killer Tagged Articles at Cinematical

As a fresh 35mm print of Charlie Chaplin's quintessential 1947 thriller Monsieur Verdoux begins circulating through revival houses around the country, it seems like a good time to remind people that while the late actor is mainly known as a star of the silent screen, he definitely didn't die with it. Although the greatest slapstick artist of all time initially rejected the development of sound film, mocking it with hilariously exaggerated voices in City Lights, he eventually adopted it after realizing that resistance was futile. However, he refused to simply throw in a few lines of dialogue to accompany his beloved tramp shtick, choosing instead to take his career in a fresh direction. While Chaplin made many sound films over the course of several decades, only two of them really qualify as classic talkies (except for Limelight, which deserves a category of its own). Late flops like A King of New York don't really hold together, but Chaplin's initial forays into the world of sound film display his talent as a composer of distinctive prose.

His first work of this era, The Great Dictator, remains a masterpiece that broadened the potential of his tramp character with a modified Prince and the Pauper tale applied to World War II, and Chaplin doing double duty playing both a Jewish barber and an exaggerated Adolf Hitler (or "Hinkel," rather). Monsieur Verdoux, in which he plays a frustrated man whose losses during the Great Depression lead to a twisted scheme where he marries, murders and robs rich women, represented something else altogether: Chaplin's only brooding melodrama, the occasional laughs are almost incidental.

I hate to borrow material from another film critic, but a colleague of mine offered the following words after we finished watching Chapter 27: "It's like a feature-length version of De Niro's 'You talkin' to me' speech from Taxi Driver -- only without Scorsese, Schrader or De Niro." I repeat that sentence because it perfectly encapsulates my own opinion on the deadly dull and seriously dreary Chapter 27, a movie that promises to offer some insight into why Mark David Chapman, on one chilly night in 1980, shot the beloved John Lennon to death. But after 90-some minutes of J.P. Schaefer's writing/directing debut, I was no closer to understanding Chapman's motivations than I was 90 minutes earlier. I know it has something to do with J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, but any other specifics are lost beneath waves of babble, tedium and pretense.

Lead actor Jared Leto earned himself a producer's credit on Chapter 27, and it's blatantly obvious from the first few frames of the flick that the young actor really, ahem, beefed up for the role. And Leto wants you to know it, which is why we see Chapman parading around in his tighty-whities for two or three scenes. Jared might as well look directly into the camera lens and scream "Look how much weight I gained for this role!" To make matters worse, Leto (who, to be fair, has done some excellent work in movies like Panic Room, American Psycho and Requiem for a Dream) opts to brandish a rather nasally high-pitched squeak of a voice, which makes Chapter 27 feel like a straight-faced parody of Capote. And I don't think that's what Leto and Company were going for.