The Artist reviewed

"The Artist," reviewed

Photo: "The Artist," The Weinstein Company, 2011.

In the classic film "Singin' in the Rain," directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly examined Hollywood's transition from silent to sound cinema from the perspective of the winners; actors like Kelly's Don Lockwood, who successfully survived the advent of the talkies. In the new romantic drama "The Artist," director Michel Hazanavicius reimagines that same journey from the perspective of the losers, men like Jean Dujardin's George Valentin, who were left behind when Al Jolson belted out his first onscreen tune in "The Jazz Singer." While "Singin' in the Rain" used the formal language of the musical to celebrate everything that the movies gained with sound, "The Artist" cleverly uses the language of silent cinema to remind us of what the movies lost, namely the magic of pure visual storytelling.

Dujardin is the film's impossibly handsome and charismatic star, a Douglas Fairbanks-esque matinee idol. As "The Artist" begins, he's presenting the premiere of his new adventure picture, "A Russian Affair." The film within the film is clearly silent, but it's not immediately obvious that "The Artist" is too. It opens with a packed house enjoying "A Russian Affair" while a full orchestra plays an accompanying score. It's only when the movie palace audience bursts into ecstatic applause -- and we hear absolutely nothing on the soundtrack -- that we understand the extent of Hazanavicius' devotion to the silent film form.

At the premiere, George has a chance encounter with an aspiring actress named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo), and still more chance pairs George and Peppy together in George's next film (this one's titled "A German Affair"). Their chemistry is instant and obvious in a wonderful scene where George, the superstar, is supposed to casually dance with Peppy, the lowly extra, as he navigates a crowded dance floor. George spoils take after take, enchanted by Peppy's beauty and distracted by her touch. Again, there's no dialogue, but Dujardin and Bejo tell us everything we need to know through gestures and body language. A few helpful cutaways to the production's clapperboard do the rest of the work.

George's boss at Kinograph Studios (John Goodman) believes that talking pictures are the future. Peppy embraces sound and rises from chorus girl to household name; George rejects sound and suffers a precipitous fall, foolishly sinking his fortune into an ominously titled silent epic called "Tears of Love." If George wasn't crying before he got the box office results...

George's arc is sad but "The Artist" is nevertheless an exuberant movie. The key to its success is the way Hazanavicius turns silent cinema's restrictions into opportunities for the sort of whimsical gestures that modern movies rarely allow. After George and Peppy share their dance on the set of "A German Affair" she goes looking for him in his dressing room. Finding it empty, she stops and admires his tuxedo jacket, and as she tries it on, it magically comes to life, embracing her as she imagines what it might feel like in George's arms. In a sound film, Peppy would no doubt explain her feelings for her co-star to a plucky sidekick (and the audience). The silent approach is, in this case, far more economical and far more powerful.

I'm not sure cameos from the likes of Malcolm McDowell, Missi Pyle, and others add anything to the film beyond unnecessary distractions and George's cold, shrewish wife (Penelope Ann Miller) is an unfortunate mix of convenience and "Citizen Kane" homages. An argument could also be made that the film's ending is thematically inappropriate to Hazanavicius' "Singin' in the Rain" counter-narrative. But I don't think the director is eulogizing silent cinema as much as he's mythologizing the true artists of the Hollywood dream factory, and that makes George and Peppy's final fate the only sensible one. He's paying tribute to those great old crowd pleasers by making one of his own, while reminding us that silent films aren't inferior to sound ones, just a little different.

"The Artist" opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles. If you see it, tell us what you think. Leave us a comment below or write to us on Facebook and Twitter.

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Orignal From: The Artist reviewed

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Confessions of a political mind

A POLITICAL MIND: George Clooney takes about this latest movie The Ides of March

A few years ago, George Clooney joked that one reason he never seemed able to hang on to a girlfriend was that his idea of a great date was a few days at the Democratic National Convention. Obviously, he said, this was a turnoff. I didn't believe this for a second. What red-blooded woman wouldn't want to go and help Clooney work the room and get the numbers for a decent policy on Darfur?

