The Artist
To understand this post it helps to have read the last few posts (sic: a blog is a push-down stack). A dear friend an email friend of mine told me earlier in the day that she could hardly wait to see “The Artist”. I need not tell you that it is typical of people to have certain opinions about films not yet in official distribution. I downloaded the film. I watched it. I deleted it. It was worth watching but it isn’t a keeper for me.
The previous post was a snapshot of Internet traffic. It does not tell us what the “video” is but right now a portion of the traffic is “The Artist”. Bits and clips are on YouTube. NetFlix is huge.
Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) is an American provider of on-demand Internet streaming media in the United States, Canada,[5] Latin America, the Caribbean, United Kingdom and Ireland and flat rate DVD-by-mail in the United States. The company was established in 1997 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California. It started its subscription-based digital distribution service in 1999[6] and by 2009 it was offering a collection of 100,000 titles on DVD and had surpassed 10 million subscribers. On February 25, 2007, Netflix announced the billionth DVD delivery.[7] In April 2011, Netflix announced 23.6 million subscribers.[8] By 2011, the total digital revenue for Netflix reached $1.5 billion.[9] Netflix launched in the UK and Ireland on January 9, 2012.
Besides YouTube and NetFlix who are “safe” there is a lot less safe or legal “data in the stream”. This is not speculation. It’s DATA.
I just watched “The Artist”. It’s a silent film. I can’t dare say it’s “gawd awful” but it’s no “Midnight in Paris”. It is “gawd awful”.
Woody Allen can pull that sort of “outside the box” stunt off. B&W. Time travel. He just did that in his last movie. But Woody does his stunts without pretense. Every film is just another one of his little $2,000,000 one/yr movies. He does give his films a happy ending or any other focus group spin/fix to cover production costs. The Artist was $12,000,000. The mix of french actors and B-level english actors does not work. And what is the movie about? By now we know Woody isn’t going to solve the problem “about dying” but we know he’ll have some fun with the question. The lines he has Hemingway saying in his Paris flick will have you lol. As an extra in a 5-minute visual feast he tells us how clever of the french were to abandon the Britiish at Dunkirk in May and to surrender in June 1940 and save Paris. Hencetherefore Paris was not bombed by the Germans nor the U.S.A.F. during WWII. That’s why it’s so beautiful – unlke Berlin which was – and isn’t. Beautiful.
Excuse me: there were French men and women who believed that the main body of the French armed forces had surrendered too willingly. At the time of the surrender, the Germans took 1.8 million (!) French soldiers prisoner. They still had 2x the tanks, heavy guns, aircraft. It was not for nothing that Marc Bloch (1886-1944, when he was shot by the Gestapo) entitled his book on the 1940 campaign and surrender a "Strange Defeat".
Without prejudice: "Cheese-eating, wine guzzling, soap dodging, mutiny Monkeys", since N.. General Schwarzkopf said on Iraq that "Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without an accordian. All you leave behind is a load of noisy baggage".
What is there creative in ignoring modern filmmaking techniques? Instead we have a nothing new monochromatic palette and soundscape of silence. That’s how movies used to be shot. It is 2011 ODD but The Artist is as conventional as a late night B-Movie can be. Michel Hazanavicius’ took a simplistic approach to storytelling and it works at first then it starts to bore me. I’d say “The Artist” was a technical exercise first, a movie second— with a tacked on happy ending. The result is undeniably pleasant. Few will be safe from the movie’s bombardment of silent but deadly charm. But there’s nothing to think about or remember 15 minutes and 15 miles from the Exit.
===============================================
I won’t be surprised if it picks up a few Oscars. Yes it’s “french cookin’ but it dies in the last reel – I hope what we’re seeing is not “The Directors Cut”. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe like “Blade Runner” it will become a cult film and be re-released. But I don’t think so.
iStarBadger
