Limelight (now on video)

[LIMELIGHT is now available on home video.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

My wife knows just about all the "Saturday Night Live" running characters and their catchphrases. I wish this were a marketable skill. There does exist, in fact, a "Saturday Night Live" board game, thank you Lorne Michaels (or is he now "Lorne Michaels (TM)"?), and it is possible that some high rollers might play it for money...somewhere. But at the moment it's just her preoccupation. And one SNL running character she quotes is `Stefan,' the effete NYC club-kid shown on the Weekend Update segment. Surely you know this one? His schtick is to come on and advise visiting tourists on Manhattan night life, always with the same routine: "For the ultimate New York experience, look no further. The hottest club in New York is (unpronounceable). The brainchild of performance-artist and prostitute (unpronounceable), this former haunted mortuary reopened as a retro-future-contemporary-punk-hip-hop-redneck-country-line-dance-nonalcoholic speakeasy and opium den. Look! Who's that in the corner, Kate Moss? No, just a chalk-body outline..." And so on.

Limelight (June 3 at 9:25 p.m. and June 4 at 5 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[LIMELIGHT screens Friday June 3 at 9:25 p.m. and Saturday June 4 at 5 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady Jr.

Some big football coach at Ohio State University just resigned in an ethics-violation case. Or, as local polticians call it, "natural causes." So that means that probably nobody is reading the Cleveland Movie Blog. I can write anything I want here. So what? Nobody's ever going to know it. I can name the dude who may have discovered the secret of perpetual motion...I can reveal the identify of that ghost nurse who is supposed to walk in the woods near the Memphis Kiddie Park...I can ruin the twist ending of PSYCHO. But instead I'll just beat up on the The Cleveland Cinematheque for messing up the chronology of their Charlie Chaplin retrospective. Thought they'd be showing Chaplin's sound-era features in the order in which they were made, but either they can't tell time over there or (far more likely) the impresarios of the Cinematheque have decided to finish off the cycle not with Chaplin's lackluster final pictures but with what should've rightly been the great entertainer's career farewell - or anybody's career farewell, for that matter: LIMELIGHT.