But after seeing his latest film, The Ides of March, set in a succession of bloody back rooms during a Democratic primary race, you stop wondering about why the most attractive man in show business is mostly single.

''He loves all the rough and tumble of this stuff,'' says Paul Giamatti, who plays a campaign manager in the film. ''He gets off on it, the theatre and the drama of it, stuff like that. He definitely does.''

But judging by this film, Clooney's fourth as director, this appetite for politicking would have to be the visible tenth of some great iceberg of madness. Who could love the vicious business depicted here?

The story of The Ides of March is a classical one. Clooney directs himself as Governor Mike Morris, a charismatic liberal contender for the Democratic nomination battling it out with a Bible Belt conservative. Ryan Gosling plays his young press liaison officer, Stephen Meyers, alight with hope and belief and clearly heading for disillusionment. It is based on a successful play, Farragut North, which was written by Beau Willimon, an enthusiast not unlike Gosling's character. Willimon worked on the unsuccessful campaign of Democrat Howard Dean for the party's nomination in 2004.

He says that although the story is a concoction, there is nothing unlikely in it. ''I had worked on a number of political campaigns and the characters are fictional amalgamations of the hundreds of people that I ran across during those experiences,'' Willimon has said in interviews. ''But everything mentioned in the play in terms of breaking laws, manipulating the democratic process, the back-room dealings: that's all true ... playing by the rules of the game is not what gets you elected president.''

Clooney and his writing and producing partner Grant Heslov - with whom he collaborated on Goodnight and Good Luck,Leatherheads,The Men Who Stare at Goats and The American - were working on a script about Wall Street when the play was sent to them. They immediately saw that the competitive dynamics of this world were similar to those of high finance but were supposedly driven by higher ideals.

''It seemed like a fun world where you could ask some questions about morality,'' Clooney says at a press conference in London.

''If you do something to better your own chances, something that hurts someone else, is it worth it? Sometimes the answer might be yes. At one point on a moral scale, is something bad worth doing? Negative advertising, saying rotten things about the guy in office, bending the truth. If the right guy gets in and that election has consequences for huge numbers of people's lives, maybe it is.''

Farragut North is a Metro stop handy to a street full of lobbyists' offices in Washington; a great title for a play, Clooney observes, but too parochial for a film. By placing the primary in the film on March 15 - the middle, or ''ides'', of the month - he was able to give it a title that immediately suggests the timelessness of the struggle for power. Julius Caesar was warned to ''beware the ides of March'' by a soothsayer in Shakespeare's version of events; not that being forewarned and wary helped him to avoid being assassinated.

Clooney's father, Nick, a retired news anchor, ran unsuccessfully for Congress on a Democratic ticket in 2004. To lose was disappointing but it was the actual campaigning that embittered him. Some of the sleaziest scenes in The Ides of March, Clooney says, are from conversations they have had about his experience.

''There are hands you have to shake that you wouldn't normally shake,'' he says. ''It's unfortunate but that's the way it is. You can't finance your own campaign unless you're independently wealthy, so you end up having to make deals. I know there are deals made all the time for cabinet posts ... Right now, in the United States, 95 per cent of the people who win elections have the most money.''

Filmmaking is a business of compromise, too, of course. You drop scenes to save money, change dialogue to please an actor or shoot in cloudy conditions when you need the sun. There are money men to mollify; bigger films are run by power structures of executives.

''Every day brings a thousand decisions,'' Clooney says. ''But it's still a playground. If I've made a mistake, it doesn't cost 200,000 people their lives.''

He is often asked if he has any plans to run for office himself. As a political animal with the most mellifluous voice in Hollywood, he seems a natural. Clooney is more interested in ''telling stories''.

