproduct of the era.) How did Keaton accomplish this? Through masking and double exposure. He and his cameraman Elgin Lessley would cover part of the lens, perform a beat, and then rewind, uncovering the previously masked portion to add another version of himself to the shot. The effect is a wondrous confluence of Keatons all acting at once. Split-Screen High Jinks In many ways, Disney's 1961 caper remains the go-to example of doubling an actor. Hayley Mills plays a pair of twins who conspire to get their divorced parents back together. The split-screen technique sounds almost quaint these days. Mills would perform the scene as one twin opposite her double and then switch clothes and do it all again as the other twin. The camera would have to remain perfectly stable, and nothing on set could be altered between takes. Mills also could not reach out to her scene partner. 'When we were shooting a scene, on pain of death did you cross over the dividing line,' Mills later told Vulture. After shooting, the two strips of film were fed into what was called an optical printer and rephotographed with mattes, which blocked out the sides that didn't feature Mills so that they could be combined. Crossing the Line The cinematographer Dean Cundey remembered seeing 'The Parent Trap' as a child and figuring out the trick. 'I thought, 'Well, that's intriguing but they don't ever cross the line,'' he said in an interview with The New York Times. 'I bet the way they did that was they put two pieces together down the middle.' Though Cundey would later shoot Nancy Meyers's 1998 remake of 'The Parent Trap,' he helped solve the problem on 'Back to the Future Part II,' Robert Zemeckis's sequel to the time travel hit that features actors playing their characters' ancestors and descendants. The solution? The VistaGlide motion control dolly system, developed by the visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic. The technology meant that Cundey could shoot a scene as he normally would, without keeping the camera in a fixed position, and then the computerized dolly would be able to repeat that exactly for the next take when Michael J. Fox would change clothes to play Marty McFly's son, for instance. Motion control also figured into the sequence in which an old Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) hands his younger self a sports almanac as part of a ploy to get rich in the future. While Cundey explained they could have simply had Wilson pass the book out of frame, instead they put it on a motion-controlled robotic arm. 'He would hold the book in one hand and follow across, and then we would cut and he would go get made up and the book would come across and he would grab it and take it,' Cundey said, adding, 'We went the extra step to develop the motion-control arm that passed the book and it never left the audience's sight. Those are the kind of shots that are interesting because they just tell the story.' Following the Feet In Harold Ramis's comedy, Michael Keaton plays an exasperated family man who clones himself so he can get more done. Eventually there are four Michael Keatons onscreen, each with a vastly different personality. The visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund quickly figured that one of the main challenges would be making sure Keaton was making eye contact with himself when the clones were interacting. So Edlund devised a contraption that was essentially a tripod affixed with a pistol scope and a laser that could send information to a computer. For the first take, an operator would use it to follow Keaton's feet. On the second take, Keaton would act opposite a stand-in who would hold a monitor that played Keaton's first take and stand over a laser dot that played back the movements Edlund's device had captured. 'Michael would be talking to the monitor in sync and he had a hearing aid off screen on the other side so you never saw it,' Edlund said in an interview. When Keaton had to cross in front of himself, they used pieces of green screen on the set. Meanwhile, throughout production, a team was stationed in a trailer creating composites of the takes so Ramis could get a sense of what the final product would look like. Facebook Face Swap 'I'm 6'5, 220 and there's two of me.' That line spoken by Armie Hammer as one of the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher's 'The Social Network' is also indicative of what Fincher had to accomplish in the film to bring the imposing Harvard bros to life. Instead of casting actual twins, Fincher chose Hammer and another actor, Josh Pence. But Pence's face is never seen onscreen. Instead, Fincher scanned Hammer and Pence's visages with a medical-grade laser and digitally replaced Pence's face with Hammer's. 'It was really motion-capture acting in a way,' Pence told The Huffington Post in 2020. A Cigarette Pass and a Camera 'Halo' On 'Sinners,' Ryan Coogler not only wanted to turn Michael B. Jordan into Depression-era twins named Smoke and Stack, he wanted to do so on 65-millimeter IMAX film. 'There are a lot of extra challenges that come with the 65-millimeter film,' the visual effects supervisor Michael Ralla said. 'Not only is it the resolution — how big the negative is — but with that there's interesting challenges where the film is warping as it's being pulled through the camera, and then it's being pulled through the scanner again. Compared to digital photography where you have a perfectly stable frame, there's a lot of movement that we need to make sure is consistent across the frame.' The filmmakers developed what Ralla and the visual effects producer James Alexander called a matrix to decide how exactly they were going to double Jordan for each particular moment. In some cases that meant simple over the shoulder shots, in others it meant using a techno dolly, essentially a more advanced version of the VistaGlide. Their standout innovation was what they called the halo. It's a rig that sat on Jordan's shoulders with 12 cameras that could capture anything he did with his head. They could then use those images to replace a double's noggin with Jordan's. Still, one of the most impressive moments of twinning in the movie is all Jordan. Early in the film, Stack hands Smoke a cigarette. Jordan intensely rehearsed the moves of both characters with a body double, and then would swap places during the shoot. 'We had a little pole that would show where the cigarette handover had to happen,' Ralla said. 'They knew how to touch that pole that was digitally removed later and the two were combined.' The action took a long time to get right, but Ralla said it was worth it because of how it shows Jordan's characterization of the twins. 'All the body movement, all the mannerisms, all the body language is established so well already and we weren't able to see it during the shoot yet,' Ralla said.
