Build Your Own Review: The Artist

The Artist, a film so adored that the discovery that some people thought it less than awesome was considered newsworthy in some quarters. A film so sophisticated that The Daily Telegraph felt it appropriate to point and laugh at the dirty proles who just didn’t get it. The film that made it easy for pseuds to pretend they were big fans of silent movies all along, when really they were just happy to have a French movie where they didn’t have to read too many subtitles. As everybody knows, with the exception of The Daily Telegraph‘s made-up mob of baffled scousers, The Artist is a silent movie (with synchronised musical soundtrack), and this is apparently a very daring and innovative thing, because nobody watches silent movies any more: generally, people seem surprised that The Artist is not unwatchable or incomprehensible, so it is at the very least a good thing that it has swung some spotlight back onto the silent period. Will it see an increase in the sales of Douglas Fairbanks boxsets? Who knows. Whatever your thoughts on the film, it rode into town on the bank of a mass of critical acclaim, and was met with a more varied set of responses. In advance of an all-out backlash, I offer up one of my (not-actually-)patented Build Your Own Review posts. Not sure what to make of the film, and frustrated by partisan reviews? Then collate your own mixed response from the entries below. Choose mostly option 1 if you found The Artist to be a joyous celebration of filmy goodness, and mostly option 2 if you’re a curmudgeonly, dessicated old git. Probably.

Midnight in Paris

This brief review of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris will be very Allenesque. By that, I don’t mean that it will be packed with urbane, occasionally surreal witticisms about relationships, but rather that I’ll be borrowing whole sections of it from the last review I wrote of a Woody Allen film. Names will be changed, but I’ll be able to save time and energy by just copying and pasting directly from the previous article, which was mostly about Spectacular Attractions favourite Naomi Watts‘s performance in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Borrowed passages are highlighted in blue. 

In 2012 Hollywood will turn its back on you…

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Spectacular Attractions Video Podcast #002

 

In the second of a trio of videos about Stanley Kubrick’s film, this week’s podcast is an audio-visual race through Marvel Comics’ adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Fragment #35: Rudolf Arnheim on Lotte Reiniger

It is not easy to make fairy tales come alive for the eye as well as the ear, because the magic power with which children imagine what is told them is too easily paralysed by every image they see. Even the witchcraft of the film hardly ever matches the superior buoyancy of youthful imagination; in the pretty fairy tale films by Starewicz, the artistically constructed animals have something frighteningly robotic about them: they are uncanny, sleepwalking little machines. Lotte Reiniger utilises the ideal technique, the silhouette film. The silhouette is not as close to reality as a three-dimensional thing, no matter how imaginatively it may be thought out. It thus spares the viewer, particularly the child viewer, the fear that sets in when the fairy tale passes a certain point of vividness and becomes tangible reality. The moveable silhouette charmingly maintains the right balance between the product of art and life; we believe it enough to be enthralled, and we do not believe it enough to get the goose bumps we get when experiencing the supernatural.

Lotte Reiniger films Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle, developing an incredibly expressive outline as she goes. The swinging link chain that forms a tall Negro prince, the little velvet ball that rolls across the screen as Doctor Dolittle or his lazy piglet, the grotesque disproportionateness of a giraffe’s body and the slender elegance of a sparrow – the plucky scissors cut lively curves in the black paper, and living beings arise in pleasingly rounded, elegant forms. Everything is caricatured, but with so much sensitivity to the real nature of each creature that the accentuation never becomes a distortion.

When we keep in mind that the artist never sees one movement during the shooting, but moves limb for limb millimetre by millimetre on her animating table, and that every gesture must be pieced together from a hundred individual little pictures in one long process, it is almost unbelievable to behold how, when the work of months of patience flies by in seconds on-screen, every figure acts just right. The apes swing from the branches, the duck waddles, hurried and plump, the lion, a pompous heraldic animal, proudly sways his behind, the wave sprays, and the snow falls softly to the ground. It must be a very happy feeling for Lotte Reiniger, similar to when a musician hears his mute-born child for the first time, to see the unwieldy piece of carton – laboriously patched together with wires, and without the guidance of a human hand – dancing lively, amazing dances up on the screen, full of life as nature itself, and yet bound by the gracious style of her most charming personal designs.

