Change Your Image
jchokey
Reviews
Rafter Romance (1933)
A cute romantic comedy and an odd historical document
This is a cute romantic comedy from the 30's. An enterprising landlord arranges to rent the same top-floor apartment to a man who has a night job and a woman (played by a young Ginger Rogers) who has a day job. He lives/sleeps there during the day; she does during the night. The two protagonists don't actually know each other, except through the increasingly hostile notes that they leave to each other about the upkeep of the apartment. (It starts off with mild stuff like "Clean up the sink after you shave", and gets increasingly angry from thereon.) Eventually the two become bitter enemies, even though they have never met in person-- or so they think. As one might predict, it just so happens that the two meet and fall in love in the course of their lives outside the apartment-- and they don't realize that they are actually in love with their despised 'roommate' until the very end.
Though hardly classic cinema, this is certainly a cute and entertaining comic romance. Also, it has a couple of curious bits of cultural history built into it. The first is that Ginger Roger's character is a telemarketer-- and this is, to my knowledge, the first representation of that very modern profession in the cinema. The second is that there's a very strange reference to Nazism in the film. At one point, the landlord's somewhat dim-witted son draws a swastika on one of the doors as he's heard it means 'good luck'. The landlord (who, like is son, is clearly meant to be Jewish) is of course, furious. The odd thing is that this little incident was obviously intended to be funny (though I think most contemporary viewers will find it jarring or troubling). I think that just shows that this movie was made at during the narrow period of time when Nazism's anti-semitism was known in the U.S., but could still serve as a foil for laughter; it had not yet been recognized as the truly terrible force that it really was. As such, that makes this movie a curious historical artifact as well.
Eat (1964)
Incredibly funny!
I had never thought much of Andy Warhol as a filmmaker. The thought of watching a motionless movie of the Empire State Building (his movie Empire) or of watching somebody eat (this one) something just seemed to me to be pointless, pretentious and tedious. But then again-- I had never actually seen one of his films. This was just an opinion based on what I had heard about them.
However, a few years ago, I was visiting the Andy Warhol museum in Pittsburgh and I happened to stumble across _Eat_ playing in the cinema room. And then-- I got it! This stuff is supposed to be funny, amusing, and playful-- not taken with high church seriousness! Or at least _Eat_ is. Watching the guy in the movie take 30 minutes to eat an apple (or a peach or whatever it was) sounds like it should be tedious, but it's not. In truth, it was actually one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. He takes a bite, he chews, he chews, he chews, he pauses, he chews some more, he looks at the apple again, chews some more, swallows-- no, he's still chewing.... Yeah, it sounds really dull to hear me describe it like that.... but really, if you actually watch it, it's incredibly comical. The other two people who came out of the movie room when it was over were also in hysterics. I know it sounds crazy, absurd, and unbelievable-- but this movie really is incredibly funny. You have to watch it to see why, though.... it really just can't be communicated in words.