Moreover, he says, his life contains far too much rakeable muck to survive the attentions of opponents' fixers. ''I f---ed too many chicks and did too many drugs, and that's the truth,'' he told Newsweek a few years ago; he's said versions of this dozens of times. ''I'd start from the beginning by saying, 'I did it all. I drank the bong water.' Now can we talk about the issues? But that would be my campaign slogan: I drank the bong water.'' He has a point: that line's certainly not going to play in the red states.

Instead, he addresses those issues in a number of campaigns with NGOs, of which the best known is his activism on behalf of South Sudan through the United Nations and through his own Satellite Sentinel Project, which keeps cameras trained on the disputed border between north and south Sudan to monitor illegal troop movements and cross-border fighting. ''It doesn't hurt to go where people don't get enough attention and try to shine a light on them,'' he said recently on television.

But Clooney's value as a campaigner is not simply that he brings cameras in his wake. He also has a unique ability to talk in an entertaining way about things that are crushingly grim. Only Clooney could keep a David Letterman audience chortling through a 20-minute discussion about the Sudan. Clooney often says he counts himself lucky that he wasn't anything like a celebrity until he was 33; until he became ER's heart-throb, he was just a jobbing actor. Since then he has been able to keep the fame and the intrusions that come with it in proportion because he was old enough to understand that it was something separate from him. Even so, he found playing a politician a stretch in the other direction.

''You'd think actors have big egos. And they do,'' he tells his London audience. ''But the ego it takes to take all those good shots with your chin up. Politicians have a tremendous amount of ego to be able to do that. It's hard when the product you're selling to the entire country is yourself and you're selling the hell of out of that product, all the time. 'I'm better than anyone else in the room!' We have to have that and we need someone good at it but it was something really tricky to embrace.''

But are those few people who are good at it bound to be disappointing? Interestingly, he and Heslov were ready to make The Ides of March in 2008. Then Barack Obama was elected president. ''We realised we had to shelve it because everyone was in such a good mood,'' Clooney says.

It took about a year for the cynicism of Farragut North to return. Not that Clooney is cynical. Despite everything, he is still an honest believer. He sounds like one anyway. His great hope is that recent groundswells, even one as uncongenial as the right-wing Tea Party but also the newer Occupy movement, will eventually throw up candidates who represent real people and real positions, ''who aren't just saving their jobs or answering to a very minor constituency'', he says. ''I think that's going to change. It always does with us. It always has.''

In the meantime, there's lobbying to be done. That new girlfriend, Stacy Keibler, had better be willing when the next Democratic National Convention rolls around.

The Ides of March opens in New Zealand on February 16, 2012.

Watch the trailer

- Sydney Morning Herald

---

Orignal From: Confessions of a political mind

Read more →

Confessions of a political mind

A POLITICAL MIND: George Clooney takes about this latest movie The Ides of March

A few years ago, George Clooney joked that one reason he never seemed able to hang on to a girlfriend was that his idea of a great date was a few days at the Democratic National Convention. Obviously, he said, this was a turnoff. I didn't believe this for a second. What red-blooded woman wouldn't want to go and help Clooney work the room and get the numbers for a decent policy on Darfur?

But after seeing his latest film, The Ides of March, set in a succession of bloody back rooms during a Democratic primary race, you stop wondering about why the most attractive man in show business is mostly single.

''He loves all the rough and tumble of this stuff,'' says Paul Giamatti, who plays a campaign manager in the film. ''He gets off on it, the theatre and the drama of it, stuff like that. He definitely does.''

But judging by this film, Clooney's fourth as director, this appetite for politicking would have to be the visible tenth of some great iceberg of madness. Who could love the vicious business depicted here?

The story of The Ides of March is a classical one. Clooney directs himself as Governor Mike Morris, a charismatic liberal contender for the Democratic nomination battling it out with a Bible Belt conservative. Ryan Gosling plays his young press liaison officer, Stephen Meyers, alight with hope and belief and clearly heading for disillusionment. It is based on a successful play, Farragut North, which was written by Beau Willimon, an enthusiast not unlike Gosling's character. Willimon worked on the unsuccessful campaign of Democrat Howard Dean for the party's nomination in 2004.

