It must be bizarre for people in Japan or Korea to see movies made about mundane aspects of society for them though filtered through an American lens that is astounded by them. The rental family is one of those concepts -a not uncommon service in Japan whereby actors are hired to play a friend or family member for a client for reasons ranging from social etiquette to companionship to a means of working through grief. And it is something that feels strange and even unethical to many a westerner, especially for those aspects that require deception or that interact with sex work outside the traditional purview of acting. To impose that moral judgement from a western perspective would be arrogant and condescending -as though we have any real high ground to stand on. That is why it is important that Rental Family , a movie basically designed to teach westerners about this thing, is directed by a Japanese filmmaker, whose own assessment of the service is thus unclouded by cultural bias. Hika...
There is a notable twinkle in the eye of Charlie Chaplin that makes the ending shot of City Lights so emotionally iconic. That same twinkle reappears a few times in Limelight , made over twenty years later. If Chaplin’s career was in potential danger in 1931 as the silent film looked to be rapidly a thing of the past, it was by and large over by 1952. He’d made only a single misfire of a movie(in which he played a serial killer) in the twelve years since his last honest hit The Great Dictator , though it is possible a part of the setback had to do with allegations of Communist sympathies -though he was never fully blacklisted he was heavily boycotted -to the degree that Limelight , which came at the height of McCarthyism, never even played in Los Angeles. This is how it wound up being eligible for the Oscars a further two decades later in 1973, when it was at last rediscovered, reappraised, and released in that city. Chaplin was nominated for and won an Oscar for Best Original Sc...