The Balloonatic (1923)

It is a performances centric movie

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Buster Keaton is at an amusement park. First he's in the House of Trouble and then he gets slapped in a tunnel ride. He finds a large balloon. The balloon gets loose and he gets taken for a ride. He tries his hand at duck hunting and shoots his own balloon. He crash lands and tries to do some fishing. He gets into a constant fight with a woman fishing until they run into a bear.I really laughed when he brought out the duck decoys. It would have been better for Keaton to extend the balloon ride. That is fun and something different. Once he gets on land, the story isn't quite as much fun. It's interesting to have the bear but that's to see if he's getting bit or not. I really the balloon but it's far too short.

"The Balloonatic" opens with what I believe is the most beautiful shots of all Keaton's films. The short opens at "The House of Trouble" a fun house which I find amusing, among other things, at telling how less litigious early 20th century America was. Despite the rather death-defying drop as the exit, there are no mile-long warning signs, (which we in 21st America would recognize) and it apparently hasn't been closed down, or, I bet, the owner sued for incurred injuries. I also found it refreshing that for once, Buster set his romantic eye on a curvy girl instead of the svelte jazz babies he usually longs for. The rest of the story deals with Buster vs the outdoors and the heart of a fair maid and ends with a lushly, surreal romantic image.

. . . in a not-so-beautiful balloon. In this short, Buster Keaton plays "The Young Man"--also referred to (ironically?) as "The Prince" on one mid-film title card--who turns out to be a serial womanizer. The young man also is blessed with remarkably good luck, as he proceeds from mishap to mishap at a frenetic pace, coming out of it no worse for wear (unless you count the black eye he receives off-camera from doing who knows what to a stranger lady in the tunnel-of-love-type boat ride). Oh, the humanity, the humanity!--if the young man had just been on the Hindenburg the following decade, it's doubtful lightning could have struck. A decade earlier, he would have saved the Titanic by just being in steerage. With the luck and pluck displayed by the title character of THE BALLOONATIC, the possibilities are endless. Whether threatened by the ladies, bulls, bears, squirrels, or the raging abyss of a waterfall, this character leads a charmed life. Too bad for him that personal podcast cameras were not around in 1923, since showing just a few of his lucky escapes to his potential dates should prove him a worthy suitor, just on the basis of his being a human-sized rabbit's foot.

This is not one of Buster Keaton's best short features, but it has some good moments. Most of the gags are of good quality, and most of the sequences work well enough. The main thing it really lacks is that, unlike most of Buster's movies, it never really builds on itself or gets much momentum. In his best features, the setting and story help make the decent gags very funny and the good gags hilarious.Buster becomes "The Balloonatic" when he is trying to help a balloonist prepare his craft, and it accidentally takes off with Buster on top of the balloon. He winds up in the wilderness, where he and a young woman that he meets (Phyllis Haver) have to fend for themselves.Although this one doesn't fit together quite as well as his best comedies, being mostly a series of only loosely-connected gags, some of them are very good in themselves. If nothing else, it has enough that it should probably be of interest at least to those who are already Keaton fans.