I failed this category miserably. I haven’t seen a one of them. As of right now, you can see 9 of the 10 live action and animated shorts via iTunes or OnDemand with most cable providers La Luna is Pixar’s entry in the animated category this year, but it won’t screen for audiences until June 22nd as a pre-show short in front of Brave. Continue reading
I guess I’m supposed to love The Artist. It’s a movie about movies. About silent movies and the transition to sound movies and how that destroyed the lives of the silent film era stars who refused to jump on board with the newfangled invention of talking pictures.
Oh yeah. The Artist is a silent film. But you probably already knew that.
Thing is: I didn’t love it. It’s fine. Cute, even. Jean Dujardin is handsome and charming and oh so expressive (an essential quality to making a silent performance work) as the movie star George Valentin who bucks the talkies by directing himself in one last silent film. That personal project bankrupts Valentin and his world crumbles around him.
Berenice Bejo plays Peppy Miller, an adorable actress whose star rises in the age of talkies as Valentin’s falls. Peppy gets her big break because of Valentin, however, and she never forgets that. She’s clearly in love with him, a fact she reveals in a Chaplinesque bit where she convincingly embraces herself with one arm through Valentin’s jacket. She’s one of the few people in the audience when Valentin’s last film opens, while next door her breakout movie debuts to a sell out crowd. Despite her success, she never forgets what Valentin did for her. She supports him from a distance as he spirals further and further into despair. Eventually, he hits rock bottom and she’s there to pick him up again. It’s all very jolly.
The Artist is certainly well made and there are really brilliant scenes interspersed throughout. A particular favorite is a sequence where Valentin’s just been informed of the advent of talkies. Up until that point, the film has played out in completely silent fashion, the only sound that of the (theoretical) orchestra playing along with the images. Valentin looks in the mirror and takes a drink of water. When he sets the glass down, it makes a diegetic sound, the first of the film. Valentin is surprised so he picks up the glass and puts it back down again. Another sound effect. Around him, everything starts to make noise, but when he speaks to himself in the mirror, he’s silent. It’s a wonderfully executed scene and my favorite in the film.
Unfortunately, nothing else really lives up to that moment. The ending eventually comes along and the final sequences inexplicably play to the sounds of Bernard Hermann’s glorious score from Vertigo. Beside the fact that it’s a beautiful piece of music, I can’t really figure out why it’s here. As the film comes to a conclusion with Valentin’s redemption at the hands of Peppy Miller’s persistence, the inevitable happens: silence becomes sound and the transition is complete. Talkies are the new norm and that age of the silent film artist vanishes forever as the credits roll.
Here’s a fun fact: The Artist is the first silent film to be nominated for Best Picture since 1928. That year, The Patriot was nominated in the second annual Academy Awards ceremony. If the Artist wins Best Picture, it’ll only be the second film to do so. The first was Wings in 1927 at the first Academy Awards ceremony.
The nominees are out. That means it’s time to start reviewing all the movies I’ve missed in 2011 and making a plan to see as many of the nominated films as I can before the winners are announced on February 26th.
That’s not a lot of time. I get myself into this mess every year (minus 2010, which I sort of took off). You can see my similar lists from 2009. I kept my lists of movies to see private the past couple of years, but they’re back!
It’s admittedly silly, but my goal is to see as many nominated films as I can. Not just the big nominees… ALL of them. The foreign films tend to be tough to pick up (oftentimes they don’t appear in theaters until after the awards are given) and documentary shorts tend to never be seen (at least the animated and live action shorts usually find release on iTunes and in theaters through the efforts of Shorts International. Then there’s the movies I simply do NOT want to see. (I’m looking at you, Transformers, you piece of shit!)
Without further ado, here are the 61 nominated films. The ones I’ve seen as of today have been struck through:
For those of you counting, this means I’ve only seen seven of the nominated films. In 2009, I had 42 films to catch and last year it was in the upper forties. Now I’ve got one month to catch 54 flicks.
Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. But I’ll do my best to get as close as possible!
Wish me luck.
Updated 1/30: Marked The Help, The Artist, The Descendants and Rise of the Planet of the Apes as seen. Down to 50! Also added links to Netflix or iTunes for films you can watch at home, along with some notes about streaming or DVD availability.