He says that although the story is a concoction, there is nothing unlikely in it. ''I had worked on a number of political campaigns and the characters are fictional amalgamations of the hundreds of people that I ran across during those experiences,'' Willimon has said in interviews. ''But everything mentioned in the play in terms of breaking laws, manipulating the democratic process, the back-room dealings: that's all true ... playing by the rules of the game is not what gets you elected president.''

Clooney and his writing and producing partner Grant Heslov - with whom he collaborated on Goodnight and Good Luck,Leatherheads,The Men Who Stare at Goats and The American - were working on a script about Wall Street when the play was sent to them. They immediately saw that the competitive dynamics of this world were similar to those of high finance but were supposedly driven by higher ideals.

''It seemed like a fun world where you could ask some questions about morality,'' Clooney says at a press conference in London.

''If you do something to better your own chances, something that hurts someone else, is it worth it? Sometimes the answer might be yes. At one point on a moral scale, is something bad worth doing? Negative advertising, saying rotten things about the guy in office, bending the truth. If the right guy gets in and that election has consequences for huge numbers of people's lives, maybe it is.''

Farragut North is a Metro stop handy to a street full of lobbyists' offices in Washington; a great title for a play, Clooney observes, but too parochial for a film. By placing the primary in the film on March 15 - the middle, or ''ides'', of the month - he was able to give it a title that immediately suggests the timelessness of the struggle for power. Julius Caesar was warned to ''beware the ides of March'' by a soothsayer in Shakespeare's version of events; not that being forewarned and wary helped him to avoid being assassinated.

Clooney's father, Nick, a retired news anchor, ran unsuccessfully for Congress on a Democratic ticket in 2004. To lose was disappointing but it was the actual campaigning that embittered him. Some of the sleaziest scenes in The Ides of March, Clooney says, are from conversations they have had about his experience.

''There are hands you have to shake that you wouldn't normally shake,'' he says. ''It's unfortunate but that's the way it is. You can't finance your own campaign unless you're independently wealthy, so you end up having to make deals. I know there are deals made all the time for cabinet posts ... Right now, in the United States, 95 per cent of the people who win elections have the most money.''

Filmmaking is a business of compromise, too, of course. You drop scenes to save money, change dialogue to please an actor or shoot in cloudy conditions when you need the sun. There are money men to mollify; bigger films are run by power structures of executives.

''Every day brings a thousand decisions,'' Clooney says. ''But it's still a playground. If I've made a mistake, it doesn't cost 200,000 people their lives.''

He is often asked if he has any plans to run for office himself. As a political animal with the most mellifluous voice in Hollywood, he seems a natural. Clooney is more interested in ''telling stories''.

Moreover, he says, his life contains far too much rakeable muck to survive the attentions of opponents' fixers. ''I f---ed too many chicks and did too many drugs, and that's the truth,'' he told Newsweek a few years ago; he's said versions of this dozens of times. ''I'd start from the beginning by saying, 'I did it all. I drank the bong water.' Now can we talk about the issues? But that would be my campaign slogan: I drank the bong water.'' He has a point: that line's certainly not going to play in the red states.

Instead, he addresses those issues in a number of campaigns with NGOs, of which the best known is his activism on behalf of South Sudan through the United Nations and through his own Satellite Sentinel Project, which keeps cameras trained on the disputed border between north and south Sudan to monitor illegal troop movements and cross-border fighting. ''It doesn't hurt to go where people don't get enough attention and try to shine a light on them,'' he said recently on television.

But Clooney's value as a campaigner is not simply that he brings cameras in his wake. He also has a unique ability to talk in an entertaining way about things that are crushingly grim. Only Clooney could keep a David Letterman audience chortling through a 20-minute discussion about the Sudan. Clooney often says he counts himself lucky that he wasn't anything like a celebrity until he was 33; until he became ER's heart-throb, he was just a jobbing actor. Since then he has been able to keep the fame and the intrusions that come with it in proportion because he was old enough to understand that it was something separate from him. Even so, he found playing a politician a stretch in the other direction.

