The Artist

Excellent movie! Incidentally, does anyone else feel like the PG-13 rating had less to do with the official reason, one middle finger and a "disturbing image", and more to do with how Everybody Smokes and Everybody Drinks in the movie?

Yes, I do. This is the type of movie you can take the whole family to. It's got everything: action, romance, comedy, drama and a cute little dog.

And the dog got a Golden Globe!

I haven't seen this yet but I really want to. It's only showing at the Arc Light and their tickets are absurdly expensive.

I really want to see this film.

After I saw the beautiful trailer and read interviews from the director, it's obvious he has quite a passion for the era the film represents, and it's awesome how painstakingly the feel of the era is recreated on screen.

Another thing that really impresses me is Ludovic Bource's romantic and deep score which faces the gargantuan task of supporting the film and serving its emotional needs in ways which scores in "talkie" films just can't match quite as well, and the music as painstakingly loyal to the era as the film itself is (I can't help but admire his efforts to pay tribute in orchestration and instrumentation to the great composers of the Golden Age of Hollywood film scores and how well he weaves those mannerisms into an enjoyable package).

I'm mixed on whether or not this is a movie you have to see in theaters. The orchestral instrumentation is amazing, but you could probably manage that with most home sound systems. It is a movie that works best without a lot of background noise. I got lucky in that our theater had no boisterous or crying little kids and very little of people noisily consuming food but I feel like watching it at home, there will be a lot more of things like traffic going by, fighting cats, family going about the house, etc, that would distract from the movie.

When I saw it, the people behind me did an entire play-by-play of the movie. It was alternately annoying and amusing.

I manage the perfect experience would be to have live musical accompaniment. Maybe one of these days, Ludovic Bource will have a world tour of the film with him conducting a live orchestra. Carmine Coppola (Francis's dad) did this with the 1927 Napoleon in the 1980's and it was quite successful.

Great film, I loved how they used sound to show how the world was evolving. The last scene was increadibly memorable not just because it was a great dance number.

I do find it interesting that none of the ads for this promote it as a silent movie, I went into it expecting it to be about silent movies but not knowing it was basically a silent movie in and of itself.

For others that have seen silent movies before, the "mugging" that they were talking about actors doing (that they were obviously using in this movie itself) as a stand-in for dialouge, I know that must have been prevelent, but how prevelent was it for them to mouth a lot of the dialouge and not actually put the words up after like they did in this movie a lot? It seemed quite creative, but I have no idea if that was the style for all movies back then, or just the good ones, or if it was used at all.

I recall Frau Im Mond having a lot of "dialogue" and very few title cards. It's pretty common.

It does kind of impress upon you how little of a movie's dialogue is that important. So much of it is the little incidental conversations that just serve to pass time.

During the nightmare scene, I was impressed that the sound effects sounded authentic as well, not quite true to life but instead mixed in one place and inserted afterwards by someone who's still figuring out what sounds right in a movie. Although, I'll admit that it put a bit of a scare in me that the rest of the movie might become a talkie to keep up with the times.

edited 27th Jan '12 5:50:19 AM by FuzzyBoots

It's one of the films that I'm really sad I didn't get round to seeing in the cinema. I'm spend too much time looking at film in history you could say, yet this is likely a film I'd like because it's more than your average throwback. I loved Sight and Sound's write-up of it too...

edited 27th Jan '12 6:57:31 AM by TheSollerodFascist

The idiot next to me in the theater was apparently uncomfortable with the old-fashioned atmosphere of the movie because he kept feeling the need to reconnect with the modern world by CONSTANTLY CHECKING HIS FUCKING TEXT MESSAGES.

*fumes*

Anyway, I'm very glad I saw this in the theaters. It's such a wonderful throwback, it would be a shame to watch it on something as modern as a home television set.

Yeah, I found that weird, too. On the other hand, it's not unreasonable to assume that modern audiences shun silents like the plague. One of the people I went with, the one sitting next to me, whispered, "Oh thank god," during the dream sequence when George put the glass down.

Considering that there aren't a huge number of movies about silents, isn't it kind of a funny coincidence that two of them came out in the same season of the same year?

To be fair, this one was finished for a while before Oscar season (it premiered at Cannes in May and had a summer release in France).

Really glad this won Best Picture, because it certainly deserved it. I agree with whoever said it makes us realize how we take dialogue for granted. This movie makes you pay attention to the screen; not with flashy graphics or Fanservice, but with a story told through visuals. It doesn't need dialogue. Except at the very end. Powerful moment, that.

You don't need to see it in a theatre. Just see it.

I didn't like the end. After such a complicated, subtle, beautiful film, it felt like a bit of a cheap gag.

I teared up when he fired his valet...