Yes, it’s a silent film.

Okay, I totally dug The Artist. My review, which can also be found in LGBT Weekly:

Usually, I do a little bit of research about a movie before I see it. At least, I’ll scan the entry on IMDb.com, just so that I have an idea about what I’m about to see – some plot threads, the resumé of the actors or director, and the like. Though I won’t read anyone else’s reviews if I am planning on reviewing it myself; some critics are too good at their job and their arguments cloud mine. But I was very busy the day I saw The Artist, and I went in only knowing that it had been named by the New York Film Critics Society as the best movie of the year. I didn’t even know that the movie was silent, or that it was in black and white.

When I realized about 15 minutes in that both its black and whiteness and its silence were going to last for, probably, the whole film, I thought back to it being named the best film of the year by groups of critics, and I thought, “Well, there must be some avant-garde twist – it’s going to be colorized, or the sound will come in halfway through, or it will turn into a cartoon.” And I waited, and it didn’t happen. No, The Artist is a silent black and white movie, and that’s all that it is.

But it’s an amazingly entertaining black and white silent film, as skillfully made as any movie released this year. The only thing that makes the film modern is the plot, which is meta enough to be called post-modern: It’s a silent film about silent films. It tells the parallel stories of super star silent film actor George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), whose career and life fall apart with the advent of talkies in 1929, and up and coming ingénue Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), whose movie career starts after a chance meeting with Valentin and then sky rockets after sound changes the industry.

The plot is somewhat reminiscent of A Star is Born, but it has very little of the pathos or melodrama of any of the versions of that classic. George’s decline is sad and dark, but silent film, especially one using the style of film of the 1920s, does not lend itself to the sort of subtle realism that contemporary moviegoers expect from their emotional dramas. Instead, the Belgian writer and director Michel Hazanavicius uses bold but not heavy symbolism, expressive and almost mime-like facial expressions, and chiaroscuro cinematography that reminded me, at times, of the shots of Busby Berkeley, Fritz Lang and Orson Welles. With a rollicking, pitch perfect period score by Ludovic Bource, the film really feels as if it was snatched from the late ’20s.

And Dujardin could have been a matinee idol in the 1920s, and if he had been, he would have rivaled either Douglas Fairbanks or Rudolph Valentino, who George is clearly modeled on. Dujardin is not only almost inhumanly handsome, but his ability to emote without a single word and with such gorgeously choreographed gestures and expressions makes his presence on screen simply tantalizing. As sweet and perky as Bejo is as Peppy, whenever Dujardin was gone, I yearned for his return. It’s a stellar performance.

I was surprised by how much I liked The Artist. It is a perfect film. But I am somewhat perplexed by it. Why make a silent film almost exactly as it would have been made in 1929? (I say 1929, not 1928, because there are a few moments of non-musical sound, and that wouldn’t have been possible until the last year of the 1920s.) As I watched The Artist, I wondered whether it was the greatest film school exercise of all time. Then I realized that Hazanavicius was simply paying homage to a period of history and period of art that has been forgotten, and he does it with skill that rivals if not surpasses his idols..

MOVIE REVIEW
The Artist
Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius
Starring Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo and John Goodman
Rated PG-13
Opens Dec. 23
At Landmark Hillcrest

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A dirty shame

Yet again, I am in the distinct minority on a movie. My review of Shame can be found, of course, on the website for San Diego LGBT Weekly, and I’ve pasted the whole thing below.

Shame, Steve McQueen’s dystopian tale of compulsion and sibling conflict, is the most sexually explicit movie I’ve seen since John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus but it is not nearly as interesting, inventive or sexy as Mitchell’s movie. In fact, Shame is about as sexy as taking a cold shower, clothed, while your grandmother sits on the toilet seat and tells you about her dentures. To be fair, Shame is not meant to be sexy, or at least I don’t think it is. In theory, watching the chiseled, intense Michael Fassbender get blown in a gay sex club and have a ménage à trois with two burlesque dancers should be hot, or at least really titillating. But by the point in the film when these scenes arrive, Fassbender’s Brandon Sullivan has shown himself to be so cold, angry and self-hating that McQueen could have sent him running through a field of daisies singing “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning,” and I would have still been depressed.

