Fondue Movie Reviews: The Artist: The Review (The Bulleted Remix)

In 6th-grade, I spent the majority of my free time engaged in the following activities:

Pretending to be Huck Finn and “fishing” in a nearby canal (this involved accidental cross-dressing)
Rollerblading a very methodical, complicated and neurotic circuit around the exterior of our house (this involved repeatedly opening and latching at least two gates with every revolution, all whilst trying to avoid the cat that would dart out in front of me in what can only be described as very sentient and purposeful efforts to make me splatter myself on the concrete)
Watching American Movie Classics, the best cable channel of all time (before it started having commercials)

I guess I was kind of a weird 11-year old. But I loved my black-and-whites more than anything. My favorites were:

Anything with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire
Anything with Katherine Hepburn
Dear Ruth, and its sequel, Dear Wife
And my #1 fave at the time: The Abbott and Costello comedy The Time of Their Lives

It’s taken a long time, but I’ve learned to appreciate and, even respect, color movies. I still think they’re kind of flashy and there’s far too much ankle showing in my opinion. I did not agree with the scandalous premise of Pleasantville. Life is meant to be spent sleeping in one’s own twin bed.

Does this have anything to do with The Artist? Not really, I just like to talk about myself.

Fine. I’ll talk about The Artist…

*sigh*

What I liked about The Artist:

I was happy to discover that I could be engaged by a mostly silent movie in the first place (I was worried that my technology-addled attention span had diminished to a point where I could no longer find amusement in a medium that does not shamelessly fling its meaning at me without reservation)
The dog, the stache, the cinematography, the music (oh! the music!), the last final long shot that sweeps from a medium close-up of the actors to a wide shot of the set
The fact that it’s kind of a meta-movie, in that it’s a movie about movies. I wrote an AMAZING paper in undergrad on this topic with Singin’ in the Rain as the subject, but I think I lost it and it’s one of the great tragedies of my life
Its clever use of diegetic sound
The fact that it provided me the with the opportunity to use the term "diegetic sound" (I just can't say that often enough)
James Cromwell. Flat out loved him.
The reminder at the very end that while a film may construct a dynamic, visual extravaganza – something internalized through your rods and cones – the real story must take place in your mind. (If a tree falls in a forest… ) There are so many little ways that our brains fill in gaps and create plausibility without us consciously recognizing that they're doing so. Say, for example, two characters are having a conversation. The shot switches from one face to the other and back and forth as they exchange their lines. Unless you see a shot with both actors in the same frame, there’s no reason this conversation couldn’t have been filmed in two different studios on two sides of the planet at two different times. That conversation could conceivably have never happened. But your mind needs it to happen to make the story of the film real for you.

Some of my favorite movies are the ones that shake you up a bit by showing you at the last minute that the thing you were thinking without knowing you were thinking it, was wrong.

Official fondue movie review: Melted Gruyère with crusty baguette. Really, the only fondue.