The Woes of Roller Skates (1908)
** (out of 4)
aka Les Patineurs
A group of people attend a show where the highlight is a couple people doing tricks on roller skates. It looks easy enough so the group all buy roller skates and take them home where it doesn't take long for stuff to get broken from all the falls. This here really appears to be another later day film where the director was trying to expand the running time and fit the need for longer movies. At just 7-minutes this is still quite short by today's standards but back when this was released the French director was going from shorter movies to these here, which ran a bit longer. Sure, Melies had epic, longer running films throughout his career but for those he actually had a story to tell. With this film, and several others, it really does feel like a one joke movie that could have worked within a few minutes but when you stretch it out it just becomes flat. The "comedy" of seeing an obese fan trying to roller skate was mildly amusing but overall the film is lacking any real laughs. There are bits and pieces just thrown in for no reason and it appears the only purpose was to expand the running time. This is far from a bad movie but it's no where near a good one from Melies.