What hath Victor wrought

I’ve added a new link out to the right under “Religion *and* Film,” to the blog “Just an Amateur” by Michael Gerardi. The title is a reference to a moment in Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT, which he has a still from above his blogroll.

Michael was a longtime reader of this site and, in a post reacting to my depressive fit from a couple of weeks ago, he calls me his “blogfather” and said I was the inspiration for starting his site. It doesn’t quite go to the levels of fanboyism that this site has for Theo, but I am of course flattered. In a bit of private correspondence when I found out about his site last week, wrote me back: “don’t go threatening to close down your site like that again!” Well, Marlon Brando is still alive. Tomorrow, I’ll post a slightly edited version of the letter I wrote to Michael when he asked for advice as a budding cinephile.

Anyhoo … more publicly-valuable reasons to read his site. Just on the current page, Michael has some interesting thoughts on VERTIGO and on NOBODY KNOWS, which I apparently persuaded him to see. (And he realized what a great film it is, and his review is quite excellent.) More impressively, his unabashedly personal account of watching MONSIEUR VERDOUX is flat-out one of the best things I’ve ever read on Chaplin. And VERDOUX is a film I flat-out don’t care for and Michael is more of a Chaplin fanboy than this Buster-and-Harold-lover (again, a sure sign of a valuable critic … Michael is worth reading whether you agree with him or not). Here’s the best excerpt:

A genius is harder to love when he’s not doing what we love him for, but perhaps we never really understand the things we love him for until he tries to express it in a different way. VERDOUX certainly ranks among Chaplin’s greatest accomplishments, not merely because it is a good film in itself, but because it makes the experience of his other films so much more rich.

Welcome aboard bud.