I’ve always loved this blessed last week of the year. It’s a week free of the calendar–no day has any significance since almost everything but basic services is closed, nobody’s at work and it’s not even a holiday. Truly a lost week–a wonderful, liberating and rare occurrence. For several years now, to celebrate this week of ethereal otherness, I’ve posted silent Laurel and Hardy shorts of the mid-to-late 1920s. Why these movies strike me as peculiarly appropriate to the general air of the last week of the year is beyond me. Perhaps seeing Stan and Ollie minus their voices gives these movies a not quite real feeling. Their voices were so distinctive and so much a part of them as characters that you feel their loss–one almost wants to yell at the screen “speak up!”. But the silent L&H also belong to another world–one without calendar–a world that took these two comic geniuses into its hearts even without Stan’s innocent limey accent and Ollie’s strident and irritable southern-tinged delivery. Above is ‘Two Tars’, one of their greatest silents and as meticulous a piece of comic filmmaking as ever was made. Enjoy…