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byneddiedingo · 1 year ago

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Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo in The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius, 2011)

Cast: Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo, John Goodman, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller, Missi Pyle, Malcolm McDowell, Elizabeth Tulloch, Beth Grant, Ed Lauter. Screenplay: Michel Hazanavicius. Cinematography: Guillaume Schiffman. Production design: Laurence Bennett. Film editing: Anne-Sophie Bion, Michel Hazanavicius. Music: Ludovic Bource.

There are two classic movies about the effect of the arrival of sound on films and the people who were silent-movie stars, Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952) and Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950). Neither of them won the Academy Award for best picture. Coming half a century later, Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist, which did, looks oddly like an anachronism. It is certainly a tour de force: a mostly silent film with a few witty irruptions of sound in the middle when the protagonist George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), having learned that his career as a film star is ending, suddenly begins to hear sounds, even though he seems incapable of producing them himself. (At the end of the film, Valentin speaks one line, "With pleasure," revealing his French accent.) The project grew out of Hazanavicius's admiration of silent films and their directors, and it fulfilled his own desire to make one himself. The title and the central predicament of George Valentin are an acknowledgement of the fact that silent film is a distinct art form, one lost with the advent of sound. At the expense of his career, Valentin insists on preserving the art -- much as Charles Chaplin did by refusing to make City Light (1931) and Modern Times (1936) into talkies, long after sound had taken hold. But Valentin is no Chaplin, and his effort, an adventure story in the mode of the films that had made him famous, is a flop, coincidentally opening on the day in 1929 when the stock market crashed. Meanwhile, a younger fan and something of a protégée of his, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), becomes a huge star in talkies. From this point on, the script almost writes itself, especially if you've seen any of the versions of A Star Is Born, which is why some of us wonder how this undeniably entertaining film became such a hit and a multiple award-winner. It was nominated for 10 Academy awards and won half of them: picture, actor, director, costume design (Mark Bridges), and original score (Ludovic Bource). To my mind, Hazanavicius's screenplay is at fault for not making Valentin's supine reaction to sound entirely credible: Is it actor's ego? A fear of the new? Embarrassment at his accent? And the decision to play Valentin's suicide attempt as comedy feels like a failure of tone on the part of the writer-director. That said, the performances by Dujardin, Bejo, and the invaluable John Goodman as the studio boss keep the movie alive. I just don't think it belongs in the company of Singin' in the Rain and Sunset Blvd.

#The Artist #Michel Hazanavicius #Jean Dujardin #Bérénice Bejo

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tilbageidanmark · 2 years ago

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Movies I watched this Week #104 (Last week of year # 2):

Cairo Station by renowned director Youssef Chahine, my first from the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema. A 1958 Neo-realist story of a lowly (and horny!) newspaper vendor who loses his mind after being sexually obsessed with a luscious lemonade seller. Sharp descriptions of poor, working class individuals, unexpected sensuality and descent into madness is not what you’d expect from the low-brow melodramas of that time. 7/10.

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Heaven without people is a beautifully-written, award winning family drama by a Lebanese play writer Lucien Bourjeily, his debut feature. It was shot entirely in one regular middle class apartment, and featuring about 15 not-actors, including some kids. It realistically tells of a large Christian family who gather for Easter feast, for the first time in two years. It’s conversation heavy and tightly-played. The busy, friendly interactions between all members of the family eventually turns into discord, and ugly secrets emerge. Well worth watching. 8/10.

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Fear and desire, 24-year-old Stanley Kubrick’s debut feature. A somehow amateurish anti-war production which cost $10,000 raised from Kubrick’s family. It follows 4 soldiers behind enemy lines, with Paul Mazursky as the delirious young one. “Not his best work”.

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The documentary Three Minutes – A Lengthening uses a unique approach: It tries to deciphers a clip from a 16mm holiday movie which was found in somebody’s closet, without adding any additional footage to it. In a voice over it tells of the detective work that it took to unpacks what’s there, and it lets only the visuals from the clip to speak for themselves.

