I can do exactly as I wish.

"There is so much I do not know." "You do not want to know."

So, if you're upset about the upcoming train-wreck of Nolan's Odyssey, let me just remind folks about this under-appreciated GEM of a movie with Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche chewing up scenery and reminding everybody why they both have multiple Oscar noms and Binoche has her own Gold Guy. Maybe if they'd put Fiennes up for The Return instead of Conclave, he might have won. This was, imo, the better film (and that's saying a lot as Conclave was brilliant).

It's not a retelling of the epic. It's an allegory. It's bleak.

Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus THE RETURN (2024) dir. Uberto Pasolini

Charlie Chaplin in 1969. Charlie spent some time in London exploring ways to capture scenes of a strange bird in flight.

The film, titled "The Freak," is a fantasy about "a beautiful creature with wings... a bird with a human body."

Charlie Chaplin wrote about an otherworldly being named Sarapha who has the power to cure disease and bring peace to the world.

"Pierre Smolik guides us through the process of preparing this project to which the “master of masters”, as Renoir called him, devoted his last years, and whose beauty lies in its incompletion. Chaplin left the film nearly ready for shooting, since everything is there: script, preparatory notes, development, music, drawings and even some filmed rehearsals that constitute the last production by this giant of the cinema.

These heretofore unpublished documents pull the reader into a universe that blends aspects of the fantastic tale, dreams, poetry, myth and tragedy—a universe where humour is not left out: “Offering an egg to a bird—how very tactless!”

It was during a meal in the 1960s that Chaplin told his family the story of a strange creature—a bird woman who falls, injured, onto the roof of a professor-writer’s house in a remote area of the Tierra del Fuego. Who is she? An angel? A monster? A chimera? The best choice is to let our imagination survey the possibilities.

A testament film that illuminates all of Chaplin’s work, The Freak would have been, among other things, a playful satire on the almighty power of money and commerce, on the influence of advertising and the rise of religious fanaticism and its media exploitation.

The work of a free man, The Freak proves Chaplin — again and as always— to be a creator ahead of his time."

Source :

Max Brown as Edward Seymour The Tudors (2007-2010)  season 3 episode 8 “The Undoing of Cromwell”