Chaplin;Charlie Best of

I bought this DVD based on the price ($9.99 at time of purchase).
I've seen a few of Chaplin's films, but not too many and I thought this would be a good way to see a bunch of them for a decent price.

It's certainly not the worst DVD purchase I've ever made, but it's definitely not the best one either.
Just because an older movie has been released on DVD does not make it "digitally mastered".
The company promoted that staement on the cover, but when I got home and started watching it... it was anything but "mastered".

I realize that some of these films are almost 100 years old and the originals have deteriorated quite a bit. But digitally mastering would help to fix the imperfections and make it more viewable. Sadly, this wasn't the case with these DVDs.
Not to mention that the company logo is superimposed in the lower right-hand side of the screen every few minutes during each movie. A distracting and unnecessary feature.

These were silent films in their day, so I expected typical "silent movie" music to accompany the movies.
Typical is right. In fact, it's mediocre at best and doesn't play along with the movies at all. It's as if the production company just slapped whatever music they could find (and didn't have to pay royalties for) onto the soundtrack and hoped nobody would care.

The first film in (on the first disc) appears to be a 're-released version' of the original film.
The title sequence doesn't match the rest of the opening and there is a narrator talking over the music and describing a little bit about Chaplin and what's going on in the scenes.
That would be okay if they noted that on the package, but they didn't.
I found it very distracting and ended up watching only a few minutes before I stopped and went to a different film.

I've only watched a couple of the DVDs, so there may still be a gem or two hidden away that I just didn't get to. But so far, I've been very disappointed in the quality of this "Best of Chaplin" set.

I gave it two stars (instead of one) because for $10 you do get 4 DVDs with a lot of films altogether. It's just too bad that quality couldn't have been as good as the quantity.

You get what you pay for and if $10 doesn't seem like much for the amount of Chaplin films you get, then it's not too bad.
I just think it could've been better.

› Go to Amazon.com to see the review  2.0 out of 5 stars