My Review of The Great Dictator (1940) directed by Charlie Chaplin

 The Great Dictator (1940) was marketed as the first post-Tramp movie of Charlie Chaplin after he assured people retired the character after the release of Modern Times (1936), but in-fact this film would be the last appearance of the character as who would end-up playing a nameless Jewish barber with amnesia in fake-Germany and strike an obvious resemblance the other role Chaplin plays as the villain antagonist fake-Adolf Hitler. The protagonist and antagonist never meet, but their resemblance is crucial to the film's ending-climax and it's commentary on World War II up to that point in 1940.

This film is famous for (among other things) being Chaplin's first talking movie—and he has a lot to talk about about. As his home country was being pummeled by the Germans and France had already fallen to the Nazis, he watched the USA be neutral for the most part, to some being vocally supportive of the Nazis at worst. Leftist that he was, Chaplin used his physical and rhetorical talents to try and convince American audiences that they needed to oppose fascism. Chaplin's physical set-pieces like the globe sequence (my personal favorite) and the barbershop scenes shows that his comedy and art could still translate to sound-era comedy. I think the witty dialogue also showed his British wit was not lacking. Also, I think everyone knew what to expect of mocking Hitler's infamous speech patterns. Of course, where trouble starts is when he stops going for comedy and gets serious. You can tell how raw his emotions were and how desperate he was to rally Americans to support the War-effort or have the War end entirely. This makes some scenes when Chaplin filibusters and just writes what he feels seem clunky to us today. But when it comes to the ending speech, it is the filibuster that the rest of the movie depends on and is necessary and evergreen in its message,

The film was made only a year after Germany invades Poland and the Holocaust had not officially-begun. This was still post-Nuremburg Laws (laws that were modeled after the USA's Jim Crow Laws) and Kristallnacht, so people knew of the the discrimination and repression of Jewish people in Germany (and how much it resembled the discrimination and repression of African-Americans in the United States). I wonder if Chaplin really thought a country as racist (and antisemitic) as the United States  could be convinced to oppose a nation a nation it ideologically-sympathized with. In 2025, I wonder this now.

On a side note: having fake-Mussolini have a New York Italian accent was an inspired choice😆.

My Review of The Rainmaker (1995) directed by Frances Ford Coppola

 This movie is a straight-up courtroom trial drama about a novice lawyer that takes on an insurance fraud case while also helping an old lady draft a will and helping another woman get a divorce from her violently-abusive husband. This is a very good late-Coppola/early-Matt Damon film. I like the details on court procedure that it shows and I agree with the message it has about the legal system.

My Review of My Cousin Vinny (1992) directed by Jonathan Lynn

Marisa Tomei stole the show. This movie, The Rainmaker, and A Guilty Conscience we’re 3 courtroom drama films I watched in 2023 which were really good! One of the rare films where Joe Peschi is the heroic protagonist; this film is a look at aspects of the legal system not usually show on screen.

Some update posting...

 I haven't really been posting movies on the blog since 2022, and I haven't posted movies on Letterboxd since 2023, so I am posting some reviews I had written drafts of in the last two years, but not published yet.

My Review of A Guilty Conscience (2023) directed by Jack Ng Wai-Lun

A Hong Kong jurist named Adrian Lam gets on the wrong side of the hiss boss and decides to found his own law firm and take on a case involving a Hong Kong oligarch family. Adrian gets too cocky and over-his-head and is set-up into losing the case. Years later, he finds evidence that leads to a retrial and one more shot at redemption.

While I won't spoil the film here, this was such a big it because it uses every movie court-room drama trope in the book to commentate on the class divide (and possibly the sentiment concerning recent political events) in Hong Kong. Louise Wong's role as the wrongly-accused was worthy of Ruan Lingyu. Dayo Wong really does his job right as the magistrate turned lawyer. If you liked Witness for the Prosecution or A Time to Kill then you will like this movie. 

My Short Review of The Other Side of Hope (2017) directed by Aki Kaurismäki

Following-up the last Kaurismäki film I watched, La Harve, this is also about the fate of refugees in Europe—but this time in Kaurismäki‘s native homeland of Finland. Though this film is a lot more cynical than La Harve, Kaurismäki‘s idealism about how people should be towards each other ultimately wins out. Both this film and Le Harve harken back to Jean Renoir and the idea of the guy that just steps-up to be someone in need—no questions asked. 

My Review of ...And Life Goes On (1992) directed by Abbas Kiarostami

 This the Iranian New Wave at its peak. When Iranian film-makers decide to go to extremes of blurring fiction and reality in order to tell an honest story rather than a 100% accurate one, you get what Toni Morrison called "the site of memory." How much can you blend reality and fiction together until you gain the ability to almost change reality? On June  21, 1990 the Manjil–Rudbar Earthquake struck northern Iran and killed around 45,000 people. One of the hardest-hit places was the village of Koker where Abbas Kiarostami had filmed his movie Where Is the Friends House?                                         Kiarostami gets his son and immediately makes his way to Koker from Tehran to find Babak Ahmadpour—the boy who starred in WITFH?. The movie is a recounting of this journey.

As the title suggests, the main theme of this movie is that even after apocalyptic devastation, people keep on living. As Kiarostami traveled through the region, he was marked by the resilience of the people even as they were suffering and trying to collect themselves. This film also used a favorite filming method of Kiarostami; while he and his son were portrayed by actors, Kiarostami was always behind the camera interacting directly with people in the film. In doing this, he dares you to classify this as a realist film. The meta-nature of Iranian New Wave films of this era started getting criticized by the Iranian censors and this marked the beginning of Kiarostami's decline in standing with the régime (he never criticized the pre- or post-revolutionary regimes directly, so he was never explicitly banned or went into exile, but after 1999 it became much harder for him to show his films in Iran compared to internationally). 

Abbas Kiarostami always felt that the best films are the ones that look like they made themselves and that is on display here.