Change Your Image
sweetkness
Reviews
Metropolis (1927)
Best Silent Film Ever! A good prediction of the future???
Taking into account when this film was made, and what Fritz Lang had to work with, this film has to be easily be considered one of the best silent films ever made and certainly one of the best sci-fi films ever. The set designs and absolutely amazing, so good that many sci-fi films can't compare to them 80 years later. The story is also very good for a silent film, building up enough suspense and drama to easily keep my attention for the entire two hours, something which much shorter silent films have not been able to do for me.
Fritz Lang was so far ahead of his time with this film, it just had me totally amazed. I found it quite ironic that this film, made 80 years ago, paints a good picture of the path our world may be taking. Maybe its just the pessimistic side of me, but we continue to become more and more dependent on technology yet we are depleting more and more of out energy sources. There also appears to be a larger gap forming between classes and the power the upper class is able to enforce. Could this lead to a future quite similar to the one Fritz Lang pictured? Maybe, maybe not, but thats the beauty of this film, it can get you thinking about larger issues such as that, unlike many silent films where the world is portrayed as all hunky dory, and everything ends happily.
Kurutta ippêji (1926)
Fantastic Silent Film
I have to admit, I wasn't expecting much going into this film viewing in my Japenese film class, but this film really blew me away. The director does a wonderful job following through with the title of his film, truly portraying a picture of madness. I think the fact that this film is silent adds to the resemblance of madness, helping the viewer experience the characters inner world rather than the world outside his mind. This film just added to my feelings about foreign silent films vs. American, in that the foreign films work much more to exercise your mind and make you think rather than going for the fluffy film always with the happy ending, exercising the imagination very little.
The Kid (1921)
First Chaplin film I viewed
I found this film touching in a way, the main reasons for this may have been that it was the first Charlie Chaplin film that I had viewed, and I saw it in a film class, which might have made me pay extra attention to the film. However, I am writing this comment quite a while after seeing the film, and since then I have seen a few other Chaplin films, and in my opinion, if you've seen one Chaplin film, you've seen them all. True, this film has a bit more touching feeling to it do to the "adult/child, father/son" relationship, but the overall reaction I had at the end of the film was the same as any other Chaplin film. Now maybe this is just do to the limitations of the silent film era, but I tend to group all Chaplin films into the same mold. So if you see this one, and really enjoy it, go ahead and check out his other films, because you should enjoy them also, just don't expect much new.