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Post by Jeremy on Jan 10, 2018 19:58:19 GMT -8
The Artist (2011)
This could've easily felt like another bait-y film, with the Hollywood setting and obvious silent film tribute giving the movie a feel of blatant Oscar pandering. But while the award recognition may have been inevitable, I really enjoyed this film.
The breezy feel, the upbeat background music, and the faithful recreation of 1920s-era, pre-talkies Hollywood all combine to make The Artist a fun (and, thankfully, not overlong) film which feels like a sincere tribute to the silent films it emulates. The two leads (neither of whom I was at all familiar with beforehand) have great chemistry, especially considering that not a vocalized word is shared between them. And Uggie may be the best canine actor to appear onscreen since the dog from Frasier.
Do I believe the Academy granted this film its award based on the entertainment value? Not really - the combination of nostalgia and Hollywood prestige ultimately made for the deciding factors. But while it's probably not true "Best Picture" material, The Artist is definitely worth a look.
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Quiara
Grade School
Posts: 775
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Post by Quiara on Jan 10, 2018 20:12:05 GMT -8
Man, are you trying to give guttersnipe a stomachache??
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 10, 2018 20:31:21 GMT -8
Guttersnipe will be fine. He's got a high tolerance for conflicting opinions of cinema. And he knows that I love Fight Club.
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Post by guttersnipe on Jan 11, 2018 11:01:41 GMT -8
Yeah, I'm OK with that. It's not so much that anything in The Artist is especially bad per se, my grievance is more with its raison d'etre: if you suspend knowledge of the dates, its barely any different a film to, say, Show People or Shooting Stars (genuine silent-era movies about movies), only a lot less impressive than either. It's hard not to be cynical and view it as a Bait picture when only the following year saw the release of a silent Spanish version of Snow White that nobody bothered to see after it was completely ignored by all the big award bodies (it wasn't really any better or worse, I'm just talking about the principle of novelty). And even if you remove it from more obvious comparisons, its main themes of sound transition and ingenue-saves-fading-star are much better addressed by Singin' in the Rain and A Star is Born respectively.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 11, 2018 11:13:24 GMT -8
Yeah, I immediately noticed the Singin' in the Rain parallels. But I imagine there are a lot of films which explore the early days of Hollywood with affectionate nostalgia. (Most recently, Todd Haynes' Wonderstruck explored the rise of the talkies, while also paying tribute to the silent-film era, in brief but interesting fashion.) So it didn't bug me too much here.
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Post by guttersnipe on Jan 11, 2018 12:02:25 GMT -8
Well, this kind of discussion takes me right back to the 90s when people started taking polar positions on Tarantino and his (often less-talented) VHS-educated followers (lots of "Scorsese pays tribute, Tarantino copies/steals", etc). My position has always been that everyone borrows, for want of a better term, but what counts is what you do with the elements you've taken. Tarantino is to my mind a master chef: he takes all sorts of ingredients but knows exactly what will overpower the recipe, so balance is key. Even though it's not quite his best film, Inglourious Basterds is a great example of this: references ahoy, but the confidence and deftness with which they're employed is remarkable. I actually caught a bit of it when I was on holiday a few months ago (basically looking for anything in English before I went to bed), and even though I was tired and don't really truck with watching bits of films, I ended up watching the whole last hour or more because I just couldn't switch it off. I've not caught up with the new Todd Haynes but I dare say he'll be filtering his cinematic lodestones with a similar dexterity.
The other approach is simply to work to template (particularly with genre directors), but to play those familiar elements with a great deal of impact. Peter Hyams does a lot of this; Sudden Death is Die Hard in a stadium, The Relic is Alien in a museum, etc, but he's got sufficient skill to make them work admirably. I don't really see much of either in The Artist, which to me just kinda exists.
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 11, 2018 17:16:20 GMT -8
I think I get that. The Artist isn't a groundbreaking film by any stretch, but it's enjoyable to watch. And it's the kind of film designed to make modern audiences appreciate the old days of filmmaking.
Overall, I'd say it's works as a Hollywood nostalgia piece - perhaps not admiringly so, but to at least a greater degree than something like La La Land (which made a big deal about "modernizing" the classic Hollywood musical without doing anything much new with it).
