I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Fantastic!

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Blistering performances.

This Lumiere piece from 1896 is just a series of gags as a man tries to mount a horse and keeps failing -- not high enough, leaping over the horse and so forth. It's a fairly standard bit of clowning and I'm sure it still goes on at rodeos and dude ranches. Even given the short length of Lumiere pieces, it seems to go on a bit long.As with all the Lumiere shorts, the composition is impeccable -- although given that you've got a horse there that you wish to fit into the frame, that's not much of a challenge. The horse stands still for all these hi-jinks -- my guess is that it was a circus horse and trained to put up with this sort of nonsense.