The refusal of Jean Dujardin‘s Valentin to venture into sound is due to his French accent, which he fears will be a career killer. Why not then return to France, “the home of cinema”, and join Marcel Pagnol, Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo and Marcel Carne “who were making, or about to make, films that entrance audiences to this day?,” asksThe Economist‘s “Prospero.”
This is not an option, he explains, because Valentin “is so in love with Hollywood that he would rather fail there, even to the brink of suicide, than return to ply his trade in France. If the actor’s vocal ‘flaw’ had been an accent that revealed unacceptably working-class origins, sympathy would be genuinely merited. Still, this is a major star and, we are assured by the very title, a true artist. But he’d rather die! He’d rather be a second-rate hoofer in Hollywood than anything else anywhere.”
I’ve been saying all along that I’d be a much more passionate Artist fan if it looked, moved and emoted like a real silent film, instead of offering a pastiche of one.
“The Artist, a likable spoof, [is] bland, sexless, and too simple,” New Yorker critic David Denbywrote a few days ago. “For all its genuine charm, it left me restless and dissatisfied, dreaming of those wilder and grander movies [of the silent era].
“Jean Dujardin, with a pencil mustache, looks a little like John Gilbert, but his cavorting star is meant to be a [Douglas] Fairbanks equivalent. A chesty, full-bodied man who moves quickly, Dujardin is good at buoyant peacocking, as when he shows off to an appreciative audience at the premiere of one of Valentin’s films. But most of what Dujardin does is obvious and broad. He smiles fatuously; he grimaces when things go wrong.
“The Artist is an amiably accomplished stunt that pats silent film on the head and then escorts it back into the archive. The silent movies we see in The Artist all look like trivial, japish romps. Certainly, there’s no art form on display whose disappearance anyone would mourn. Hazanavicius’s jokes are playful but minor, even a little fussy, and after a while I began to think that the knowing style congratulates the audience on getting the gags rather than giving it any kind of powerful experience. ”
“The Artist lacks the extraordinary atmosphere of the silent cinema, the long, sinuous tracking shots, the intimacy with shadow and darkness. Well, you say, so what? The movie is just a high-spirited spoof. Yes, but why set one’s ambitions so low? The movie’s winningness feels paper-thin, and, as Peter Rainer pointed out in the Christian Science Monitor, The Artist, with its bright, glossy appearance, looks more like a nineteen-forties Hollywood production than like a silent movie.”
It’s entirely possible that Hollywood Elsewhere will be overwhelmed later today by traffic, as it was during last year’s Oscar telecast. People not only had difficulty refreshing the site but I myself had difficulty posting. I’m just saying. I’ve just had a long, infuriating conversation with a senior-tech person at Softlayer, during which he assured me there’s little I can do at this juncture.
The “Easy Rider, Raging Bull” days were in full bloom. Shampoo had just wrapped, and film rights to the unpublished All The President’s Men had just been bought by Robert Redford. The air was awful. (Catalytic converters had only just been invented a year earlier.) El Cholo and Lost on Larrabee were hip restaurants. The Microsoft Corp. was eight or nine months away from being hatched by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And LexG was…what, four years old? (Photo tweeted by Shawn Levy.)
For what it’s worth, FilmJerk odds & number-cruncher Edward Havens is predicting a George Clooney win over Jean Djuardin and the other three. And Viola Davis over Meryl Streep. Beyond that I don’t think we need to hear any more Artist talk.
The 2012 Spirit Awards did the wrong thing today by giving four awards to the Big Oscar Inevitable known as The Artist — Best Feature, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Cinematography. The worst kowtow was giving Jean Dujardin its Best Actor prize instead of, say, A Better Life‘s Damien Bichir or Take Shelter‘s Michael Shannon. It wasn’t an indie thing to do — it was a “we want to be the Oscars too!” thing. Extremely bad form, dark day, etc.
Random Tweet #1: “Spirit Award for Best Actor goes to…Jean Dujardin? At the Spirits? People in the press tent going ‘eewww!” What a drag. Not Bichir?” Random Tweet #2: “Is it because I’m not drinking that the 2012 Spirit Awards are feeling so…I don’t know, rote and meh and under-energized & not-enoughy?” Random Tweet #3: “Not even light munchie food in Spirit Awards press cantina. No celery sticks, no carrots, no nothin’ — just empty, scarfed-up food boxes.” Random Tweet #4: “AT&T 3G is ridiculously slow in press tent. Too many people tweeting in too dense a space. No wifi for MacBook Pro and no celery sticks.”
Best Female Lead Spirit Award winner Michelle Williams — Saturday, 2.25, 2:55 pm.
I have to get over to the 2012 Spirit Awards in Santa Monica, which Seth Rogen will be hosting. The show begins at 1:30 pm, but the best part is the 90 minutes of schmooze time before it kicks off. Most of the indie community shows up every year. For me it’s a picture- and video-taking orgy. As long as the weather isn’t chilly and blustery like last year, everything’ll be jake.