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 11, 2018 18:48:02 GMT -8
It's been a while since I watched The Artist, but while I thought it was a pleasant-enough diversion, I don't recall it evoking the heightened, ambitious visual elements of the notable silent films of the era much at all. In fact, the silent -- and even black-and-white -- element kind of felt arbitrarily tacked-on. If it was going to contrast the silent and talkie era, it might've done better to have half the film in the silent mode, and the other half not. The musical elements of La La Land were pretty well integrated with the psychology and ideology of its characters, and I'd say that film going smaller and more cynical and internalized during its middle section differentiates it from many musicals, which go big and splashy (and often shrill) for the majority of their running time. (Note: I'm not stating that there haven't been dark or cynical/self-aware musicals in the past, only that they're not considered the traditional mainstream form, which is what LLL's referencing.)
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Post by Jeremy on Jan 11, 2018 19:29:21 GMT -8
I think the silent aspect of The Artist helped add to the emotional weight, since the film relies heavily on physical acting (which the actors conveyed successfully without feeling over-the-top) and background music to convey the story. It's a totally different feel from what audiences are used to, since the line between talkies and silents can often be separated by a lot more than dialogue. (To reuse my previous example, I found the B&W, silent scenes in Wonderstruck to be far more investing than the dialogue-filled color scenes.)
Also, I've watched a lot of musicals, and most seem to be at their least splashy during their middle acts (give or take an occasionally kicky number). La La Land's darker and more cynical aspects didn't quite register with me, though, given that I found the film kind of dramatically thin (albeit not without its virtues in other areas). It's a good film - and it inspired a pretty amusing Simpsons parody this week - but not one that resonated with me all that much.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 11, 2018 20:45:47 GMT -8
I just didn't think The Artist had a great deal of visual flair. To me, it was very rudimentary and kind of sitcomy, which sort of defeated the purpose of doing the silent treatment. But hey, if it was trying to capture the static look of some of the early talkies (where the mikes wouldn't pick up the sound if the actors moved around too much), but without sound... Mission Accomplished!
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Post by guttersnipe on Jan 12, 2018 3:04:22 GMT -8
I don't recall it evoking the heightened, ambitious visual elements of the notable silent films of the era much at all. In fact, the silent -- and even black-and-white -- element kind of felt arbitrarily tacked-on. I'd agree with that; I recall reading Sight&Sound's lukewarm review of it which criticised its lack of formal ambition, in other words stating that it does feel silent but doesn't evoke a terribly impressive silent film. The musical elements of La La Land were pretty well integrated with the psychology and ideology of its characters, and I'd say that film going smaller and more cynical and internalized during its middle section differentiates it from many musicals, which go big and splashy (and often shrill) for the majority of their running time. (Note: I'm not stating that there haven't been dark or cynical/self-aware musicals in the past, only that they're not considered the traditional mainstream form, which is what LLL's referencing.) Well, I didn't want to be the guy that brought it up, but its mid-section/last hour feels to me like it's almost embarassed to have attempted a musical before stating, "Enough of that nonsense, this is serious business". There's no reason why a musical can't go genuinely dramatic; The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (itself a Hollywood love letter, only a good one) alone is proof of that, and as I remarked before, its tonal structure is the same as that of Moulin Rouge!, a film whose transition is also knee-jerk, but doesn't once forget that it's a musical. La La Land's halves are not only weaker ("I'm a real prick about jazz" / "This one-woman show is apparently really important but lord knows why") but the clunk is starker. As for its visuals, the best part for me was honestly the array of lovely vintage film posters around Emma Stone's apartment, if only because a) I could temporarily pretend I was watching one of those films instead, and b) it made me question how someone can ostensibly love film but have not seen Rebel Without a Cause. And speaking as someone who could barely care less about consensus (hey, I really like Sucker Punch), I must confess to feeling a little vindication at some of the (packed) audience reactions when I went to see it: "She is so boring", "When is this going to end??", and as I passed a couple of the way to the cark park, all I caught was "Did you like it?" / "Uuuuhhhhhmmmmm...."
