Charles Spencer Chaplin, What a nice name

Apr 01, 2004 16:59

This entire post is about Charlie Chaplin. For those of you who are not fans of film or are uninterested, you've been warned, hah.

Terry: I thought you hated the theater?
Calvero: I also hate the sight of blood, but it's in my veins.

Calvero: That's all any of us are: amateurs. We don't live long enough to be anything else.

Above are two of my favorite quotes from "Limelight," one of Chaplin's last movies. It's the end of the month and yesterday was the last day of that Chaplin thing on TCM. They showed the movie Limelight (Amongst other titles) and I really enjoyed it. It's definitely one of my favorite Chaplin movies. I think it's one that he put a lot of himself into.

After having watched countless documentaries about him and movies by him, I can say I'm a bigger fan then I was before. Although he had his flaws, he was still a brilliant man with a hell of a lot of guts, (I didn't realize how tough it must have been to make "The Great Dictator" and hear people say that the picture would ruin his career... It ended up being Chaplin's highest grossing film.)

Another thing I loved about him was, no matter what, Chaplin always knew how to end a film. I must have watched the ending of "The Circus" seven or eight times when I recorded it last week. Everyone drives off and he's just sitting alone. He finds a paper that had been ripped at the beginning of the movie when someone doing a stunt, jumped through a hoop with that same piece of paper stretched over it. The tramp (Chaplin's character) picks up the paper looks around for a bit, not really knowing where he's going to go next and, as if he's putting his experience away into his mind as just another memory, he crumples up the paper, throws it up, kicks it, and walks away.

I think a big reason why people identified with Chaplin's characters so much was because they never quite fit anywhere. They never fit into any part of society. He almost always ended up alone, wandering, trying to get by, or trying to find his place.

I think at this point, probably my favorite movies by him (although, I like all of them) were The Kid, City Lights (which has a great ending. One that everyone loved so much, it's probably one of the most famous of his endings, really heart breaking, but wonderful), The Great Dictator, and Limelight.

A big debate over the years has been, who was the better comedian? Chaplin, or Buster Keaton. Now, I love them both (Although I'm a bigger Chaplin fan. The way he moved, it was unlike anyone else, it was baletic and natural... I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, it was just, different) but I must say, one of the best moments in cinema was when you found both of them on a stage at the same time, performing in Limelight together.

Hah, I really did love "Limelight." so much that I felt the need to discuss Chaplin for paragraphs here. That movie got to me. It was as if he was exposing himself in ways you'd never expect. His character actually has a nightmare at one point that had been a reoccurring nightmare of Chaplin's. At those moments when he’s relaying his wisdom on life, you really get the sense that Chaplin’s coming to terms with where he is in his life at that moment or maybe coming to terms with where it might end up going. It was really a wonderful picture.

Hah, sorry I went on about this. It's probably only mildly interesting to people who are fan's of Chaplin's work and confusing to everyone else, hah. Not to mention the fact that there is absolutly no transition between each idea... sorry about that :). It's just, watching that movie last night, it really got me. It just really got me.
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