The Artist

***included in Brian's Best and Worst of 2011***

Back in September, I stumbled across OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies.  I had seen the DVD cover art before and curiosity finally got the better of me, so I watched it with little to no foreknowledge.  I was treated to a likable and extremely clever (but not as funny) French spoof of 1960s spy movies.  The cleverness of the story made me extremely curious to see more of the director, Michel Hazanavicius, and the star, Jean Dujardin.  As luck would have it, the most acclaimed film of 2011 happened to be The Artist, which paired the star and director once more.

...and the director's wife, who was also in OSS 117.  Nepotism leads to Oscar nominations.

In 1927, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a huge silent film star.  Everything he touches seems to turn to gold, and his skills seem to apply equally to romances, action/adventure flicks, and comedies.

George Valentin: Eastern Orthodox Hollywood icon

One day, while posing for pictures outside his most recent film premiere, George is accidentally bumped by a young lady in the crowd, Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo).  Being a suave celebrity, George opts not to punch her in the face, and instead laughs it off and poses for pictures with Peppy, to the delight of all.  Seriously, look at that crowd, they're acting like they're at a bachelorette party.

My personal favorite is the woman by his elbow

Peppy happens to be an aspiring actress that idolizes George.  She manages to get a role as an extra on one of George's movies, and the two show a lot of chemistry and sexual attraction. In fact, the two almost act upon that attraction, but the moment passed and so they went on with their lives.  Young Peppy started to work her way up in the movie business, while George took a slightly different approach.  When the head of the movie studio (John Goodman) shows George a prototype of a film with a vocal track, George scoffs at it, declaring it a toy.  From that point forward, George is fighting a losing battle against the idea of sound in film while Peppy --- being an up-and-comer --- wisely rides the "talkies" to fame and fortune.

I suppose there's a bit more to the story than the rise of one performer and the fall of another, but that's the plot in a nutshell.  If it sounds familiar to you, that's because it should; this basic premise has been used many times over.  What separates The Artist from, say, All About Eve is the choice to make this movie about a silent film actor into a silent film.  To be fair, it's not entirely silent; there are a handful of words spoken and some interesting sequences where sound was selectively added, but the movie on the whole plays like a classic silent movie (just with superior film stock).

The silent movie schtick may seem like a gimmick at first, but it loses that feel after watching Jean Dujardin on camera for a little while.  I don't know if he will ever be able to transform into a Hollywood star (his accent is pretty thick --- not a deal-breaker, but still...), but Dujardin was wonderful in The Artist.  I can't pinpoint exactly why I liked him so much without making it sound like a backhanded compliment, though.  Dujardin is able to act like the stereotype of a mediocre actor; he has expressive eyebrows and a giant smile, which he utilizes in most of his "on-camera" scenes in this film.  He also conveys some very realistic emotions quite subtly in other moments.  It was a well thought out performance that was executed nearly perfectly.

Bonus points for not being stereotypically movie drunk

Bérénice Bejo was likable as the blossoming star, Peppy, but her character wasn't all that deep.  She wanted to be a star, she achieved that goal, and she wanted to help her friend.  We don't actually have to care about her character very much at all --- we just have to understand what she represents to George Valentin.  I think that was a missed opportunity.  Still, she did have her moments; I really liked the playful scene where she pretended to be romanced by Valentin's coat.

How ugly do you have to be to require this much work?

John Goodman was, as always, a welcome addition to the cast.  His character was pretty simple, but Goodman has made a career out of making simple characters entertaining to watch.  I think James Cromwell was under-appreciated for his turn as the loyal manservant to Valentin; Cromwell often is cast as a harsh authority figure, and it was nice to see him playing such a sweet character.  I was a little surprised by how many recognizable Hollywood actors played small roles in The Artist.  Penelope Ann Miller essentially just defaced George Valentin memorabilia whenever she was on camera, Missi Pyle was suitably obnoxious as a famous actress, Malcolm McDowell just sat in a scene, Ed Lauter showed up just long enough for his face to ring a bell, and Ken Davitian managed to not be involved in a penis-related gag for a change.  Perhaps the biggest scene-stealer in the film was Uggie, the dog.  The sequences with Uggie were certainly cute, and the animal is clearly very well-trained.  That said, it's a dog; get over it, America.

