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DVD Modern Times (2 Disc Special Edition)
Charlie Chaplin is in glorious form in this legendary satire of the mechanized world. As a factory worker driven bonkers by the soulless momentum of work, Chaplin executes a series of slapstick routines around machines, including a memorable encounter with an automatic feeding apparatus. The pantomime is triumphant, but Chaplin also draws a lively relationship between the Tramp and a street gamine. She's played by Paulette Goddard, then Chaplin's wife and probably his best leading lady (here and in The Great Dictator). The film's theme gave the increasingly ambitious writer-director a chance to speak out about social issues, as well as indulging in the bittersweet quality of pathos that critics were already calling "Chaplinesque." In 1936, Chaplin was still holding out against spoken dialogue in films, but he did use a synchronized soundtrack of sound effects and his own music, a score that includes one of his most famous melodies, "Smile." And late in the film, Chaplin actually does speak--albeit in a garbled gibberish song, a rebuke to modern times in talking pictures. --Robert Horton
Review(s): DVD Modern Times (2 Disc Special Edition)
Wonderful Wonderful Wonderful
A brilliant movie. Painstakingly made. Wonderful humor, stunts, pathos and social commentary. The tramp is an intrepid little bum as he stumbles from job to jail and jail to job. He subverts and mocks authority and technology just by being an innocent clumsy fool. A great companion piece to the other Chaplin masterpieces, The Gold Rush and City Lights.
Awful, awful, awful
Almost everyone who has reviewed this film gave it 5 stars, and the lowest it got from anyone was 4. Well, too bad.
This is a dreadful film.
I laughed about 4 times during the whole thing. A lot of predictable, obvious, unclever slapstick, and awful lot of it really contrived or just stupid (I longed for death during the interminable scene where he goes round and round the dance floor carrying the tray).
But the worst part of all was the "social commentary" aspect. This film is pure luditism. In a nutshell, Chaplin couldn't handle the fact that technology-- talkies-- was displacing him and his silent movie approach, and so he railed against all technology. NINE YEARS after talkies came in, he's still stubbornly clinging to silents; apparently these "talking pictures" are just a fad. It's the most pathetic of crusades.
Oh, and it's not hard to see why people thought Chaplin was a communist. The character of the owner of the steel mill might as well have lept off the pages of Marx himself, he's such a grotesque caricature of a capitalist, sitting around doing jigsaw puzzles, reading comics, and yelling at the proletariat to work faster.
Happily, for the most part, the movie doesn't maintain this virulently anti-capitalistic tone. But its attempt to capture the pathos of the depression is itself pathetic. When the factory reopens, Chaplin exclaims "Work at last!"-- but the reality is that he's already had THREE jobs during the movie, and he lost ALL of them through his own incompentence, not because of the depression. The great moral stance that this movie takes is that it glorifies bunglers and thieves.
Let it not be said, though, that I found nothing good in the film. Chaplin's stunt work (I assume that was actually him) in the blindfolded rollerskating scene is mindbogglingly good. Truely remarkable. I'd gladly trade the whole rest of the film for just that scene.
Modern Times
More a silent film with sound than a sound film-- and replete with Chaplins signature visual gags and set pieces-- this title works as initial exposure to Chaplin for kids, with Goddard an adorable foil.
Related DVD's Modern Times (2 Disc Special Edition)
City Lights is a film to pick for the time capsule, a film that best represents the many aspects of director-writer-star Charlie Chaplin at the peak of his powers: Chaplin the actor, the sentimentalist, the knockabout clown, the ballet dancer, the athlete, the lover, the tragedian, the fool. It's all contained in Chaplin's simple story of a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill). Chaplin elevates the Victorian contrivances of the plot to something glorious with his inventive use of pantomime and his sure grasp of how the Tramp relates to the audience. In 1931, it was a gamble for Chaplin to stick with silence after talking pictures had killed off the art form that had made him famous, but audiences flocked to City Lights anyway. (Chaplin would... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Virginia Cherrill Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 02 March 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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After the box-office failure of his first dramatic film, A Woman of Paris, Charlie Chaplin brooded over his ensuing comedy. "The next film must be an epic!" he recalled in his autobiography. "The greatest!" He found inspiration, paradoxically, in stories of the backbreaking Alaskan gold rush and the cannibalistic Donner Party. These tales of tragedy and endurance provided Chaplin with a rich vein of comic possibilities. The Little Tramp finds himself in the Yukon, along with a swarm of prospectors heading over Chilkoot Pass (an amazing sight restaged by Chaplin in his opening scenes, filmed in the snowy Sierra Nevadas). When the Tramp is trapped in a mountain cabin with two other fortune hunters, Chaplin stages a veritable ballet of starvation, culminating in the cooking of a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Since Adolf Hitler had the audacity to borrow his mustache from the most famous celebrity in the world--Charlie Chaplin--it meant Hitler was fair game for Chaplin's comedy. (Strangely, the two men were born within four days of each other.) The Great Dictator, conceived in the late thirties but not released until 1940, when Hitler's war was raging across Europe, is the film that skewered the tyrant. Chaplin plays both Adenoid Hynkel, the power-mad ruler of Tomania, and a humble Jewish barber suffering under the dictator's rule. Paulette Goddard, Chaplin's wife at the time, plays the barber's beloved; and the rotund comedian Jack Oakie turns in a weirdly accurate burlesque of Mussolini, as a bellowing fellow dictator named Benzino Napaloni, Dictator of Bacteria. Chaplin himself hits... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Chaplin - Paulette Goddard Director(s): Charles Chaplin DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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A pivotal moment in film history. After The Birth of a Nation, nothing was the same: not the way audiences watched movies, not the way filmmakers created them. D.W. Griffith's jumbo-size saga of the Civil War expanded the boundaries of storytelling on the screen, conveying a richer, more complicated (and certainly longer) tale than anyone had seen in a movie before. The delicate relationships, the sad passage of time, the spectacular battle scenes all look as fresh and innovative today as they did in 1915. So do Griffith's brilliant actors, most of them--including favorite leading lady Lillian Gish--drawn from his regular stock company. What has become increasingly problematic about The Birth of a Nation is Griffith's condescending attitude toward black slaves, and the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lillian Gish - Mae Marsh - Henry B. Walthall Director(s): D.W. Griffith DVD Release Date: Released the 17 November 1998 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and can't be known easily. Welles plays newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane, taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. The result is that every well-meaning or tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event. Written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz, and photographed by Gregg Toland, the film is the sum of Welles's awesome ambitions as an artist in Hollywood. He pushes the limits of... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Joseph Cotten - Orson Welles Director(s): Orson Welles DVD Release Date: Released the 25 September 2001 Usually ships in 24 hours
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