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 12, 2018 16:48:00 GMT -8
And speaking as someone who could barely care less about consensus (hey, I really like Sucker Punch), I must confess to feeling a little vindication at some of the (packed) audience reactions when I went to see it: "She is so boring", "When is this going to end??", and as I passed a couple of the way to the cark park, all I caught was "Did you like it?" / "Uuuuhhhhhmmmmm...." Attend any slightly arty film with a relatively full house of casual moviegoers, and you'll hear a lot of that, especially if said movie isn't super-fast-paced or action-packed. Many of those same types of people think the latest Aronofsky is one of the worst films ever made. And so it goes. Anyways, I disagree on the LLL visuals: I think it's a pretty handsome-looking picture. (And I don't mind Sucker Punch, BTW.) Moving on, I'll finally get to see the new Paul Thomas Anderson picture, Phantom Thread, next Friday. Booyah. And I've got to find a way to watch World of Tomorrow, Part 2 by Don Hertzfeldt without signing up for a Vimeo account. The first 14-minute short was pretty genius.
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Post by guttersnipe on Jan 13, 2018 5:50:20 GMT -8
Attend any slightly arty film with a relatively full house of casual moviegoers, and you'll hear a lot of that, especially if said movie isn't super-fast-paced or action-packed. True enough, only we're talking about a big-budget, mainstream Hollywood movie. A crowd-pleaser. This isn't like when I saw Inland Empire at my local cinema and there were walkouts every ten minutes, reducing an audience of over one hundred to barely twenty (amusingly the next time I went there I was waiting in line and I overheard a chain conversation between strangers that started something like, "Well, hopefully his will be better than that David Lynch film" / "Oh god" / "Yeah, we saw that, wasn't it awful?"...) But anyway, we can probably move on, because A Facsimile of Feeling seems to have become the new Playtime.
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Post by ThirdMan on Jan 13, 2018 8:53:28 GMT -8
Anyways, as I noted on Twitter, I'm taking an extended break from offering any sort of opinions or ratings on the arts (movies, TV, music, games, etc.). I'm sick of the sound of my own voice, don't feel strongly enough about most things to want to engage in debate about them. And there's simply too much hate and/or contrived "backlash" going on out there, too much posturing, with too much of it filtered through political ideologies. People pretending to get worked up over plot contrivances in silly space-wizard movies, when they really just can't deal with their male protagonists taking orders from a few female characters. People drawing the line between "arthouse snobs" and "unsophisticated" TV viewers with the latest David Lynch project. Suggesting people who like Three Billboards are somehow forgiving or accepting of Rockwell's character's blatantly-racist attitudes and actions, simply because the film shows he's occasionally capable of kindness and nobility. People bashing freakin' Mario to build up Zelda, and vise-versa.
I'm tired of feeling obligated to work out a well-reasoned opinion on something, when I'm on-the-fence about most things, rarely loving or hating anything. I thought about chiming in on Unk's review of Raging Bull the other day, saying it's not amongst my absolute favourite Scorsese films, because like P.T. Anderson's The Master, it, IMO, leans way too heavily on tedious and mundane behavioural repetition. I could say the same for Scorsese's Silence, but you know, both films are crafted pretty handsomely in most other areas, so really, who gives a fork?
I'm not depressed, I just don't want to be a part of all the noise anymore. I guess Dunkirk is my favourite of the awards contenders this year, with Lady Bird a close second, but I honestly don't care what wins anything. If my favourite show from last year, Legion, isn't as visually-ambitious and creative in its second season, so be it...Season 1 isn't going anywhere. Hopefully I enjoy the new Wes Anderson film even half as much as I loved (such a rare occurrence for me) TGBH. Way too much time is spent dissecting and evaluating and taking sides on everything, and it's freaking exhausting. So I'm out, for the foreseeable future. I'm not tracking the movies I watch, or rating movies, TV shows, music, or games anymore. I'll watch what I want, feel however I feel (or not feel at all), and just move on. I may or may not post anything here in the next while, but the likelihood of it being opinion-related will be slim-to-none.
And lastly, if the U.S. can't sort out the mess it's put itself in, it makes me all the more glad I live north of the border. But until the Big Orange Menace is out of the picture, I'm done discussing that as well.
That'll be all, for now.
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Post by unkinhead on Jan 13, 2018 9:00:38 GMT -8
I thought about chiming in on Unk's review of Raging Bull the other day, saying it's not amongst my absolute favourite Scorsese films, because like P.T. Anderson's The Master, it, IMO, leans way too heavily on tedious and mundane behavioural repetition. See but now you did say it so I'm interested. I don't really know what you mean by behavioural repetition. Like. La Motta constantly being an abusive bastard to his wife?
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