The Artist (2012)

 Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl7vP3ndik0

Dir: Michel Hazanavicius

Starring: Jean Dujardin, Berenice Bejo, John Goodman

                The most talked about film since The King’s Speech finally arrives dripping with plaudits, nominations and awards. So is it everything that it’s supposed to be? Not quite.

                George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) is a big name actor in the silent film industry. Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) is a nobody hoping to become a star of silent movies. With the advent of sound, Peppy’s career takes off and George refuses to change with the times and his popularity plummets but a romance develops between them.

                The film is a love letter to the era of the silent film. It is certainly something different and lovely in a time where big action blockbusters make the most money of any film of the year and are held by the studios as their hottest properties. Hopefully it can open up the world of silent films to a new audience, bringing back the black and white classics of people such as Charlie Chaplin. Having the film silent and in black and white works and it’s certainly to be celebrated that Hazanavicius has managed to create a 100 minute film in this style which never seems to drag or to feel laboured. However, when the film ended, I didn’t feel like I’d just sat in the cinema and watched a film, it could have just been something on television.

                The acting is fine, everybody including the dog do perfectly well in their roles. I wouldn’t go as far as saying the performances are exemplary, the performances are all exaggerated as silent movie performances had to be, but this means they don’t stand up to other nuanced and better performances of recent times. Even the highly talked about dog is just a good performing dog and nothing more. The forming relationship between Peppy and George is effective and it’s lovely to see how the relationship develops. A shot of them passing on a stairway is well staged even if it is a little too obviously a staged image for their differing careers.

                It is a lovely and charming film and something different and original which is getting to be more of a rarity now.  It is certainly worth a watch but it is not the masterpiece that it’s been made out to be and I’m not particularly bothered about seeing it again.

4 out of 5 Buttons

Red State (2011)

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ1v6oFHefc

Dir: Kevin Smith

Starring: John Goodman, Michael Parks, Melissa Leo

Kevin Smith takes a break from his usual genre of the slacker comedy to tackle action and horror in Red State. The film begins with three teens (Michael Anagarano, Nicholas Braun and Kyle Gallner) in southern states America who find a woman on the internet who will have sex with them. After travelling out to her trailer, they are drugged and find themselves held captive in a church, about to become the unwilling victims of a murderous sermon of the congregation of the Five Points Church.

The film takes aim at hardcore Christian groups in America, more specifically the Westboro Baptist Church.  The religious sect is a great subject for horror as we already think their views and actions are monstrous, and so their murderous actions don’t seem farfetched. The film also scrutinises the government and its policy on terrorists and the Terrorism Act, its stance on culpability and its willingness to take lethal action when it perceives a threat. The Waco siege of 1993 was an obvious influence on the second half of the film. The event, in which the FBI initiated a siege on a Protestant Sect on a ranch after being unable to execute a search warrant, which lead to 76 deaths including children and pregnant women, is reflected in the siege upon the Five Points ranch, the FBI in the film ordered to kill everyone including women and children.

The film ultimately poses to us the problem of evil. Who are the bad guys in the film? The ultra conservative Christians who are killing people for what they believe is a God ordered purpose or the government who kill people because they can and who cover up the whole massacre, hiding behind legislation, and then sleeping peacefully at night?

The main problem with the film is that it does not know what genre it wants to be. It starts off as a horror as the Christian group are shown as righteous murders, willing to kill homosexuals and rampant fornicators as is God’s will. The film then wildly changes tack to become a siege action film in the vein of Assault on Precinct 13, as its focus shifts from the three terrorised teenagers, and onto Joseph Keenan (John Goodman) and his squad of police waiting outside of the church. The tension is never really built up in the beginning for the horror element to work fully and though the deaths of some characters come as a surprise at points, as the focus of the film is changed from character to character, you never really get a sense of loss when one of them dies.

However, the film is certainly entertaining and better than many of the leading reviews have proclaimed. It has some interesting themes and some good performances; Michael Parks is creepily effective and convincing as a pastor strongly attached to his religious convictions, and Goodman is always watchable as the government official struggling between his sense of right and wrong and his orders.

It’s good to see Smith trying something different, especially after a recent string of poor films, even if Red State is a slight disappointment.  It would be good to see him tackle different genres more often. 

4 out of 5 Buttons