Word: chaplinitis
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most technological entertainment medium in history is movies, as anybody can surmise from seeing the small army of technicians on a sound stage or location. Technology gave the silents a voice in 1927 (though some of the great silent performers, such as Charlie Chaplin, took their time about speaking), but more important, it enabled film to refine its unique visual language...
...American town in the late 1910s, stood the life-size cardboard figure of a small tramp--outfitted in tattered, baggy pants, a cutaway coat and vest, impossibly large, worn-out shoes and a battered derby hat--bearing the inscription I AM HERE TODAY. An advertisement for a Charlie Chaplin film was a promise of happiness, of that precious, almost shocking moment when art delivers what life cannot, when experience and delight become synonymous, and our investments yield the fabulous, unmerited bonanza we never get past expecting...
Eighty years later, Chaplin is still here. In a 1995 worldwide survey of film critics, Chaplin was voted the greatest actor in movie history. He was the first, and to date the last, person to control every aspect of the filmmaking process--founding his own studio, United Artists, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, and producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring and editing the movies he starred in. In the first decades of the 20th century, when weekly moviegoing was a national habit, Chaplin more or less invented global recognizability and helped turn an industry into...
Five years ago, Robert Downey Jr. enjoyed the Academy Awards from a choice orchestra seat in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, honored as a Best Actor nominee for his acclaimed performance in the biopic Chaplin. During last month's ceremony his vantage point wasn't quite so glamorous: he watched the show on television through steel bars at the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail, where he was serving time for violating probation after testing positive for drugs...
...small movie roles until a season-long stint on Saturday Night Live served as a springboard into "brat-pack" films in the mid-'80s. The brilliance he displayed in such roles as the druggy Gen-Xer in 1987's Less Than Zero and later in his portrayal of Charlie Chaplin deepened the tragedy as he began spiraling down into a cycle of drug arrests, jail sentences and relapses...