Just perfect...

Best movie of this year hands down!

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

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.

. . . 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.

Actually, there are only a few minutes of Buster Keaton and the big hot-air balloon in this 22-minute movie. Most of it is Buster and Phyllis Haver out in country, separately, canoeing and having adventures fishing and hunting. In the end, they get together for a few scenes including a "cute" ending with some waterfalls. Overall, it's okay but nothing hilarious. Most of the gags are very loosely connected, but that's not unusual for a short silent comedy film. Buster provides most of the laughs but Haver, a new female face not seen by me before in a Keaton film, is not a bad comedienne. I watched this right after a much faster-paced Keaton short ("Neighbors") so this looked a little slow in comparison.

Here, Buster Keaton accidentally gets on top of a hot-air balloon. When he shoots himself out of the sky, he lands near a stream filled with fish. Also, there is a young woman camping nearby. Funny scenes follow, which contain, among other things, bears, burning canoes, and waterfalls. See this film because it is yet another one that displays Keaton's mechanical ingenuity. Surely, you will also find it quite humorous.