***whimper***

Dujardin's excellent acting certainly goes a long way toward making the whole silent-film-thing less of a gimmick and more of an interesting choice, but it is the direction of Michel Hazanavicius that truly makes The Artist and interesting film to watch.  There are very few directors currently working who are willing to make interesting choices while making a film.  Those choices don't necessarily have to work (Malick, I'm looking at you), but their films are usually made far more enjoyable when they do.  Hazanavicius took a high concept and managed to add a solid story and some excellent acting to it.  While I like the choice he made, I still think the story is a bit weak and uses the silence to help mask that problem.  On the other hand, Hazanavicius also used the silence to convey some not especially subtle, but still easily overlooked character moments.  I really liked that Penelope Ann Miller was wearing a different piece of jewelry in each of her scenes; the audience knows she's unhappy because she keeps marking up every picture of George she can find, but I thought that was a nice additional touch.  What I truly appreciated in the film was Hazanavicius' frame composition.  It pops up periodically throughout the movie, but the symbolism on the movie studio staircase after Valentin was fired was gorgeous.  The Artist is a movie that understands film style and uses it to convey ideas with images, instead of through exposition, and that was a bit of a treat for me.

The Artist is a very clever film that deserves accolades for daring to do things differently.  Are you going to like it?  Well...that's a tough call.  On the plus side, it is a huge change of pace from anything else that came out last year.  It is also well-acted and well-directed, so if you like examining cinematography or acting subtleties, this should be a good time for you.  On the other hand, it is still a silent movie, and that might make the film drag at times for the less snobby film fan.  It's certainly a cute movie, but it doesn't have a whole lot of depth; the best trait The Artist has is just how clever it is, but that might not be a strong enough selling point for everyone.

Surrogates

I'm a dork. No, really, you can pick your jaw up off the floor. It's shocking, but true. Even with my near-encyclopedic knowledge of all things geeky in the movie world, I was surprised to find out that Surrogates was based on a comic book series for the same name. Even more shocking, I had never heard of the people that made this comic. Hell, I'd never even heard of the comic's publisher. Are those good signs or bad signs, I wonder?

Surrogates takes place in the future. Well, maybe. A year isn't given, but the introductory scenes give us several news reports with "Fourteen years ago" and the like given for reference, counting down until we have reached the present day. Congratulations, everybody! The present day has android robot things! Just like 1957 predicted! Let's just say that this takes place in an alternate reality and leave the question of time for another day. In the present day, people don't interact face-to-face (hey, you're reading a blog, so you know that), they use a robotic proxy called a surrogate to live their lives. These surrogates look like people, but have android insides, so you can drink ranch dressing all day, e'er day at home and the person that everyone sees is your perfect bodied surrogate. Basically, you lie down in a tanning bed (with scientific things touching your head) and you project your consciousness into the surrogate. That means there is now no violent crime or sexually transmitted diseases. Best of all, overweight male internet perverts who like to pose as naughty schoolgirls in chatrooms can now have a naughty schoolgirl surrogate --- your surrogate doesn't have to look anything like you.  Hooray!

And that's a key point. The movie begins with a surrogate being destroyed by a weapon wielded by a non-robotic person. Ordinarily, that would just be an inconvenience for the user. This time, though, the weapon somehow killed the user, miles away. Obviously, a weapon that can kill someone through their supposedly risk-proof surrogate is a big deal, so the FBI take the case. Agent Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) and Agent Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell) begin by following the clues. The only surrogate-unfriendly folks around are in the Dread Reservation (named, I hope, because they don't wash their hair) and are lead by the charismatic (and humbly) titled Prophet (Ving Rhames). The possible motive for the crime gets a little more complicated when Agent Greer learns that the dead surrogate is the son of the creator of surrogates, Lionel Canter (James Cromwell), and the son was using one of Lionel's usual surrogates that night. So, was the murder due to philosophical and religious reasons, or was it an attempt for a rival to eliminate Lionel from the business world? Or was it something completely different?

Okay, I have to ask. Shouldn't this movie have been named "Avatar"? Sure, I understand why that might have been a copyright issue, but the concepts behind this and that Smurf movie are pretty similar. In both cases, people get hooked up to a machine and live their lives through an artificially made creature. I would have thought that, with the obvious social commentary in this movie, that they would have chosen "Avatar" as a nod to the digital age. To be fair, this is an adaptation of a comic book, so I guess it should be the writers of the comic that are criticized for their vocabulary. Why do I care? I just enjoy when obviously different movies share identical titles, like The Patriot --- one had Mel Gibson (accent-free Aussie), while another had Steven Seagal (charisma-free lawman). You would think that Seagal was riding on Gibson's coattails here, releasing some straight-to-DVD crap in the hopes that someone would rent his movie by accident, but no. SS beat MG to the punch by two years. The more you know...!

