When it comes to silent cinema, I don't have much experience with it. But thanks mostly in part to a friend of mine for introducing me to "Metropolis" about a couple years ago (Now one of my favorite films of all time), I've always wanted to see more.

So I figured after reviewing nothing recent works, I'd take a step back in time to talk about some forms of film I've always wanted to get a better eye on, and what better way to start then with what many would probably call the master of silent cinema, Charlie Chaplin?

"Modern Times" marks my first impressions with the man, and they're fairly good you could say. It follows him as a…

I should start this review with these lines: “A tramp more shining than a lamp – Is all I thought since I was kid – More polite than any kind; more clean and honest and truth than any elegant gentleman dressed with fancy hat and using long canes for his roaring period; a poor man with gentle soul under the light of the cities. A noble man. -- My plan was to write this after watching City Lights. And I DM to my friend and I message to him: “look, what I wrote right now…” and he said to me “great lines” – But, I decided to not review City Lights (I love but I’m not so familiar with it.…

I love animated films, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with them, but I remember when my daughter exclusively watched only that genre at a very young age and I was thinking to myself, at what point can I show her more? When will she be ready to explore cinema beyond talking animals and snappy songs?

While she has been beyond that point for a while now, something happened the other day while watching the Charlie Chaplin masterpiece Modern Times that I was not anticipating. There I am, lying on the couch mesmerized by the film when I realized I wasn't alone. Not in the literal sense, I knew the soon to be seven year old was sitting across the…

Decades Project: 2/3 of the 30's

Listen, I'll be honest: I don't know much about comedy. I don't know what makes things funny. All I know is that Charlie Chaplin makes me laugh. A lot. And here he's made another masterpiece to go along with City Lights and The Great Dictator.

What makes Chaplin's films so great is that they make you think just as much as they make you laugh. Modern Times is interesting not only for its satire of modern working conditions (the constant stress of the workplace vs. the relaxed paradise of the jail) and the unseen remainder of capitalist excess (floating through the machines), but also for Chaplin's depiction of the voice as object. As a…

The most iconic image from Modern Times is the Tramp caught in the cogs of the machinery, having gone deranged. The metaphor here is all too literal; the Tramp has been integrating into a mechanised system to the point that he lost his personal sense of morality, ethic and sensibility, taken over by conditioned impulse, in a system that does not understand his humanity - nor does it care to. This image emerges from the Great Depression era in the U.S, after the initial shock of modernity and industrialisation had pretty much entirely settled in society. This image and scene more generally takes a step into what would have been the norm, literal falling into the belly of the beast…