Now that Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh‘s critically-dismissedAct of Valor has emerged as the weekend’s #1 film with an expected $27 million, and now that at least some HE readers have seen it, did the “real Navy SEALS shooting real ammo” aspect do anything for anyone? From the get-go haven’t people been bracing for the expected shortcomings in the acting end of things? And how could live rounds mean anything to anyone? What detectable versimilitude could possibly occur from this?
And I’m a little surprised that eighth-place Wanderlust is an instant DOA. People just didn’t want to see it. Which is about the concept, I suppose, as well as a referendrum on the drawing power of Paul Rudd and Jennifer Aniston. People saw the poster, reminded themselves that Aniston almost never makes A-level movies, read the story about her pixellated breasts (and how she insisted on the boob coverup as a gesture of deference to boyfriend/costar Justin Theroux) and figured it’s a Netflix download, plain and simple. Plus people…what, aren’t into comedies about hippie communes?
What a disconnect between the 2.16 Wanderlust premiere screening and what I was feeling (i.e., moderate amusement) as I watched and the brutal reality of the box-office. I thought it might have a moderately okay weekend and then descend the following weekend and disappear.
Visual effects (including special makeup) can be “imaginative, even astonishing, but [they] are ultimately there to sell a world, a character or a moment,” writes Press Play‘s Aaron Aradillas for a two-parter about horror and makeup. “One of makeup’s greatest triumphs is 1981’s An American Werewolf in London, which became the first film to win an Oscar for makeup in regular competition. Overseen by Rick Baker, who supervised all of the film’s makeup effects, it shows a man changing into a werewolf in real time…right in front of your eyes.”
And the first time I saw this I felt mildly deflated. For me it was a time-out, a prosthetic musical number, a demo reel showing everyone how necessary it would be to hire Baker when and if they made a horror film. For me werewolves were always half-wolves and half-men, so why did we have to do the big trans-species transformation? I didn’t care if David Naughton could grow a real wolf snout and wolf ears, and in fact would have much preferred him becoming a two-legged, Lon Chaney-style werewolf running around in a snarly, feral mode and half-resembling himself. It’s all a metaphor anyway so who needs prosthetics that turn him into a generic four-legged hairball with fangs?
Landis and Baker and all those dug-in, highly-paid special-effects industry guys had to do better. They had to do more. They had to show off, and most horror fans, being the low-lifes that they are, loved this. Gradually horror films, especially with the advent of the digital era, became defined by narrative and thematic coherence getting nudged aside by the effects themselves. It was during the ’80s that effects became the films.
The best parts of American Werewolf were (a) the backpacking section with Naughton and Griffin Dunne, (b) “dead”, torn-apart and progressively rotting Dunne coming back to chat with Naughton, and (c) Jenny Agutter‘s scenes.
To Catch a Thief (Paramount Home Video, 3.6) “looks marvelous on dual-layered Blu-ray. Everything tightens-up impressively and the contrast takes notable strides in the 1080p resolution. Colors also appear to improve with better balance in the presentation that has more than 4X the bitrate of the last SD transfer. A fair dusting of grain, no disturbing noise, no signs of digital manipulation. By far the best viewing I’ve ever had of this film. Beautiful.” — DVD Beaver‘s Gary Tooze.
In the wake of this afternoon’s Deadline report that the Academy has reversed course and will now permitSacha Baron Cohen to do with his red-carpet routine to promote The Dictator, MCN’s David Poland is tweeting “Wow…if Nikki Finke is correct, a new precedent is being set for the Oscars. And I expect people to be fired.”
This, I’ve long believed, is Poland at the nub. When some person or company has been judged to have seriously erred through stupidity or clumsy politics or has otherwise dropped the clay vase on the stone floor, there is only remedy in Polandworld — i.e, severe punishment. People must lose their jobs and/or be tarred and feathered. They must be wounded economically. They must put out their hand and the hand must be cut off with a sword. No wrist-slaps, no admonishments, no probations. Arterial blood must soak the sand.
The blood, it it happens, is over a possible scenario that’s being discussed by Poland and Harold Itzkowitz, to wit: that the Sacha Baron Cohen banned-and-then-allowed-to-walk-the-carpet story is/was (a) a stunt and, (b) that it’s “looking more and more like [it] was orchestrated with Finke & Sherak, not just WME & Paramount].”
Undetermined quote #1: “If this cahootism is proved, it’s a downfall.” Undetermined quote #2: “One would think Finke has better survival skills than to do this, no? What’s interesting is that [this] story isn’t mainstream yet.” Undetermined quote 3: “What is stunning… if this is true… is that smart people recently hired at The Academy can be this fucking stupid.”
One of them commented earlier in the thread: “Is every call by the new Academy team going to be another Brett Ratner moment?”
My point (apart from the particulars of this story, which I know nothing about one way or the other) is that while the stories may change from month to month, Poland’s appetite for Jihadist vengeance remains constant.
Poland inqures: “Paramount spokesperson officially denies N[ikki] Finke, who initiated & promoted a ‘controversy,’ is being paid to shill 4 The Dictator.”
