Of course, modern times in the 1936 Modern Times, by Charles Chaplin, means the Depression.  Chaplin’s Tramp and Paulette Goddard need work, and although they find it, they unexpectedly lose it.  But then find it again.  The objective is to stay one step ahead of hunger.  However, modern times means something else as well: that the world of industry dehumanizes workers for the sake of profit.

To bring the theme to the present, is this not what goes on today with wage theft?

The harried Tramp suffers in the satire, even being driven to a zany nervous breakdown.  He recovers, though, in what is a socially conscious but hilarious and very charming comedy.  Unfortunately, the film is pretty anticlimactic, but by the time the anticlimax is reached I’m tired of all the slapstick anyway.  That’s how I am about slapstick.  This despite my enjoyment of Modern Times, one of Chaplin’s best.

Cropped screenshot of Paulette Goddard from the trailer for the film So Proudly We Hail!. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Charlie Chaplin The Tramp debuted in 1914 — pre-1923 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The first season of the Showtime series, The Affair, which I just finished watching on DVD, may get confusing up to a point; but by episode 9 it becomes a striking, affecting tragedy, not exactly common in the TV shows I’ve seen.  Plus, some magnificent stuff comes from actors Dominic West, Ruth Wilson, Maura Tierney, and three or four others.

On to Season Two (when the DVD is released).

The first season of the Showtime series, The Affair, which I just finished watching on DVD, may get confusing up to a point; but by episode 9 it becomes a striking, affecting tragedy, not exactly common in the TV shows I’ve seen.  Plus, some magnificent stuff comes from actors Dominic West, Ruth Wilson, Maura Tierney, and three or four others.

On to Season Two (when the DVD is released).

In 1871, a Danish immigrant (Mads Mikkelsen) kills two men who murdered his wife and his young son.  One of these men is the brother of a virile fellow (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who used to be a good man but is now cruel and wicked.  He finds and brutalizes the immigrant, who thereafter seeks to avenge himself.

Critic Kyle Smith is correct that the 2015 Western, The Salvation, “relies too much on dull conventions,” notwithstanding Smith liked the film and so did I.  Director Kristian Levring might have done better to adapt one of the many nifty Western novels that have been written—one without the dull conventions—but, in any case, his movie provides some not-bad action, some thrills.  It is un-perversely and apolitically entertaining, not like such items as High Plains Drifter, Duck You Sucker or the p.c. Unforgiven.  Yes, The Salvation saves itself. 

The critics in 1970 were right to adamantly reject Zabriskie Point, the American-made Michaelangelo Antonioni film.  It is dumb, anemic and ill-structured.

Signore Director believed the alienation of young people in the 1960s, and of the New Left, was as significant an alienation as that in such earlier Antonioni films as L’Avventura and La Notte.  But ZP fails to convince us of that.  It has no sophistication whatsoever.  Indeed, the straightforward lovemaking between hippies in the desert (presented in a dream sequence) goes on for so long—and ends with a long shot that makes the hippies look like insects on sand banks—that it turns distasteful.  Yes, visually the film is often impressive, but junk is junk.

Zabriskie Point is a free-love, essentially anti-cop movie, and so we can hardly help realizing just how right it seems for our shoddy times.

Cover of Zabriskie Point