Updated 2/3: Since the last update, I’ve seen two of the documentaries (Hell and Back Again and If A Tree Falls, the two available on Netflix streaming), as well as Warrior and A Separation. That brings me down to a total of 46 flicks left to see! My weekend plans include Hugo and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close for sure. Might also suck it up and go get War Horse out of the way. Speaking of which, I can’t think of the last time there was a Best Picture nominee I wanted to see less than War Horse. I really hope it’s not actually as torturous as it feels like it will be.
Go Giants!
Updated 2/10: An amazing victory for the Giants in the Super Bowl seems to have foreshadowed a slowed pace in movie watching this past week. Only saw 5 more films: A Better Life (awesome), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (terrible), Hugo (average), Ides of March (also awesome) and My Week With Marilyn (underwhelming), which brings me down to one less than the Meaning of Life movies to see (i.e. 41).
I’m not usually one to pat myself on the back for a job well done, but I’m far too elated to concern myself with modesty right at this moment.
What has me so pleased, you ask? Today, for the first time in my adult life, I am debt free. Without debt. Zero dollars owed. My credit cards are goose-egged and I owe nothing!
This screen capture doesn’t really tell the whole story, of course. I pulled it from Mint and that only has my data going back as far as March 2009. The truth is that I owed upwards of $30,000 as recently as early 2008, steadily accumulated from the time I got my first credit card as a college freshman in 1996. Poor spending habits and spending well outside my means really bit me in the ass for a long, long time.
I suppose that at the end of the day, getting out from under a mountain of debt like that isn’t a particularly heroic act. It’s a little like setting fire to your neighbor’s house and wondering why they didn’t thank you with a nice zucchini bread after you saved them from the flaming wreckage. That said, it’s still a satisfying personal victory. Seeing your debts totally outstrip your income is an imposing sight. It’s scary and it feels like the process of getting rid of that debt will never end, that you’ll just be paying it off well into your golden years. No matter how much you pay (or can afford to pay), it always feels like the process is going too slow. Just keep at it and don’t lose your cool.
Be still my beating heart: The Black Keys have a new album coming out on December 6th.
Inexplicably, I was lukewarm on last year’s Brothers when it came out.1 It took me a few months to realize just how wrong I had been, by which point everyone I pestered about the album had just kind of moved on to something else, robbing me of my chance to engage other music lovers in the right-on-brother-ain’t-THAT-the-truth of “Next Girl“2 or the sleazy stripper shuffle of “Howlin’ For You.”3
So how did Las Teclas de Negro 4 announce their new album? With that ridiculous video up there of Bob Odenkirk selling a used van.
Which leads us nicely to the actual cover art.
Clearly, the Keys are way funnier than their music indicates. That said, I thought Brothers had a pretty funny cover, too, which is why I think they probably should have gone with something like this:
On second thought, their idea is way better.
In my defense, I still think 2008′s Attack & Release is a better album. ↩
There is nothing inherently funny about The Black Keys. They write bluesy rock and they cover a lot of familiar territory within the genre, lyrically speaking; heartbreak, lying, cheating, desire and repentance. That said, the video for “Next Girl” is possibly one of the funniest things I’ve seen all year. It features a Tyrannosaurus puppet as a lip syncing Casanova, wandering around a hipstamatastic poolside setting, cast full of bikini clad babes vying for the adorable dinosaur’s attention. When a tattooed beauty licks the lascivious lizard’s long snout, it sets off a cat fight that would normally mark the inevitably awkward moment in a story driven porn when the acting bits transition into the sex bits. While this Southern California homage to Caligula takes place, a crawl at the bottom of the screen details the battle between the band and the label over creative control of the video, admitting that “The Black Keys hate this video and don’t find it funny at all” and “they disavow any responsibility for it and with you would stop watching.” ↩
Another transcendently great video, this time using the tune as the trailer music for a grindhouse flick about a sexy assassin named Alexa Wolff hell bent on exacting revenge on the man who killed her father. There’s too much awesome here to speak of, but a couple of favoritelines include “bad guys beware: she’ll bang ya, but then… she’ll hang ya” and “I once choked a chupacabra to death for not saying grace.” Honestly, it’s a minor tragedy that this isn’t actually being made into a film. Can we get a Kickstarter project going to raise the funds for this or something? ↩
You didn’t watch the “Howlin’ For You” video, did you? ↩