Best movie of this year hands down!

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This 1914 Comedy short has pretty much survived intact due to the fact that Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed & starred in it. Most of Chaplins work survived because of his fame.This one has a distinctive cast as Chaplin teams with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle as a pair of drunks who come home to their wives, both of whom are obviously upset with them. In fact there is a lot of physical comedy as both drunks come home & both angry wives get physical with them & start pounding them. Charlies wife pounds him & puts him into Bed to sleep it off. Arbuckles wife pounds him & leave him on their apartment floor to sleep it off.Charlies wife gets concerned about what is going on with Arbuckle & his wife as they make quite a noise. She wakes up Charlie & they go over too see what's happening. After another round of physical stuff, Arbuckle steals his wife's purse, & the money in it. Then he & Charlie go to a fancy restaurant for another brawl with bar patrons. Charlie Chase & Edgar Kennedy pop up here.Overall this is slap stick physical comedy that worked well in 1914 but does not have that taste for today's audience. The ending has our drunks wind up in a lake in a leaky rowboat & drown as their horrified wives scream at them from shore.This is before Chaplin did the Little Tramp. This is Charlie doing drunk and with all the talent in this cast, I guess a real plot was not needed. Wives punching out drunk men, maybe in 1914 - but it seems today that is very rare.

Chaplin again teams up with Fatty Arbuckle as drunks who argue with their wives in separate hotel rooms. The two comedians play drunks as well as anyone before or since. Minta Durfee, Fatty's real life wife at the time, plays his wife here. The spouses go at it quite a bit before Charlie checks out the commotion next door to find Fatty in the same situation he's in. Charlie and Fatty become fast friends and steal away to the hotel's restaurant while the wives argue with each other. Once in the restaurant, sight gags follow and then the wives. In minutes the whole restaurant is up in arms and Charlie and Fatty run off to get away stealing a boat in the process. The ending is grand. Look closely for Charley Chase in the restaurant. ** of 4 stars.

Most Keystones do not age well. Comedy tastes have changed over 90 years, and the hyper-speed frantic randomness of the early Keystones tend to leave the viewer wondering what was supposed to be funny. And frequently, plots are both too complicated and stereotyped.This one is different. There ain't no plot. All that happens is that Chaplin and Arbuckle, roaringly drunk, annoy their wives, patrons of a restaurant, and eventually the entire civilized world (which seems to have found its way to Griffith Park in LA.) Charlie Chapin and Fatty Arbuckle are very, very funny drunks. They just have the routine down. Chaplin's drunken behavior around his wife is hilarious, because he knows how to make inanimate objects do all the wrong things, and he knows how to pitch his body in all sorts of wrong angles. Arbuckle is not the comedian that Chaplin is, but he keeps up, particularly when he and Chaplin start to demolish a posh restaurant.The key to this short is pacing. Chaplin and Arbuckle do not spaz out in the typical Keystone way, to assure everyone what hysterical fellows they are. They just move according to their own looped logic, and let the application of that logic be the humor.The ending, by the way, can be taken as a bit of a cosmic statement -- and is that rare thing in a short comedy -- the perfect closing gag.

It's fun to see Roscoe Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplin together (plus a couple of brief appearances by Al St. John), although this movie as a whole is only mildly entertaining. Not that either of the stars disappoints, by any means, but the material limits them somewhat. It's also interesting, though, to see an earlier version of the extended, more carefully planned "drunk" acts that Chaplin did in features like "The Cure" and the excellent "One A.M."The story is episodic, with the two stars as a couple of good-natured drunks who get into trouble with their wives and with plenty of others. Chaplin and Arbuckle could do that kind of material as well as anyone. Most of it is funny enough, although after a while it starts to run out of steam and seem a bit forced. There are a couple of good gags to go along with their drunk act, though other parts are fairly routine stuff. It's probably a little above average for its time, but it's not as imaginative as either Arbuckle's or Chaplin's best material.