The 3 silent minutes are from a trip that some American Jew took in 1938 to his small birth village in Poland. All that we see are some streets, a public square, and about 150 random people who were there on that day, most of them looking at the movie camera, which was a novelty. It’s a haunting snapshot, because it’s so completely mundane. Still, as the grandson of the photographer explores, only about 3% of these 3,000 Nasielsk Jews survived the holocaust. So all the curious, smiling, randomly waving people became ghosts. Co-produced by Steve McQueen. 8/10.

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5 more by Robert Redford and 3 more by J. C. Chandor:

🍿 ...I'm doing a survey... do you believe the Condor is really an endangered species?...

Another perfect Christmas re-watch: Three days of the Condor, one of my all time favorite conspiracy thrillers from the 70′s, and really, one of my top 50 films of all time. Every word I wrote about it last year, when I saw it last time is till in play. 10/10.

🍿 I loved J. C. Chandor‘s ‘Margin Call’ and ‘A most violent year’, but I hesitated watching his tremendous ‘Old man and the sea’ masterpiece All is Lost. And even when I started, I had a hard time staying in, and had to take frequent stops, Not that it’s not all-immersing and original. But the harrowing, no-words, single player (no-)survival story of a man lost at sea is so dispiriting, so nerve-racking, it took me three days to finish it. 9/10 for being too tense.

🍿 In György Pálfi’s immersive mashup Final Cut, Ladies and Gentlemen, Redford only appears for a brief moment. That’s because it is a ‘supercut’ of over 450 clips from the most famous films in history. It’s a meta-love story, told through a montage of scenes edited together from all those other films. Absolutely fantastic. Another inspired re-watch from last year.

🍿 "...Stay away from the chocolate mousse”...

Years before winning an Oscar for ‘The Artist’, French director Michel Hazanavicius created a similar montage in La Classe Américaine. Recieving permission from Warner Brothers he cut and pasted scenes from about 50 of their old movies into a nonsensically-funny, politically-incorrect and unexpected hillarious parody. It mostly follows Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman and Paul Newman, silly journalists at the Washington Post, who interview dozens of classic stars as they try to understand John Wayne’s last words, “Monde de Merde”. Dubbed into ridiculous French, full of cursing, off color jokes about butt sex and bad digestion. Worth the watch!

🍿 A River Runs Through It was the third film directed by Redford. A long, beautifully-shot and utterly uninteresting period piece of two uninteresting brothers in pastoral Montana in the 1920′s. 3/10.

🍿 So I was finally also able to watch J. C. Chandor‘s last feature film, Triple Frontier. Each of his 4 films is in a different genre. This one is a standard action-adventure flick, where ex-Delta Force Oscar Isaac is getting the old team together for one last big deal, stealing millions from a Colombian Narco lord. Even though the story and action were not original, it was extremely well-done. 8/10.

🍿 And even though I’ve seen Chandor’s Margin Call 4 times already this year, and again today, I am becoming convinced that this is of the best debut features of all time, and one of the greatest films of the 21st century.

Repeat viewings prove to me that his control of sound, design and editing is masterful: The opening scene’s score. Every single scene is perfect. Every new chapter in this evolving story unfolds like a play. Absolutely fantastic - 10/10 again.

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I have a new favorite sub-genre: Debut fictional masterpieces by young(ish) female film directors. Recent examples: Quinn Shephard (Blame), Alice Wu (Saving Place), Deniz Gamze Erguven (Mustang), Bora Kim (House of hummingbird), Céline Sciamma (Water lilies), Kaouther Ben Hania (Beauty and the dog), Chloé Zhao (The Rider), Lulu Wang (The Farewell), Andrea Arnold (Wasp), Charlotte Wells (Aftersun), Debra Granik (Winter’s bone), Mia Hansen-Løve (Goodbye first love), and so many others.

So, I’m happy to add Kelly Fremon Craig‘s The Edge of Seventeen to the list. It’s a coming-of-age drama about best friends Hailee Steinfeld and Haley Lu Richardson, whose friendship is tested when one of them sleeps with the other’s hot brother. Her only feature since 2016? At least it’s good to read that she is now filming ‘Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret’ now.

The sweetest discovery of the week - 8/10.

