Movies: The Artist

"The Artist" is a film directed by Michel Hazanavicius. It tells the story of a silent film actor who finds himself kicked to the curb when Hollywood transitions to the talkies. Here, I'll let some stills from the movie tell the story:

 

Nearly the entire movie is silent (with the exception of two sequences); that means no sound effects, no dialogue, just the film score. It's not a new gimmick, of course, and the movie's story is nowhere near the classic silent films of yesteryear (I'd put "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," "Metropolis," and "Safety Last" against any movie, past or present). Still, it is quite a creative risk to make a silent movie in the 21st century, and Michel Hazanavicius pulls it off.

There's a ton of Oscar buzz around "The Artist," which says more about the weak year in cinema than it does about the movie. I found the film a little too meta to be truly entertaining - there are little distracting references to half a dozen classic movies, like "Sunset Boulevard." Heck, they went so far as to completely lift the  love theme from Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" - Kim Novak was not happy.

Rating: 7/10