Rudolf Arnheim (1928) Film Essays and Criticism. p.141-2.

Spectacular Attractions Video Podcast #001

This week, I present the first of what I hope will develop into a regular series of short video podcasts. Last year, I experimented with ten audio podcasts, most of which adapted posts previously published on this blog. As much as I enjoyed making those shows, I missed being able to show images and clips, so this is an opportunity to refer very directly to particular scenes from films; sometimes I’ll analyse a single clip, and other times the subject will be more of a video essay like this first entry, which revisits a post about Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can read the original entry here, but I really wanted to start with something familiar to get used to the editing software. I’m using iMovie for now, but might progress to something more complex if needed. This equipment serves my purposes for now.

I plan to follow this with two more short videos about 2001, and then a broader variety of films. If time allows, new video podcasts will appear every fortnight. Feedback on episode #001 would be greatly appreciated:

Spectacular Attractions Video Podcast #001: 2001: A Space Odyssey – This Way Up from Dan North on Vimeo.

The Spectacular Attractions Podcast Archive

Last year, I made a series of ten podcasts, mainly to see if I could. It was time-consuming at first, and though it soon became easier once I got the hang of the software, I didn’t have time to keep it going beyond that run of ten. I’d like to try these again in the future, perhaps with a series of interviews (any tips on how best to record Skype or iChat conversations to make them suitable for podcasts would be greatly appreciated), but the next thing I’m going to try is a video podcast. I’ll probably use some of the same subjects, but being able to use clips will make things much easier for me, and hopefully more interesting for you. In the meantime here, in one place, is the whole collection of Spectacular Attractions podcasts to date. You can listen here, or download to play on your own devices:

• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #1: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick,1968)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #2: Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #3: Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #4: Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #5: Avalon (Mamoru Oshii, 2002)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #6: Gojira (Ishirō Honda, 1954)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #7: Unbreakable (M. Night Shyamalan, 2000)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #8: Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, 2000)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #9: Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
• Spectacular Attractions Podcast #10: City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931)

Halloween Picture of the Week: 125 Vampire Movie Posters

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Here’s the last of my Halloween galleries, this one a bulging, bloody collection of vampire movie posters. Naturally, Dracula, in his many manifestations, is to the fore, dominating the genre, but I think you’ll be surprised at the sheer variety of approaches there have been to the vampire mythology, from the fearful to the romantic, via analogies of contagion and sexuality. View the slideshow above, or scroll down and click on any poster for a larger view.

See also:

• 50 Frankenstein Movie Posters
• 100 Posters of the Living Dead

The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn

Steven Spielberg has owned the rights to the Tintin books since 1983, when they were passed to him by Hergé‘s widow. Apparently, the Belgian author was an admirer of Spielberg’s work, and had indicated that he was the only director who could do the stories justice. Presumably, both Spielberg and Hergé saw common ground between Tintin and Indiana Jones but, if I may be allowed to presume a little further, neither of them can have expected that the finished film would take nearly three decades, and be a fully-CG 3D motion-capture extravaganza on a budget of $130 million. For comparison, Raiders of the Lost Ark had been finished for $18 million, and Hergé’s death coincided with the release of MS Dos 2.0. But while the new film appears on a wave of publicity about its state-of-the art technology, it is also resolutely old-fashioned.

Halloween Picture of the Week: 100 Posters of the Living Dead…

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Last week’s Halloween package of Frankenstein posters proved quite popular, so I hope this is another treat. Not for the squeamish, nor for those who don’t like zombie movie posters, here are 100 (count them!) posters from zombie films, from the voodoo-themed to the splatter-obsessed, the grave to the parodic. The zombie has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in recent years, alongside that other staple of the horror scene, the vampire, but these lumbering undead, single-minded in their pursuit of your delicious brains, haven’t been so open to romanticisation. I hope you enjoy this massive parade of guts and gore.