Back to the movie at hand. I wasn't terribly impressed by the parts that made up Surrogates. Yes, Bruce Willis is a pretty solid actor, but he is no guarantee of a good movie (does The Jackal ring any bells?). I'm not quite sure why Radha Mitchell keeps getting cast in so many movies as a female lead. She's not super attractive and she has the kind of range you usually need to be smoking hot to get away with. At least here, she has an excuse for being disconnected from her character, since it's a surrogate. The rest of the cast spends relatively little time onscreen. Ving Rhames, who is often able to salvage a bad movie by being completely awesome, wasn't able to deliver here; perhaps his power is derived from his baldness and his huge dread-locked wig and cotton candy-sized beard acted as an awesomeness buffer between him and the camera. James Cromwell is fine, even if his character is the source of so much of this movie's stupidity. Rosamund Pike, who plays Agent Greer's wife, is supposed to act as the story's emotional anchor, but instead supplies the film with most of its sappiness.

I think it's pretty clear that I wasn't a fan of director Jonathan Mostow's work with his cast. I did like the look and pace of the movie, though. In fact, I really liked the first forty minutes or so, to the point where I was starting to think that I had discovered an under-appreciated gem. In that time span, the movie introduces a murder mystery, dipped deep inside of a sci-fi world, that did not appear to have anything in particular to say about that robot world. The technology introduced was pretty cool and it is a logical extension of what we already do as a society. I found it interesting that all of the main characters (except for Lionel) use surrogates that look very much like themselves. It's a little weird that Greer's surrogate has a head of blond hair on Bruce Willis' noggin, but I find it hilarious that Greer would choose a haircut and hairline that resemble no haircut Bruce Willis has had in the past thirty years. Some of the little touches are pretty cool, too, like police officers getting night vision upgrades.

And then...something dumb happened. Have you ever watched a movie where the bad guy is ridiculously stupid? I'm not talking about the normal James Bond-esque monologuing (although there is a bit of that), I'm talking about a villain taking steps early in the movie to ensure that the hero would end up foiling his evil plot. Do you want to know stupid? Here's stupid --- the villain, at one point, tells Agent Greer that he is too late, and that nothing can halt his evil plan now. That ignores the fact that there is plenty of time for Agent Greer to halt the evil plan, and he can thank the villain for committing suicide and forcing him to not waste precious seconds in witty hero-villain banter.

That's some stupid stuff, but I would have been more forgiving if the film had stayed on its hard-boiled crime route. Instead, the second half of the film spends a lot of time focusing on Greer's marriage and the difficulty they are having dealing with the death of their young son. Boo! Screw that noise! If I wanted to watch a movie about grieving parents, I wouldn't have selected the movie with androids. Detective stories are, almost by definition, all about the mystery. This movie starts out as a detective yarn, but then starts worrying about feelings, about the least detective-y things imaginable. And to make it worse, it was a clumsy and painfully transparent subplot.

The imagination shown in the film's first half ends up coming back to haunt it in the second half.  I liked that workaholics just leave their surrogates to charge at work; why waste time bringing them home, if your next move in the morning will be back at work?  That cleverness just got my mind working, which helped me notice a lot of failed opportunities for similar future design.  Riddle me this: why would surrogates need to drive cars? Why not build models with rocket-propelled roller blades in their feet? Or design some sort of tube technology; if personal safety is no longer an issue, public transportation has a lot of fresh opportunities. They could even ride in buses that treat the surrogates like luggage. In short, having a robot drive an SUV in the city seems like a waste of fuel and space.

The absolute worst thing about this movie is that it could have been so cool. Before it settled for a B-movie plot at the forty-minute mark, this movie was full of ideas and felt like a robotic noir. From what I understand, the film takes several severe liberties with the source material, so this could be blames on the writers, John Brancato and Michael Ferris, who worked with Mostow on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Bad screenplays are nothing new to Brancato and Ferris; they share partial screenwriting and story credits for Catwoman. Still, the movie, like a hillbilly child, had potential until it got involved with the wrong sort of people, so I will be generous and give it