Word: chaplinitis
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...prints and drawings of Charlie Chaplin, jazz musicians and dancers, because of their lack of message or commentary, fall flat when contrasted to the powerful images and criticism that make the rest of the exhibit interesting. The "Popular Culture" pieces only detract from the otherwise cohesive display...
...finds a neighbor artlessly attempting an abortion, she helps out. Word gets around, and soon she is a successful businesswoman. And the perfect homebody: she performs abortions in the kitchen, rents her spare room to a prostitute and takes her collaborator lover (Nils Tavernier) to the bedroom. Like Charles Chaplin's murderous Monsieur Verdoux, she is a microcosm of her amoral country...
What gave him that idea was Kafka's Amerika. "I was thinking about how he and Brecht and others saw America. Obviously, they got their ideas from the movies, the Keystone Kops, Chaplin. You think of these guys sitting in poky little movie houses in Central Europe in the 1920s watching these flickering images. As far as they were concerned, everything in America was all in the same place. You rode down Fifth Avenue straight into Monument Valley...
...break dancers accosted, a girl lost and maybe won. Some technology- ( inspired images are new -- Irwin silently screams from inside a TV until someone vacuums up his video image and expels it into an old trunk, from which the lanky actor unfolds -- but the show owes a lot to Chaplin and Harpo, Jacques Tati and Marcel Marceau. Still, they are the people to copy, and Irwin surely has the gift...
Ever since Charlie Chaplin battled a rambunctious Murphy bed, the fold-up sleeper has been an American icon. In New York City last week, a federal appeals court showed just how firmly the name is embedded in popular lore when it ruled that "Murphy bed" has become a generic term and therefore is not subject to trademark protection...