ryanmalesevich

8/10

One Week is a delightfully charming film with a simple but premise that is an encapsulation of the time. It's no longer possible to order a house from the Sears-Catalog and put it together, but it's a wonderful backdrop to Buster Keaton's first independent two reeler. Essentially, things don't go quite as planned after the instructions are tampered with from a rejected suitor to the bride. The couple does their best but as the days tick by, crazier and crazier things happen to the house. When it got to the third day I didn't know where they could take the visual gags because it was already insane, but somehow they did it. There were multiple times that I got some serious chuckles. The entire scene with moving their deformed house was great. Keaton played with expectations with the train gag, and truthfully it caught me off-guard and I laughed pretty hard. Ultimately, I think it's a wonderful introduction to Buster Keaton. I loved the physicality of his performance, but ultimately what I liked the most was reading about the development. Today, special effects are handled through CGI but in 1920 they had to come up with creative ways to film the scenes. I appreciate both, but I don't think we see enough of the practical effects and the scale of One Week was satisfying.

drqshadow

8/10

Evidently a direct satire of a then well-known Ford Motor Company advertisement (build your own prefab house in just seven days), Buster Keaton's _One Week_ works just as well with no prior knowledge of the source. It follows a hapless bride and groom, newlyweds fresh from the chapel, who are gifted just such a boxed home and proceed to naïvely plow into every roadblock and pitfall imaginable. Not that the couple is free of blame - their approach to every problem is fundamentally backwards - but a few mean-spirited bits of sabotage from a jilted suitor certainly do them no favors. It's a natural playground for Keaton, who creatively misuses every step of the construction process: failing to secure load-bearing walls, blindly feeling his way up a ladder with a brick chimney over his head, sprinting through a second-story doorway into thin air, lazily failing to properly install carpeting over the floorboards. The problems persist even after the dwelling is complete, with a harsh windstorm revealing every shortcut to unsuspecting housewarming guests, and yet the stakes rise still higher from there. The climax, a literal runaway house rumbling towards a busy set of train tracks, serves as a prime example of Keaton's gigantic, ludicrously ambitious sense of scale. Go big or go home, the saying says, and Buster really went for it this time, stretching his luck so thin he was laid up in a doctor's office before the end of production. This wouldn't be the last time.