From Brody's article (link below):
The element of nostalgia in “The Artist” isn’t for a style of filmmaking but for a style of deportment. It’s essentially a movie about formalized clothing and formalized behavior, about personal style as subjected to discipline and deference to public norms of graciousness, and he adapts a very narrow range of the styles of movies from those days to suggest the amiable, sociable, witty, and graceful yet ingratiating decency that seems to him to be exemplary and admirable.
“Hugo,” for all its historical archeology, is entirely different; Scorsese’s past is one in which geniuses can be ruined and forgotten, in which families are precarious and orphans are relentlessly pursued, in which the aesthetic graces conceal indifference and violence along with lost modes of artistic genius. For Scorsese, the technical side of the movies doesn’t just provide opportunities and delights but also quasi-metaphysical mysteries and profoundly intimate modes of self-discovery.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/02/the-oscars-dull-nostalgic-but-not-without-a-glow.html#ixzz1nZPKJaGc
Showing posts with label Michel Hazanavicius. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michel Hazanavicius. Show all posts
Monday, February 27, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
THE ARTIST really doesn't live up to its hype.
Before filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius crafted THE ARTIST, he made a couple of comedies inspired by the French O.S.S. spy series of the 60s. These films (one of which I saw) are essentially AUSTIN POWERS-meets-BORAT satires of racism/colonialism/sexism; they got some art-theater showings and are available on video.
THE ARTIST is a straight-up attempt at remaking the kind of silent film with intertitles plus a musical track that Charlie Chaplin did twice in the 1930s (CITY LIGHTS and MODERN TIMES). It's technically brilliant (looking spot-on like a shot-in-the-20s actual silent) and will undoubtedly make an American star of Berenice Bejo (who will probably be inundated with offers to play wild-and-crazy girlfriends of Jason Segel and/or Paul Rudd). And it has Harvey Weinstein pulling out the promotional stops to make it a left-field Oscar winner in the tradition of LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL.
Unfortunately, the film is overlong, overthin, a bit too one-dimensional--and, as with the somewhat superior HUGO, unlikely to find a supportive mass audience in an era where silent cinema is as much a thing of the past as books, print newspapers, VCRs, DVD players and reviews by people who were once paid a lot of money just to write film criticism.
THE ARTIST is a straight-up attempt at remaking the kind of silent film with intertitles plus a musical track that Charlie Chaplin did twice in the 1930s (CITY LIGHTS and MODERN TIMES). It's technically brilliant (looking spot-on like a shot-in-the-20s actual silent) and will undoubtedly make an American star of Berenice Bejo (who will probably be inundated with offers to play wild-and-crazy girlfriends of Jason Segel and/or Paul Rudd). And it has Harvey Weinstein pulling out the promotional stops to make it a left-field Oscar winner in the tradition of LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL.
Unfortunately, the film is overlong, overthin, a bit too one-dimensional--and, as with the somewhat superior HUGO, unlikely to find a supportive mass audience in an era where silent cinema is as much a thing of the past as books, print newspapers, VCRs, DVD players and reviews by people who were once paid a lot of money just to write film criticism.
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