Just sayin'

"We may take pride in observing that there is not a single film showing in London today which deals with any of the burning questions of the day."

— Lord Tyrell, President, British Board of Film Censors, 1937, BBFC Annual Report, p. 4

The rise of the Empire, the fall of Vader, and the victory of the Rebellion, as told by Charlie Chaplin

I love it when someone reminds us that movies exist not just as discrete, isolated things, but as elements of a single big continuum stretching back more than a century. Here we have footage from The Return of the Jedi and The Clone Wars, music from Inception, and audio from the big moment of Chaplin's 1940 The Great Dictator (I write about that one here).

At first I was skeptical about this, but as it went along I became surprisingly moved by it. It struck me that Chaplin's speech could also be used as the cri de coeur for a mashup of conscientiously chosen OWS footage. I posted such a remix, about the Arab Spring, last March.



(Via Big Shiny Robot)

Vincent Price on "the venom of racial and religious hatred" and "the poison of prejudice"

From 1947-1951, Vincent Price portrayed the radio incarnation of Leslie Charteris' popular heroic thief Simon Templar, a.k.a. "The Saint." At the end of the July 30, 1950 episode, "Author of Murder," he issued this on-the-nose and ever-timely reminder: