The Artist (1/5 Stars)

The Artist (1/5 Stars)

The Academy’s annual fuck you to the movie-going public

The ultimate downfall of the artist “The Artist,” is not that its technical attributes are infinitely overrated, it’s that its characters are unlikable and the storyline is infantile, pretentious, and utterly boring.

The plot of “The Artist” couldn’t be simpler. A silent movie star is on top of the world in the middle of the 1920s. He chance meets a young woman who he thinks has got “it.” He fights to get her into a small role in a movie. Then talkies come into play. His career takes a fall as the young woman’s career skyrockets. They switch places. He is driven to unemployment and alcoholism and she saves him because of love, or whatever. That’s the movie. It doesn’t get any more complex than that. In fact, it is just like those old movies from the 1920s in that it isn’t complex at all. This, I would argue, is not only a detriment to this movie but also to the great movies of the 1920s, most of which I have actually seen and do not hold great enthusiasm for. (Good God! What did HE JUST SAY!!!!)

Yes, I said it. The movies of the 1920s, all those black and white silent movies, weren’t the hottest shit ever produced. They were simplistic and amateurish in every technical sense and lacked coherent writing, character development, and what we would call today, realistic acting. This movie is true to those movies in that sense. “The Artist,” is as bad as they were. (I will admit that the quality of stuntwork found in 1920s movies can sometimes parallel or surpass today’s action movies. However, “The Artist,” has no stuntwork. It merely channels the worst excesses of early cinema when nobody knew what the hell they were doing.)

I would posit, first of all, that the very idea of making a silent movie in black and white does not help tell a story. The moviemakers of early cinema made silent movies because they literally couldn’t make them with sound. They would if they could have. It isn’t natural to stop a scene in a movie to read text. It interrupts the flow of a scene and should only be used to break a scene, i.e. to tell a joke. There is such a lack of jokes in this movie that the intercut subtitles become rather tedious. It should also be noted that there is indeed an art to silent movie subtitles, in that the shorter they are, the better. This movie, for all its silent movie glory, does a piss poor job at its subtitles. Some are so long it takes more than a few seconds to read. That is not good. I don’t care if nobody but me has seen a silent movie to know it or not.

The second awful thing about this movie is that it has been done before a million times. The lack of originality is stunning. An established movie star discovers a young talent and their fortunes switch places. Isn’t that the plot of “A Star is Born,” a movie that has already been remade three times (and could be again next year by Clint Eastwood and Beyonce). How about a movie that follows a silent movie star with a ridiculously cheesy smile as he transitions from silent movies to talkies? Have you seen “Singin in the Rain?” Hell, you could draw out a laundry list of shots “The Artist” rips-off as if it were made by a couple of college students making a silent black-and-white version of “Singing in the Rain” as a joke. And gee, where have I seen that cigar-chomping really angry movie producer from before except every other really bad movie ever made involving a movie producer. Even the dog seems entirely cut and pasted from the “Thin Man,” series. Here’s an idea: Go and see those movies instead of this one. Nobody would care about “The Artist,” if it weren’t riding the nostalgic coattails of much better movies. In a few months, this movie will be completely forgotten. Its most memorable quality could be that you can’t say that about most potential Best Picture winners.

But I suppose what really bothered me about, “The Artist,” is its glaring pretentiousness. To the watcher of movies it is without a doubt that the celebrities of the early movie era were egotistically deranged to the extreme. All the Kardashians put together wouldn’t be able to match the delusional importance of some of these creatures (see “Sunset Boulevard”). However, this movie actually treats those early movie stars as if they were indeed so much more important than regular people. Take the instance where the movie star meets the new girl. She simply stands next to him, smiles, and is rewarded by a front-page news story that reads, “WHO’S THAT GIRL?” Really? I mean, who in their right mind (besides movie marketers) would ever care. Or how about the idiotic scene where the movie star imparts some useful advice as to how to become a movie star. “You need something that nobody else has,” he says and then takes a pencil and marks her cheek with a fake mole. Before you know it, she shoots to stardom in a movie titled, “The Beauty Mark.” Oh, all those shots of the audience just laughing it up and adoring her, you would think she shit marble. 

I would argue that if all it takes to become a great movie star is a fake mole on one’s cheek than being a great movie star doesn’t mean jack squat. When the movie actor became suicidal after losing his great movie star status, I can truthfully say I did not care. To me, the attempt was less tragic as it was an unnecessary act motivated solely by vainglory and egotism. That silent movie soundtrack can wail all it wants. I’m not going to be fooled to feel for that shmuck. The woman disgraces feminism in going out of her way to save him. And Hollywood betrays its odious incestual love of itself by declaring the movie as one of the best of the year.

I stop myself now and wonder whether I am taking this movie too seriously. I suppose I cannot ignore the fact that this movie has been nominated for 10 Oscars. If it hadn’t I probably would have given it three stars, remark that it was slightly funny at parts, and easily gone about promptly forgetting it. But 10 Oscars???? Are you fucking kidding me? Did nobody see any other movie that came out this year? “The Artist,” no mater what anybody says, is not a radical choice for a Best Picture nomination. In fact, it couldn’t be safer. The style is extremely old school, the story has been told a thousand times, its characters can be found in a multitude of movies, and it glorifies the movie industry and its “stars” to point where it becomes as boring as propaganda. It could very well be the least original movie of the year. Go ahead make it Best Picture. See if I care. It’s not like you can make me see it twice.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (3/5 Stars)

Rooney Mara does not look like Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth is small, skinny, and sharp. Rooney is of average height, healthy, and round all over. She lost weight for this role and somehow managed to pinch in her cheeks a little but it is not enough. Rooney is a doe-eyed babyface. Lisbeth is not. There is no getting around it.

