Charlie Sheen

A year or so ago, I sought advice from my lovely daughter about the best way to address our concerns and make positive impact on our son’s life, who is at his teen now. My daughter, heartily explained what I could do right to guide my son and where I could go wrong, as she had have experienced during her teen age. I am so glad that I had the conversation, it made me realize that we (the immigrant parents) are further apart in our upbringing than that of our first generation children, it is…

Among the numerous great silent film directors, the three that are commonly mentioned surrounding that discussion are Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin. Having seen a greater amount of Charlie Chaplin’s wonderful work than the others, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd most certainly still got my consideration. In spite of every one of the three delivering awesome pieces of visual artwork, they shared some comparable attributes, but they each had unique differences which contributed…

As society develops, the arts inevitably develop with it; classic vinyls turn into cassettes that eventually become digitally transferred mp3 files. However, just as Urban Outfitters has created the return of the vinyl by selling the young adult demographic fantasy of the reversion to what the older generation called “real music”; the appeal of black and white films is the fantasy of a simpler time of flapper dresses and men laying their coats down for women to walk over. It is for this…

Best filmmaker in the 1920’s? Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin changed the way films were produced and how they were seen. Compare what technology is today to what it used to be. Imagine watching a black and white movie with no talking nor outside sounds. Watching a movie today at the movie theater you can almost feel the vibration from how loud it is. Chaplin was able to produce and star in silent films and he still was able to get his point across. Today when people watch a movie, there are multiple…

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson The dancer I chose is Bill Robinson. He is also known as Bojangles, which is his nickname. However, his original birth name was Luther. Bill was born in Richmond, Virginia, on May 25, 1878. He lived his life as an actor and tap dancer until he died in New York in 1949, from heart disease. Bill began his dancing career at the age of 7, when he quit school so he could become a dancer. This must have worked out for him, because by the end of his life he…

There has never been anyone like Art Tatum, who is one of the greatest jazz musicians in history. Tatum was born on October 13, 1909, in Toledo, Ohio, and he was the child of amateur musicians. His father was a mechanic, and his mother was a housemaid who worked in white homes. Although he was not born into a wealthy family, his unique talents helped propel him into the spotlight. If anything, Tatum proved that it was not impossible to become a world-class extraordinaire despite growing up with…

“SCREECH”, went Logan’s tires as they slid across the smooth black pavement of the street. “You ready yet?” he yells to me as I jump out the front door. “Yup” I replied. I hopped onto my bike and we headed downtown to the Voyager to go fishing. It was a warm summer day, and we were enjoying one of the first days of our summer vacation. We turned into the big black parking lot, crowded with cars. The sun was shining and the water was calm. There were a few cotton ball clouds in the sky and it…

Between March 1924 and October 1925, Douglas Fairbanks was back to people’s sight and once again became a hot spot. Newspaper reports followed up with his transformation from a dedicated actor to a diligent director. Two films he participated, The Thief of Bagdad and Don Q, Son of Zorro, which brought the idea of swashbuckling into Hollywood for the first time and was continued to carry on by acting and directing, are landmarks in silent film industry. While I was amazed by his vividly-portrayed…

The actors in each film are indicative of the era in which they were made. In The Immigrant, a silent era film, director Charlie Chaplin uses a group of actors that he’s used in previous films, most importantly Edna Purviance and Henry Bergman, with the latter starting in two of Chaplin’s 1915 films, The Kreutzer Sonata and The Melting Pot, all the way to Modern Times in 1936. Many similar ‘auteurs” of the time used the same actors as well, especially D.W. Griffith, who used actress Lillian Gish…

Charlie Chaplin, a well-known comic actor with his featured mustache, wrote, scored, directed and produced his first sound movie, The Great Dictator, in 1940. The Great Dictator marked the transition of Chaplin’s career from silent movies to a period of the sound movies. In his early work, for instance, The Tramp, he used to be a mime actor as he was so talented that his action and facial expression could perfectly present the whole story. Chaplin believed that the expression of an actor made…