Sam Downing

Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo, aka your new favourite film stars

Before everyone saw/sees The Artist they had/will have this exact conversation: “Every film critic in the world loves it, and it’s nominated for a million Oscars, but I’m not sure I’ll like it because it’s in black and white and it’s silent and it’ll probably be horrible.”

Critically beloved, Oscar-nominates bores are standard fare, especially at this time of year, so: fair enough. But The Artist is not boring or horrible! It’s really, really, great: unique and joyful and captivating and – best of all – unpretentious. Director Michel Hazanavicius didn’t make a black-and-white silent film then shove a stick up its ass just to show stuffy film critics how much he knows about cinema. He made a black-and-white silent movie because he’s passionate about cinema. The Artist glows with that passion.

There isn’t much to the plot – silent movie star is pushed aside by talkies movie star¹ but they fall in love anyway. That’s pretty much it. With an adorable dog. Spoiler alert! – but The Artist is nevertheless super-engaging. Because the story unfolds via expressions and body language and the occasional title card, you’re forced to pay attention. And this is a pretty rare thing in an age where everyone’s attention span is about three seconds long. Succumb to the siren song of your smartphone, and you’ll miss an important plot point… or at least the adorable dog doing something adorable.

There’s also the novelty factor of watching a black-and-white film – everyone onscreen radiates that spectacular monochrome glow – with almost no dialogue – “This is how people used to watch movies? Neat!”. But the old-timey gimmick doesn’t dominate The Artist to the point where that’s all there is to it. This is mostly down to leads Jean Dujardin² (his smile!) and Bérénice Bejo (her smile!), who are marvellous terrific wonderful amazing. Their chemistry! Please cast them opposite each other in another movie, Hollywood. I want to watch them together again and again and again and again.

Sadly, like many films before it, The Artist does not feature enough Missi Pyle. But it does feature just the right amounts of James Cromwell and John Goodman. I didn’t expect any of them to be in this film!

Don’t force yourself to see The Artist just because it’s got lots of Academy Awards nominations and you want to sound smart pretending you liked it. Go see it because it’s a fun, straight-up entertaining film.

1. “Talkies”. Isn’t that a great word. “Talkies”. What a shame it fell out of fashion. Let’s all start using it again! “Hey, want to go to the talkies tonight?” “Nah, I hate 3D talkies.” [↩]
2. Which is sexy-French for John Gardener. God, English is so dull. [↩]

Young Adult is not the zany black comedy suggested by its trailer (which, by the way, basically spoils the entire movie, so you should probably avoid it. Here’s the link!). This is a dark, twisted-and-not-in-that-cute-Hollywood-way portrait of a disturbed woman, but it’s a portrait that doesn’t say enough about its subject.

(Light spoilers ahead.)

The trailer does get the basic plot right: beyond-beautiful Charlize Theron is Mavis Gary, the author of a failing series of young-adult novels who returns to her hometown to reclaim her high-school sweetheart Buddy (Patrick Wilson), who’s now married with a kid.

Soon after arriving in Mercury, a sort of Everywhere/Nowheresville that could stand in for pretty much any small town in America (or Australia, for that matter – the strip mall/fast-food landscape looks the same), Mavis encounters Matt (Patton Oswalt), a former classmate who was brutally beaten and crippled when he was at school. The two bond – who doesn’t love connecting with friends of the jocks who terrorised you as a teenager? – even as Matt tries to talk Mavis out of her ridiculous plans with Buddy.

The problem with Young Adult is that when I ask myself “What is this film about?”, I can’t really come up with an answer. “Continuing to behave like a high-schooler well into your adulthood has bleak consequences.” And… that’s it? The plot doesn’t move beyond that premise; it’s not thoughtful enough to be a character study, too sour to be a comedy.

Mavis sneers at pretty much everyone who enters her field of vision, but I didn’t dislike her because she’s so unlikeable. Unlikeable characters are fine in principle, and it’s not like I hated her: she’s best when her powerful sarcasm is turned up to 11, scoffing when a date boasts about travelling in South-East Asia and rolling her eyes at a stranger’s baby (strangers’ babies are the worst). Nor would Young Adult have been better if Mavis had experienced some vague redemption – that would’ve been way worse, actually – but unlikeable characters still need to offer some reason for us to follow them, and Mavis doesn’t.

