hyped garbage

A Surprisingly Unforgettable Movie!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

This film from February 1904 is from the Biograph Company (or American Mutoscope and Biograph Company). It has a series of posters plastered on a fence or wall with one poster torn open and a real or live woman standing in the space. Enough of the torn poster remains (probably intentionally) to reveal the name Rose Sydell. Upon research I discovered Rose Sydell(1865-1941) was a real person and a American burlesque perfomer. She is probably the live woman in the poster frame black space filling in the torn part. Thats the joke on the audience to see if they know Rose Sydell when they saw her. As others have described some people walk past the poster. First a young woman and her mother with the young woman being led away by the ear. Next a husband and wife with the wife continuing on walking and the husband scrutinizing the poster which seemingly blows a kiss at him. Before the husband can analyze further the wife returns and leads him away by the ear.

Like most of the early films, scoring this one is a serious problem. At only about a minute and a half, it's just not possible to adequately score this."Kiss Me" is an oddly named film because there is no kiss anywhere in the film! It is clearly poorly named.The film consists of one joke. There are a bunch of posters and one is clearly NOT a real poster but has a live lady standing inside the frame pretending to be a printed poster. However, when one man passes, the lady inside the poster turns her head slightly to follow him. He is baffled and begins to wonder if there is something wrong with his eyes. As for his jealous wife, she catches him heavily scrutinizing the poster and drags him off by his ear. All in all, mildly interesting at best… and I kept waiting for the kissing to start.

I had to read the plot summary on the IMDb site to figure out what was going on in this one-minute film from American Mutoscope & Biograph. Apparently the woman on the poster - who is quite clearly a real woman and not a painting on a wall - is winking at the old boy who spends so much time examining her. What is going on with the young girl who is dragged away from the poster by the ear by her mother a little earlier I'm not at all sure. Perhaps when the film was new, and projected onto a large screen, the details were clearer, but a lack of discernible detail 105 years later means that it doesn't really make a lot of sense.