''You'd think actors have big egos. And they do,'' he tells his London audience. ''But the ego it takes to take all those good shots with your chin up. Politicians have a tremendous amount of ego to be able to do that. It's hard when the product you're selling to the entire country is yourself and you're selling the hell of out of that product, all the time. 'I'm better than anyone else in the room!' We have to have that and we need someone good at it but it was something really tricky to embrace.''

But are those few people who are good at it bound to be disappointing? Interestingly, he and Heslov were ready to make The Ides of March in 2008. Then Barack Obama was elected president. ''We realised we had to shelve it because everyone was in such a good mood,'' Clooney says.

It took about a year for the cynicism of Farragut North to return. Not that Clooney is cynical. Despite everything, he is still an honest believer. He sounds like one anyway. His great hope is that recent groundswells, even one as uncongenial as the right-wing Tea Party but also the newer Occupy movement, will eventually throw up candidates who represent real people and real positions, ''who aren't just saving their jobs or answering to a very minor constituency'', he says. ''I think that's going to change. It always does with us. It always has.''

In the meantime, there's lobbying to be done. That new girlfriend, Stacy Keibler, had better be willing when the next Democratic National Convention rolls around.

The Ides of March opens in New Zealand on February 16, 2012.

Watch the trailer

- Sydney Morning Herald

---

Orignal From: Confessions of a political mind

Read more →

Previous productions of Rocky

Sylvester Stallone in Rocky in 1976 Photo: SNAP / Rex Features

By Florence Waters

1:15PM GMT 21 Nov 2011

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Rocky, 1976 The then-unknown Sylvester Stallone wrote and starred in the low budget feature film about second-rate club boxer Rocky Balboa who must take on a heavyweight champion. The story was inspired by a real 1975 fight between Muhammad Ali and Chuck Wepner. The film was famously shot in just 28 days, and was the highest grossing film of its release year (1977) after winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Directed by John G. Avildsen, the film propelled Stallone to stardom, and became a classic of American cinema.

Rocky 2, 1979 Stallone’s directed the first sequel about Rocky’s demise after a brief period of fame. It suffered classic sequel fever; critics complained about its predictable story line, and felt that it did not live up to its predecessor. While the film featured a great final fight scene, the work as a whole is a cruder piece of filmmaking.

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Rocky 3, 1982 Stallone managed to keep the character development interesting in the third film, which sees Rocky sink into depression after losing his title. The fighting continues but feels like crowd-pleasing fare. The Rocky vehicle is still in the ring at this point. “Bigger but not better,” was the critics’ consensus.

Rocky 4, 1985 Rocky fans began to drop off here as the Stallone wallows in melodrama and Cold War patriotism. Rocky is invited to the Soviet Union where he vows to take revenge on his friend Apollo Creed’s killer.

Rocky 5, 1990 With Oscar-winning director John G. Avildsen back at the helm, surely Rocky’s fate would begin to improve? Not so. In this, the sloppiest of the sequels, Rocky becomes a trainer in a working-class Philadelphia neighbourhood. He becomes a mentor to a young talent, which sparks a father-son drama at home for Rocky. The BBC’s critic said the film was “like watching some favourite relative die”.

This was touted as the final film in the franchise. But, thankfully, true to his fictional character, Stallone proved he was not prepared to throw in the towel when things hit a low.

Rocky Balboa (Rocky 6), 2006 Critically-speaking, this 2006 sequel is regarded as the best of the follow-up films. Stallone wrote, directed and starred in the film which sees Rocky come out of retirement to face much younger opponent, Mason Dixon.

Rocky the musical, 2012 It was Stallone’s idea to commission this musical show, which has been written by Tony Award-winning Ragtime songwriters Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty and Tony-winning librettist Thomas Meehan (Annie, The Producers, Hairspray) wrote the musical. The show is expected to include the original film's popular, Oscar-nominated song Gonna Fly Now, as well as the Oscar-nominated Eye of the Tiger from Rocky III. It will premiere in Hamburg next year and then Broadway in 2013.

