boblipton

Brother-in-law William Gillespie leaves his baby and toddler with newlyweds Harold Lloyd and Mildred Davis. They find them more than a handful.

Children were obviously on Lloyd's mind; he had married Miss Davis in February, although their first child would not show up until 1924. But producer-director Hal Roach also had children on the mind, and was already in production of the OUR GANG series.

Like many a comedy in this period, this is divided in two parts: in the first, we get to watch Harold and Mildred try to deal with the children; in the second, fearful of burglars, the two wander the house. Unfortunately, the two parts fit together poorly and this was cut from three reels to two after initial release. Still, the restored three-reel version has plenty of gags, with a goodly number of them funny.

When the sheriff is killed by outlaws, they bring back his predecessor. Too bad for the crooks it's Harry Carey.

Despite Carey's solid presence, it's not a very good movie, even for a B western. I suspect that it being written and directed by Harry Fraser explains that pretty well, but it's also the issues that go with the sort of movie that would hire Fraser as a director. It proceeds at a crawl, thanks to the sort of pacing that requires people to walk front the front of a yard to the door rather than cutting to save time and improve the pace. In addition, the poverty is shown by the obvious lack of retakes. Carey says a line poorly, and Fraser didn't think it required a retake.

Even Carey's usual mild and mildly self-deprecating humor doesn't do much to lift this production up. He may have been Universal's big western star twenty years earlier, but now, working on Poverty Row, his productions were not good. Fortunately for him, he had already begun his transformation into a character star and would continue to delight audiences for another decade until his death in 1947 at the age of 69.

Robert Pattinson is Mickey. He has to get off Earth fast, so he signs up for a colonizing expedition to a planet called Nifleheim. And because he has no skills, he volunteers to be an expendable: when you need someone to do something that might result in their death, you use him. And, with technology that has been banned on Earth and if in very limited use in colonies, he is, as they say, reprinted, with all his memories. This has happened 16 times, and he's very tired of people asking him what it's like to die. It looks like death #17 for him, as he has been trapped in an ice cavern filled with the giant hairy pillbugs that seem to be the largest native life form. He's abandoned, but the creatures don't eat him. Instead, they roll him out, back to where the colonists have set up, and he makes his way back in. Only to find there's another copy of him. Which is illegal.

There's a lot more going on, and it's good that director Bong Joon Ho has enough respect for his audience that he has borrowed several subplots from Edward Ashton's novel, Mickey 7. There's a love affair with Naomie Ackie which has him constantly puzzled, there's the questions of whether the hairy pillbugs are worthy of our respect, and there's a lot of religious and political cult satire, as Mark Ruffalo goes outside his star persona to play a stupid politician who's in charge of the expedition, and Toni Collette Ruffalo's equally deranged wife.

Several scenes hint at a far greater psychological complexity in the novel that are unexplored, but that's certainly all right. Movies are more about what people do than what they think. However, there will certainly be a tendency to reduce the movie's complexity to one or two points: that it's against, say, imperialism, full stop. Or it's against the cult of personality, full stop. Or it's for a more expandsive definition of humanity, full stop. Just because science fiction, like other non-mimetic fiction, can be used to reduce the issues under discussion to their essentials does not mean you can't talk about more than one thing at a time. And this movie does.