Word: chaplin
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...streets of Bunker Hill, with their Frisco-style cable cars and steep slopes, had been fabled in L.A.'s history and in movie lore, which often are the same thing. It's where Charlie Chaplin shot a two-reeler, Work, in 1915, and where Harold Lloyd made many of his silent comedies. By the late '40s it had become a seductively seedy location for the film noir crowd: Act of Violence, Hollow Triumph, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Criss Cross, Douglas Sirk's Shockproof, Joseph Losey's remake of M and Kiss Me Deadly were all filmed there...
...expect a bunch of vacationing kids to remember, let alone revere, a cheeky little TV half hour that entertained the old folks almost a half century ago. For all I know, it was not as funny as we thought it was back in those less megalomaniac times. But Charlie Chaplin used to say that all he needed to make a comedy was a park, a policeman, a pretty girl and his divinely innocent self. Of course, he was touched by genius and the people who make movies like Get Smart are touched by no more than the unwise desire...
...makes every element instantly understandable. That's why most movies seem as if they were made for the passengers of the Axiom. But WALL?E plays without safety nets or spoon-feeding; it reinvents the delicate, potent behavioral language of silent-film comedy, of the Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin films...
...less for support than as a jaunty prop -twirling it, pointing it at the cheering audience - till you expect him to break into a song-and-dance routine. The cane might be a tribute to his first cinema idol, the dapper French comic Max Linder, who influenced Charlie Chaplin, Oliveira's second idol. In the audience, clearly buoyed by the old man's energy, were other distinguished directors: Cannes Jury President Sean Penn, Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis and a young pup named Clint Eastwood, who will be 78 at the end of the month and who was a year...
...almost from the beginning, movies saw machines as humankind's enslavers, not liberators. The definitive image of man's domination by the contraptions he'd created came in 1936's Modern Times, with Charlie Chaplin being threaded, like a strip of film, through the wheels and cogs of a giant machine. In later films, the gadgets we created were less likely to help us than to turn on us, like the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or to hunt us down, like the Schwarzenegger cyborg in the original The Terminator...