She doesn’t feel complicated as much as she feels disparate; she’s mentally ill and an alcoholic and there’s a late reveal about an adolescent miscarriage that probably fuelled her present-day miscarriage, but none of it gels, and some her characterisations are just obvious (the bit where she looks over a chart used to teach autistic kids about emotions, then she remarks that she doesn’t feel any. CLUNK). There’s too little sense of Mavis and what her regular life is like, or how a bitchy high-school prom queen even became a writer in the first place.

(There’s a vague implication Mavis writes young-adult novels because she’s stuck in permanent adolescence herself, which I emphatically reject, and it suggests screenwriter Diablo Cody is pretty ignorant about YA as a whole. It’s not just Sweet Valley High these days.)

It’s not just Mavis who’s so oddly drawn: what is Young Adult trying to say about small-town America? Should we share Mavis’s contempt for Mercury and her classmates who stayed behind? Or come away believing that even escaping your past doesn’t guarantee you’ll escape mediocrity? I have no idea.

Director Jason Reitman offered a better portrait of a stunted adult in Up in the Air. Watch that instead.

So last summer I was sleeping with the windows open and my next-door neighbour was watching Singin’ in the Rain turned up to full volume and I thought, “I should watch Singin’ in the Rain too!”, but then I thought “Sheez it’s so late turn down your TV!”

Anyway. I finally got around to watching the movie ¹. And… it’s kind of overrated. Greatest cinema musical of all time? Really?

Kinda ironic it’s about the making of a so-so Hollywood film that’s transformed into a great film with the addition of a few unrelated musical numbers, given that pretty much describes Singin’ in the Rain itself. Meta! Singin‘ isn’t as terrible as its film-within-a-film Dueling Cavalier, not by a long shot, but its best known numbers – ‘Good Morning’, ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’ and the iconic title track, which is pretty neat, I’ll admit – don’t have anything much to do with the plot, and a long, actually-pretty-snoozy chunk of the second act is given over to an extended fantasy sequence which has nothing to do with the plot.

(Wikipedia says “Singin’ in the Rain was originally conceived by MGM producer Arthur Freed, the head of the ‘Freed Unit’ responsible for turning out MGM’s lavish musicals, as a vehicle for his catalog of songs written with Nacio Herb Brown for previous MGM musical films of the 1929-39 period”. TL,DR: the songs really were just shoehorned into the plot.)

Singin’ in the Rain is plenty entertaining. It’s often hilarious (especially the disastrous “Yes! Yes! Yes” “No! No! No!” test screening of The Dueling Cavalier, and Jean Hagen as insufferable ingenue Lina Lamont). It’s not one of those “classic” films that bores the pants of everyone who isn’t a film critic. It’s a good movie. But I don’t believe it’s great.

Those aforementioned film critics aren’t much help revealing why, either. Roger Ebert and David Stratton and Margaret Pomeraz basically consider it great because it’s considered great? Yeah, okay, then.

1. To re-watching it, that is, but the first time I watched it was for uni film studies and I’ve decided that doesn’t count. [↩]

Sherlock Holmes

Robert Downey Jr is… the drawcard of a film which is otherwise a bit of a muddle. Director Guy Ritchie’s trademark gangster talk and slick visuals don’t quite mesh with the richly visualised 19th century London of the film, though he nevertheless does an admirable job of transporting audiences back in time to a world of cobblestones, steam and stagecoaches.

But it’s the overly complicated storyline that’s the biggest offender. For starters, there’s no actual mystery to solve – which is a crime when your leading character is the world’s most famous sleuth.

The Lovely Bones

Peter Jackson and fellow screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens (the trio also penned the Lord of the Rings trilogy) are mostly concerned with adapting Sebold’s tone of poetic whimsy, because they excise many of the book’s darker, more morally grey moments.

That’s a mistake, because the resulting film lacks both conviction and emotion.

Last week I indicated that I really, really, really liked Avatar. Exactly how much did I like Avatar? So much that when I reviewed it professionally, I gave it five stars out of five.

I have never given anything five stars out of five before. I always swore I never would, because no film is perfect. Avatar isn’t perfect, but it deserves every one of those stars.

Here are some of the words I used to describe it: “Masterpiece”. “Immersive”. “Wondrous”. “Game-changing”. “Amazing”. “Lush”. “Stunningly emotional”. “A film like no other”. So now I have to go refill my supply of superlatives.

Go see it (then come back here afterwards and complain that I ruined it for you by hyping it up too much).