Word: chaplinitis
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...little, are tossed out indiscriminately ("best comedy of the year" in February). A reference to the new decade always sounds impressive ("the love story of the '90s"). Gary Franklin, of Los Angeles' KCOP-TV, grades films on a 1-to-10 scale that can no longer contain his ecstasy. Chaplin and Alive! recently got a 10+, and Beauty and the Beast even managed an 11. Pat Collins, who reviews for New Jersey's WWOR-TV, gushes that Falling Down is "the first real movie of the '90s," thus raising the question of what she considered A Few Good Men (other...
...addition to Dempsey and Fraser, "With Honors," due out next winter, will star Josh Hamilton, who is currently starring in "Alive" and Moira Kelly, who appears in "Chaplin...
...Must Make an Epic, Be Sure You Have the Right Subject. Genius is one- tenth inspiration and nine-tenths obsession. Chaplin makes you think it is ten-tenths passivity, a matter of landing in the right place at the right time. So Richard Attenborough's film breaks new ground. Instead of casting Charlie Chaplin in an unnaturally heroic mold, it makes him a distracted twit who wanders through his life as if it belonged to someone else...
...sentimentality (of which his passion for underage girls was the most obvious, least agreeable part), his pretense to intellectuality, the torments of his vast celebrity -- are only vaguely alluded to. These are tough topics, wrong for the form (and indulgent attitude) Attenborough has chosen. Robert Downey Jr., who plays Chaplin, might have been up to them, but this episodic film gives him only cautious scenes, not an incautious character, to play...
...dances with his Aunt Sheila.) He wins over the audience, even getting them to stand and sit in an approximation of the human wave that could pass muster on a bad night at Shea Stadium. He mimes a debate between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, offers a tribute to Charlie Chaplin set to Tchaikovsky and, in general, plays on the small-world theme. "I was raised thinking you were the enemy," he tells the Russian audience. "You were raised thinking I was the enemy. We were both wrong. ((Pause.)) It's the French...