Brandon works in finance and has a white, spare apartment in a fancy building in the middle of Manhattan. He has sex with every vaguely beautiful woman he meets, and he masturbates all of the time, even at work. His life resembles that of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, except that Brandon feels – wait for it – shame. When his computer at work is taken in for repairs, he immediately fears what will be found on the hard drive, and when he gets caught masturbating by his sister, he becomes enraged. When he tries to have sex with a woman he actually likes and can’t get it up, he’s mortified. I’ve seen articles about Shame that state that Brandon is a sex addict, but this seems like a misreading. He has sex compulsively and with strangers, but when he doesn’t have sex, he doesn’t go through withdrawal. He seems to have sex in order to punish himself; he shows no pleasure in it, not in the hunt, nor in the kill. If he’s addicted to anything, it’s repression.

What Brandon is punishing himself for is never clear, though it has something to do with his younger sister, Sissy, played with ecstatic rawness by Carey Mulligan. The film opens with Brandon playing and deleting Sissy’s answering machine messages, and when she lets herself in and invites herself to stay while she’s in town singing at a couple clubs, he is greatly irritated. She is impulsive and flighty and needy and her arms are covered in scars from cutting herself, but when she sings “New York, New York” slowly, almost as a lament, it’s clear that Sissy is much more in touch with her emotions that Brandon is. Brandon is so unhinged by Sissy because of something from their past, but aside from the reference that they “came from a bad place,” this past event is left to our imagination.

That McQueen and his co-writer Abi Morgan refuse to provide us with the big reveal is probably a rejection of the clichéd plot structures of most psychodramas. This seems ironic to me, because Sissy’s character, Brandon’s self-flagellation and making gay and group sex akin to an addict’s rock bottom are as clichéd as the phrase “done to death.” As beautiful as McQueen’s visuals are and as well as he directed the cast, the film just isn’t as profound and moving as Brandon’s final breakdown indicates it is supposed to be.

That said, when Fassbender commits to an emotion, he is mesmerizing; he’s a third Lawrence Olivier, a third Al Pacino, a third Christian Bale. Even if Brandon is the least attractive character he’s played this year (I’d take his Rochester in Jane Eyre, thank you very much), it is the most striking and the bravest performance. He has been widely tapped to receive his first Oscar nomination for Shame, and it will be deserved.

Shame
Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by Abi Morgan and Steve McQueen
Starring Michael Fassbender, Carey Mulligan, and James Badge Dale
Rated NC-17
At Landmark Hillcrest

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Why don’t I like Scorcese?

My latest review is up at San Diego LGBT Weekly. If you can’t be bothered to click over, I’ve posted the whole thing below:

I may lose all credibility as a film critic by admitting that I am not much of a Martin Scorsese fan. Aside from The Departed, I’ve never actually enjoyed one of his films, even if I’ve respected them. There’s no doubt that he is a technical genius – his scene settings and camera work are visionary and sometimes thrilling, and he’s directed some actors to some great performances – but his stories tend toward either the violent or the extravagant or extravagantly violent. Scorsese does not believe in subtlety, and I don’t like to be bombarded by my art. I understand why his fans are his fans, but he just doesn’t make the kinds of movies that move me. Perhaps this is why I was in awe of his latest film, the extravagant Hugo, but I am not in love with it.

Hugo has been described as his first children’s film, and it is based on the Caldicot Award-winning novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, written by Brian Selznick, who is gay and lives in La Jolla. The story follows Hugo, an orphaned boy (Asa Butterfield) living in the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s. He spends his time tending to the station’s many clocks, stealing food, and avoiding the station’s inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), who gets his kicks catching children and sending them to orphanages. He also is trying to fix a robot-like “automaton,” which his father (Jude Law) had found in an attic of a museum before he was killed in a fire. When a very grumpy toy shop owner named Georges (Ben Kingsley) catches Hugo trying to steal a wind-up mouse, Georges takes Hugo’s notebook, which is full of drawings Hugo’s father did of the automaton. For some reason, the notebook profoundly upsets Georges, and Hugo’s quest to retrieve it leads to a friendship with Georges’s goddaughter (Chloë Grace Moretz) and to, well, an adventure. It’s a movie for children, after all.

Except that I can’t imagine very many children being entertained by Hugo. The beauty of the art direction (by the great Dante Ferretti), the truly great 3-D cinematography, and Cohen’s slapstick comedy, particularly during the many chase scenes, will widen some children’s eyes. But the plot is a very slow build, and neither Butterfield nor Moretz are particularly charismatic or well directed. That the story ultimately revolves around rehabilitating the career of a great silent film director doesn’t help. For Scorsese’s fans, the film within a film and the numerous homages to some of early cinema’s most iconic moments will lead to him being called genius, yet again.

