MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

TheLittleSongbird Am a big fan of Charlie Chaplin, have been for over a decade now. Many films and shorts of his are very good to masterpiece, and like many others consider him a comedy genius and one of film's most important and influential directors. He did do better than 'Laughing Gas', still made very early on in his career where he was still finding his feet and not fully formed what he became famous for. Can understand why the Keystone period suffered from not being as best remembered or highly remembered than his later efforts, but they are mainly decent and important in their own right. 'Laughing Gas' is a long way from a career high, but has a lot of nice things about it and is to me one of the better efforts in the 1914 Keystone batch.'Laughing Gas' is not as hilarious, charming or touching as his later work and some other shorts in the same period. The story is flimsy and the production values not as audacious. Occasionally, things feel a little scrappy and confused.For someone who was still relatively new to the film industry and had literally just moved on from their stage background, 'Laughing Gas' is not bad at all. While not audacious, the film hardly looks ugly, is more than competently directed and is appealingly played. Chaplin looks comfortable for so early on and shows his stage expertise while opening it up that it doesn't become stagy or repetitive shtick.Although the humour, charm and emotion was done even better and became more refined later, 'Laughing Gas' is humorous, sweet and easy to like, though the emotion is not quite there. It moves quickly and doesn't feel too long or short. Overall, pretty decent. 6/10 Bethany Cox

Horst in Translation ([email protected]) "Laughing Gas" is an American live action short film from 1914, so this one is already over a century old and it also runs for 14 minutes. With this age, nobody can be surprised that here we have a black-and-white silent film. The writer, director and lead actor is the legendary Charlie Chaplin and this is a film from his very first year in the entertainment industry. The title already gives away that many characters are laughing in this little movie and why they do so. Most of the action is linked to a dentist for which Chaplin works and he causes a great deal of mayhem there, not just with gas, but also with people's teeth etc. This is one of the rare Chaplin (short) film that could have needed more intertitles actually as I felt that the story was not too easy to understand at times and it was more than just a little bit awkward to see everybody constantly laughing in this film and you as an audience member have no clue what is actually going on. Admittedly, the comedy at that point from Chaplin is still far away from the level of his career-best works because here we have the approach for example of Chaplin punching a guy and that is the joke. So as a whole, this one can impossibly receive a positive recommendation. I give it a thumbs-down unless you are a gigantic Chaplin fan and suggest you watch something else instead.

CitizenCaine Chaplin plays a dental assistant in this one. There are several moments highlighting physical comedy and sight gags in this film. The hitting, slapping, and falling bits are better timed and funnier than in most early Chaplin efforts, though of course we've seen it all before. The tremendous size difference between Chaplin and the dentist he works for is used to particular good advantage. Chaplin's bit on the staircase, his trick rolling his hat on his arm, and his use of the pincers to steal a kiss are also very funny gags. As with most of Chaplin's early films, the film is uneven. However, Chaplin edited and directed this film, and the film moves at a frenetic pace and has much quicker edits between scenes than any previous Chaplin film. ** of 4 stars.

Michael DeZubiria It is no secret that Charlie Chaplin spent most of his first year in film-making churning out simple short comedies for Keystone Studios, in which he spent most of his time either kicking, punching, and throwing bricks at people or planting kisses on uncomfortable women. Laffing Gas is kind of a cross section of Chaplin's first year in film because it has all of those elements, as well as about the same ending as most of the other Keystone films, but it also shows a lot of Chaplin's most brilliant talents, the tricks that he does with his body and his cane and his hat.Also, I am not sure if it was just the copy that I watched, but part of the film plays in regular motion, rather than the slightly fast motion of most of the other short films, so you can see pretty clearly what it actually looked like when they were filming the fight scenes. Early in the film, Charlie walks into the dentist's office where he works and immediately has a fistfight with another guy, the receptionist, I guess, in the office. And this guy is tiny, by the way .Chaplin was a little guy himself, but this other guy makes Chaplin look like a giant. Anyway, they have a fight scene that is in normal speed, so it almost looks like slow-motion.The film is also one of the more violent of the Keystone films; at one point a guy gets hit in the face with a brick and then seems to spit out some teeth, soon landing himself in the dentist's office and being worked on by Charlie, who threw the brick in the first place, with a pair of what looks like bolt-cutters. There is a brief use of laughing gas in the film, but most of it is another ten minute slapstick fight scene interspersed with some genuinely brilliant moments.Also note that one scene in the film is filmed on the sidewalk in front of a place called the Sunset Pharmacy, which I imagine was a real place somewhere on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles. If anyone knows anything about that, please let me know!