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Orignal From: Previous productions of Rocky

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Twilight Wedding Makeup A Tutorial Emily Blunt YSLs Purrfect Poster Child And More">Twilight Wedding Makeup A Tutorial Emily Blunt YSLs Purrfect Poster Child And More

Twilight: Breaking Dawn fans, get excited. Kristen Stewart’s on-set makeup artist, Stacey Panepinto, dishes on Bella Swan’s wedding day makeup look and how she manages to nail Stewart’s special brand of low-key glamour on-screen and off. [Bella Sugar]

According to a new survey, one in three bosses think their female employees wear too much makeup to work, with most participants having the largest aversion to brightly colored lipstick. Apparently these administrators have not received the memo that lipstick is the new It bag. [Fashion Etc.]

Emily Blunt is the new face of YSL Opium and is now starring in a behind-the-scenes video trailer for her first commercial for the brand. “There’s something very powerful about it,” Blunt explains of the storied fragrance. In the clip, a baby snow leopard follows the starlet’s every move. [People]

Aesop, Australia’s favorite apothecary-style grooming range, recently unleashed an all-out retail blitz on New York City, opening not one, not two, but three retail outlets in Manhattan. Its latest coup? An e-commerce store, of course. Starting this week, the brand is now shipping to—and from—the United States. [Aesop]

Photo: Courtesy of www.bellasugar.com

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Orignal From: Twilight Wedding Makeup A Tutorial Emily Blunt YSLs Purrfect Poster Child And More">Twilight Wedding Makeup A Tutorial Emily Blunt YSLs Purrfect Poster Child And More

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Watch How Much Does GreenScreen Really Add to a Movie

Love them or hate them, digital effects are here to stay. CGI backgrounds and computer-crafted objects have become valuable tools in the filmmaker’s arsenal of tricks these days – and while not every computer-generated effect is a smashing visual success, this new video demonstrates that we’ve all been watching lots of films and TV shows using green-screened backgrounds and computer imagery without even realizing it.

Website GeekTyrant posted this very cool YouTube video showcasing how green-screen and computer backgrounds are being used in current productions – and it’s really pretty amazing. We’ll always feel like shooting a city scene on a tiny soundstage surrounded by green material is a little bit like cheating, but there’s no denying the post-production effects that add an entire skyline or cityscape are quite impressive. The old days of elaborate matte paintings and fake-front buildings are long gone at this point, but as this clip demonstrates, there is artistry to creating movie magic with a computer. Makes you wonder how hard it is to act effectively when you’re pretending to interact with something that isn’t actually there, though.

Check out the clip below and let us know what you think. 

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Orignal From: Watch How Much Does GreenScreen Really Add to a Movie

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Watch How Much Does GreenScreen Really Add to a Movie

Love them or hate them, digital effects are here to stay. CGI backgrounds and computer-crafted objects have become valuable tools in the filmmaker’s arsenal of tricks these days – and while not every computer-generated effect is a smashing visual success, this new video demonstrates that we’ve all been watching lots of films and TV shows using green-screened backgrounds and computer imagery without even realizing it.

Website GeekTyrant posted this very cool YouTube video showcasing how green-screen and computer backgrounds are being used in current productions – and it’s really pretty amazing. We’ll always feel like shooting a city scene on a tiny soundstage surrounded by green material is a little bit like cheating, but there’s no denying the post-production effects that add an entire skyline or cityscape are quite impressive. The old days of elaborate matte paintings and fake-front buildings are long gone at this point, but as this clip demonstrates, there is artistry to creating movie magic with a computer. Makes you wonder how hard it is to act effectively when you’re pretending to interact with something that isn’t actually there, though.

Check out the clip below and let us know what you think. 

---

Orignal From: Watch How Much Does GreenScreen Really Add to a Movie

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