My main reason for watching 'The Slippery Pearls' (or 'The Stolen Jools') was for comedic geniuses Stan Laurel and Oliver Laurel in my project of watching all their filmography other than the ones already watched. Also like a lot of the celebrities featured here and the title was appetising.
While by no means a misfire, 'The Slippery Pearls' was something of a disappointment. It is a long way from awful with enough enjoyable elements to make it watchable. It is just very difficult to rate, have not seen much recently that has conflicted me more than 'The Slippery Pearls', mostly have found myself loving something, liking something with reservations, not caring for something though with its moments and hating something but this is a case of neither being the case.
'The Slippery Pearls' is moderately fun. There were a lot of familiar faces and some are delightful. Especially Edward G. Robinson, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy (the funniest). Parts are very amusing and well timed, also easy to recognise.
It looks good and 'The Slippery Pearls' is seldom dull.
However, for a celebrity-guess-who effort to work it is kind of essential to be familiar with everybody featured. Unfortunately there were some unfamiliar faces so their material was lost on me on top of not being particularly funny in the first place. Got the sense that 'The Slippery Pearls' was too short for so many celebrities being featured, and also the sense of there being too many faces and their appearances often being far too brief.
The story is paper thin with a nice premise but not enough story content. It felt more like an excuse to include as many celebrities as possible, maybe to cover up that there was little to the story. The direction is far from amateur but it's uninspired and undistinguished, the appearances that do work are down to that those that appear are too good at what they do.
Overall, difficult to rate but interesting curio, curiosity value being the main reason to see it. 5/10 Bethany Cox
While by no means a misfire, 'The Slippery Pearls' was something of a disappointment. It is a long way from awful with enough enjoyable elements to make it watchable. It is just very difficult to rate, have not seen much recently that has conflicted me more than 'The Slippery Pearls', mostly have found myself loving something, liking something with reservations, not caring for something though with its moments and hating something but this is a case of neither being the case.
'The Slippery Pearls' is moderately fun. There were a lot of familiar faces and some are delightful. Especially Edward G. Robinson, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy (the funniest). Parts are very amusing and well timed, also easy to recognise.
It looks good and 'The Slippery Pearls' is seldom dull.
However, for a celebrity-guess-who effort to work it is kind of essential to be familiar with everybody featured. Unfortunately there were some unfamiliar faces so their material was lost on me on top of not being particularly funny in the first place. Got the sense that 'The Slippery Pearls' was too short for so many celebrities being featured, and also the sense of there being too many faces and their appearances often being far too brief.
The story is paper thin with a nice premise but not enough story content. It felt more like an excuse to include as many celebrities as possible, maybe to cover up that there was little to the story. The direction is far from amateur but it's uninspired and undistinguished, the appearances that do work are down to that those that appear are too good at what they do.
Overall, difficult to rate but interesting curio, curiosity value being the main reason to see it. 5/10 Bethany Cox