It is hard to say why this matters so much. For some reason I am thinking of something obscure that I saw in the special features of a completely different movie. It was in “Three Kings” a movie about the first Iraq War. One of the Iraqis (Said Taghmaoui, I just looked up his name on IMDb) that played a bad guy was speaking of meeting the actor Ice Cube for the first time and how he could tell that he came from a rough neighborhood (Compton to be exact). He said he could tell by the eyes. People who have grown up in a rough neighborhood have it ingrained around their eyes. He knew that because he grew up in a rough neighborhood in Iraq. And then he said Ice Cube knew that simply by looking at him as well. Ever since I heard that I became much more interested in eyes. Does being witness to rough things over a period of time really leave its mark on the eyes? I don’t know honestly, but as a person who watches many movies I will say that there is something about the eyes that can create a certain seriousness or desperation in a character, which incidentally can convey a history of seeing rough things. Good examples are Viggo Mortenson in “Eastern Promises,” and Charlize Theron in “Monster.” And perhaps the best example is Noomi Rapace’s take on Lisbeth Salander in the original Swedish version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Those eyes were piercing. Rooney Mara’s are not. The role has been miscast. Rooney would make more sense as a Disney princess.

This is a pity because this movie is technically better than the Swedish version. We have none other than David Fincher, one of the best American directors, at the helm here. Fincher has excelled at serial killers (Seven) and has excelled at complex subjects (The Social Network), sometimes both at the same time (Zodiac). The convoluted 40-year-old murder mystery that is the centerpiece of “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo,” is a ready made plot for the likes of Fincher. If you have a story that requires a journalist to do a realistic investigation (i.e. painstakingly go over evidence, hit the books at the library), Fincher is the guy who can make it interesting, lend it humor, and give it momentum. Here the disgraced journalist Michael Blomvist (played by Daniel Craig) is hired to solve a family mystery that involves a close-knit family with Nazi connections. The mystery is intricate to the highest degree but Fincher’s clear direction shines through it. In fact, for the first half of the movie where the mystery plotline runs parallel and separate to the introduction of Lisbeth Salander, it is the more interesting plot to watch unfold. In the Swedish version it was the other way around. Now if only we could insert Noomi Rapace into the American version.

Not that all of Fincher’s choices seem to be entirely correct. There was something wrong with this movie that was hard to put my finger on while I was watching it. So I went back and rewatched several scenes from the original version. The plot is exactly the same of course. What is different may be as little as tweaked dialogue, different camera angles, or simply physical gestures. But it is unmistakable how the movies have different impacts precisely where it is most important: how it regards Lisbeth Salander. This is touchy subject because there are two scenes of sexual assault in the story, one being a rape. Now I suppose I could be like the MPAA and basically judge the difference between the two versions by how many seconds of nakedness were shown in each. (There is far more in the American version. It actually surprised me upon a second viewing how little is actually shown in the Swedish version. Only about a half-second. The rest is all inferred. Both distort and mute the screaming after awhile, a rather merciful thing to do for an audience.) But the more important differences take place before and after the rape.  The rapist is Lisbeth’s legal guardian, newly appointed after her old guardian had a stroke. The sexual assaults start as a form of extortion. Lisbeth won’t have access to her own money until complying. Now, in the Swedish version it only takes one meeting before the first sexual assault. In the American version, it takes a back-story and two meetings to get around to it. It seems as though the American version is trying to ease us into the sexual assault. A pointless exercise in futility it would seem to me. The biggest difference though is that the American version also adds scenes right after the assaults where Lisbeth dresses herself, goes into the next room where the rapist is waiting to give her check, takes it and leaves. The Swedish version simply cut from the assault to Lisbeth washing out her mouth and painfully walking home respectively. What is the point of these extra scenes? At my least cynical moment I will assume that the makers were attempting to make the rapist look pathetic (in the movie he seems a bit frightened and apologetic after the assault). But even so, who gives a shit? What does it matter how the rapist feels about what he has done? It is enough that the actions exist as they do in the world. Time to move onto the next scene. 

There are some styles and genres of movies where it is okay to objectify women (or rather people in general). I wrote about this in some length when I defended “Sucker Punch,” a comic book movie that came out earlier this year. But when the original title of the book the movie is from is called, “Men who Hate Women,” I think we have entered territory where any objectification at all should be barred entirely. Take a look at the movie poster above, which shows a topless Lisbeth Salandar. Is it really appropriate for the marketers of a movie about one of the most powerful symbols of sexual violence to sell their movie with the promise of sex? (You may also ask what exactly the poster means by “Evil shall with evil be expelled.” Are they insinuating that Blomvist and Salandar are evil or using evil? How so?) The Swedish version at least seemed to understand that sexual abuse is not such an easy thing to get over. The way Noomi Rapace played the character in the consensual sex scenes, and there a couple of those, was for lack of a better word, tragic. She could go through the motions but was incapable of intimacy. That makes sense considering the character’s history. The way Rooney Mara interacts with Daniel Craig in the American version would work much better in a James Bond flick. Rooney Mara would not make a bad Bond girl.

For the record, I still don’t fully understand how the epilogue heist worked in either version of this movie. Perhaps if I read the book.