“I was half expecting this post to be pretty much the same as Duck Soup–not my style of humor, watched it for my Comedy class soph year, understand its significance. But what I hadnt realized that time before when I saw this is how absolutely \m/ beautiful it is. Seriously, gorgeous movie.
AFI ranks it as #11, which means that it’s the highest ranking one I’ll be getting to any time soon. The plan is to go in consecutive order for the top 10 once I’ve seen the other 90. On one of their more specific lists, they rank it as the #1 romantic comedy of all time. If Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson, or Katherine Heigl could make a rom-com like this, I might actually not despise the genre.
The images were so georgeous and heartfelt. Yes there was some slapstick, and no I wasnt really laughing at it, but Chaplin is so sincere in his work. How could you not fall in love with the Little Tramp? He moves with such fluidity (okay except maybe for that waddle) that its almost like choreography. This was the first of his movies to be done during the sound era. He had to fight to get to do a silent movie. The result is that the score fit the movie absolutely perfect, and the sound effects they could added in were a great touch.
Those of you who folow me on Twitter know that I watched the original Nosferatu this weekend, which is also a silent movie. That one was made about ten years before, but City Lights was just such a superior picture. I had two sound options for Nosferatu–a recently composed score by a full orchestra (which kinda sucked, and thats that I dont know much about these things) or the original score just on the organ (which had the right feel, but got old really fast). If its music was done half as well as City Lights, that would have been one fantastic picture.
Anyways Im rambling now. In other news, if you notice on the tracking sheet for the AFI project, I am now a quarter of the way through the list. Thats taken me just over a month, which is slower than I would have liked. But I’ve accepted the fact that I prolly wont reach my arbitrary end of the year goal and Im okay with that. I just hope I can keep at this steady pace. In the meantime, my non-AFI movie queue is starting to pile up quite high. I dont think Im likely to run out of stuff to watch for the next couple months.”