Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

April 2007 activity

Total Log Entries: 50

Total Comments: 20

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Black / India / 2005

Subhash Jha: You’ve repeatedly saluted Charlie Chaplin, for instance in [actress] Rani’s walk?

ong>Sanjay Bhansali: No, that was an imitation of a girl at the Helen Keller Deaf and Blind School. I guess it was close to the way Charlie Chaplin walked. But yes, there’re references to Chaplin in Black. For me he’s the most poignant character ever seen in cinema. Chaplin’s pursuit for goodness recurs in my films. Michelle epitomizes Chaplin’s loneliness. Finally she has to walk alone.

Sanjay Bhansali’s Black is a film so seemingly perfect, made with such arduous devotion and skill, I hate myself for finding fault. But outside the breathtaking cinematography and ingenious acting is a creeping, almost ridiculous nod to Charlie Chaplin. Shot from behind, Michelle walks in large shoes and with a white cane in what appears to be an homage to the shuffling waddle of Chaplin’s Little Tramp. And while Bhansali may have dismissed the idea of a tribute-via-gait in the above interview, the image of Michelle walking outside a local theatre, one that happens to be screening Chaplin’s Gold Rush, is disturbingly suspicious. It’s a distraction that keeps you from reentering a story that, by the film’s end, has begun to boil with eye-rolling melodrama.

by Adam Balz | Source: Yash Raj Films Home Entertainment DVD
01 Apr 2007 1:26 PM | Submit Comment

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