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2 French classics:

🍿 Re-watch: The perennial French bonbon The Red Balloon. A nostalgic, heart-warming throw-back to Belleville after the war, the innocence of childhood and bond between sentient beings. 100% enjoyment and guaranteed satisfaction. One of Adora’s beloved early films. (Poster Above).

I was surprised to learn that Albert Lamorisse, who directed both his kids in this gem, was also the inventor of the board game ‘Risk’, and that he died young at a helicopter crash in Iran.

🍿 The old man and the boy (”The Two of Us”), Claude Berri’s humane debut film from 1967. Very old provincial anti-Semite Michel Simon takes in a small refugee boy in occupied France, not realizing that he is Jewish. That the old, bigoted farmer was also a vegetarian was a testament to the well-balanced film, among the first to depict Nazi sympathizers with understanding.

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Fred Zinnemann’s award-winning western High Noon, with just-retired but duty-bound marshal Gary Cooper abandoning his 30-years-younger, newly-married Grace Kelly bride, in order to save the town’s citizens.

There were only two questions that remained unanswered: 1. Why was he so unpopular that nobody would help him? And 2. Why could they not pick a more memorable ‘Baddie’ to stand up against? 9/10.

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I was a big Beatles fan in my teens. When Help opened in Israel I was 12, maybe 13. I went to the small cinema in Hadar neighborhood in Haifa, and saw it 11 times. It was my movie. Peak swinging 60's. The music is still 10/10.

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‘The Olsen Gang’ was a Danish series of 14 comedy films, that was extremely popular all over Scandinavia 50 years ago. They were low-brow farces that provided escapist entertainment based on broad stereotypes. The stories were about the three inept, bumbling small-time crooks always trying to get rich quick. The Olsen Band (1968) was the first in the series. It didn’t age well, but it was nice to see all the familiar locations from around here as they looked then. Interestingly, since Denmark was the first country to legalize pornographic images in 1969, there are some lewd subplots and x-rated stories in this family-friendly romp.

...Det er skide godt, Egon!...

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2 with professional wrestler Dave Bautista and 2 with Udo Kier:

🍿 “Jared Leto's hard kombucha...”

I hated the new Glass Onion from the very first scenes, and had a hard time sitting through this boring, tricked-out big-budget spectacular. A typical turd from the Netflix-Hollywood-Complex cookie cutter, as bogus as Daniel Craig’s fake accent, or as the deceptive ‘Eat the Rich’ sub-text messaging, everything about it was irritating, over-the-top cringe.

The original ‘Glass Onion‘ was so much better.

🍿 The premise is very appealing: A quirky crime drama directed by Werner Herzog, produced by David Lynch, starring Michael Shannon as a mentally-disturbed spiritual seeker who kills his mother with ceremonial sword and Willem Dafoe as a San Diego detective, and mixed with a score of wistful Peruvian folk music. But My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done was random, misdirected, awful on every other level. 2/10.

🍿 “... Excuse me I’d like to ass you a few questions ..”

An immature, funny re-watch: Jim Carrey big breakthrough Role Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. With Hector Salamanca as Mr. Shickadance, Ace's landlord, and Sean Young as Einhorn-Finkle and some unnecessary homophobic ending. I forgot that at the 45:00 time stamp, at exactly half-point, he fucked Courteney Cox 3 times, with all his house pets watching.

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First watch of the last film that Walt Disney was personally involved with, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh from 1977. Target audience must have been 3-4-year-olds.

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First watch: Peter Bogdanovich’s screwy comedy What’s Up, Doc, with the quintessential San Francisco setting. Madeline Kahn’s debut film. Not as zany today as it might have been then. It only got mildly funny toward the final car chase. 2/10.

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Christmas Comes But Once A Year: A 1936 animated short produced by Fleischer Studios, featuring Professor Grampy, in his only appearance without Betty Boop. What a different consciousness the world will have if Fleischer would have dominated Disney.

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A constant re-play in the background while I go about my day: Sol by Alep!

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Throw-back to the art project:

Three Days of the Condor Adora (Again). Red Balloon Adora (One of the first illustrations that I really loved).

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(My complete movie list is here)

#movies #Adora

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