Hugo is a rather good movie. Its technical brilliance is the main reason, but the performances of Kingsley and Cohen are the other. Kingsley is incapable of a bad performance; his seriousness of purpose, his deliberateness and his ability to communicate five or six complex emotions when he is just silently sitting on a stool. And Cohen’s physical comedy has never been doubted, but this is the first time I have seen him subdued enough to be truly likeable. Perhaps, this is where Scorcese is actually subtle, in turning Borat into someone a little bit like Charlie Chaplin.

Hugo
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by John Logan
Starring Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley and Sacha Baron Cohen
Rated PG
At your multiplex
In 3-D

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A lesson is how to do everything wrong

J. Edgar is a lesson is how to do everything wrong. My review is here, and here.

As 20th century American politicians go, J. Edgar Hoover is tied with Richard Nixon on the evil-o-meter. Only Joe McCarthy beats them. A megalomaniacal red-baiter who destroyed countless lives and probably made the United States no less secure for the trouble, McCarthy had no redeeming qualities. Hoover and Nixon – both craven, cynical and paranoid – were, as it happens, also rather efficient civil servants.

Nixon helped create the Environmental Protection Agency, orchestrated détente with China and continued Kennedy and Johnson’s push for civil rights. And Hoover basically invented the FBI as we know it. In his 48 years running it, Hoover transformed the bureau from an unarmed, ad hoc mini-division of the Justice Department into the enormous, hugely powerful, mostly do-good crime-fighting machine it is today.

But as Nixon had Vietnam and Watergate, Hoover spent decades stomping on civil liberties, breaking laws in petty revenge schemes and blackmailing politicians to protect his fiefdom and get his way. And he was probably gay, making him yet another queer historical figure we don’t want to claim (like Ernst Röhm, Roy Cohn, and President James Buchanan). Many people, me included, were surprised when Oliver Stone presented Tricky Dick as a complicated, misunderstood man in 1995’s Nixon; and I think there will be similar reactions to Clint Eastwood and Dustin Lance Black’s sympathetic portrait of Hoover in J. Edgar. The main difference here is that Nixon was a pretty good movie, and aside from Leonardo DiCaprio’s stirring physical transformation into the late FBI director, J. Edgar is somewhat of a slog.

I was surprised, because Clint Eastwood is American film’s great living formalist. He is famous for his efficient direction, for not doing too many takes or tricking his actors into unexpected emotions. He doesn’t do the visual and editing tricks of Stone, Scorsese, Spielberg, Fincher or Van Sant. His calmly old-fashioned, straight-forward direction is impeccably perfect for self-contained stories likeUnforgiven, Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino. But when it comes to the sprawling story of Hoover – which covers more than five decades, multiple aging characters and complex political and personal machinations – Eastwood’s style is ill-fitting. I kept waiting to be surprised or moved, but instead I got a history lesson; the movie was just too staid, too pedantic and too safe.

Black’s screenplay is greatly at fault. Structurally, it takes the most clichéd approach. In the late 1960s, Hoover is dictating the story of the FBI to a series of junior agents (including, bizarrely, Gossip Girl’s Ed Westwick), and the tales become undated flashbacks. The flashbacks extend into Hoover’s personal life, which we must assume he’s not telling anyone at the FBI about, because this includes his creepy relationship with his mother (Dame Judi Dench) and his less creepy, but much less clear relationship with his deputy and sidekick, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer). The sprawl of the story includes major subplots on the Lindbergh kidnapping, infighting with Bobby Kennedy and the loyalty of his long-time assistant, Helen Gandy, played by a criminally underutilized Naomi Watts.

But what is connecting all of this? What is the psychological, emotional or historical thread that tells us what made Hoover tick? It’s never clear. We don’t get Hearst’s Rosebud like in Citizen Kane or Harvey Milk’s deep sense of justice and optimism like in Black’s most excellent script for Milk. It’s almost as if Black didn’t want to take a stand. As to whether or not Hoover was gay, or whether the rumors of his cross-dressing were true, he manages to take the dull, middle road. Stone, for whatever his failings, always took the risk and took a stand. Even if JFK and Nixon weren’t accurate, they were entertaining.

J. Edgar
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Written by Dustin Lance Black
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts and Armie Hammer
Rated R
At your local multiplex

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