Rage, lust, ambition, and obsession

Ahead of this Sunday's Academy Awards broadcast, in which the hit silent-era pastiche The Artist is up for Best Picture, David Denby in the latest issue of The New Yorker has a terrific piece on, among other things, the "lost style of acting":

The silent cinema hit the world like a hurricane, destroying élite notions of culture overnight. As a feature-length art form, it lasted less than twenty years, from 1912 to 1929, yet more than ten thousand features were made in that period in the United States alone. From the beginning, the silent cinema was an art devoted to physical risk and to primitive passions, to rage, lust, ambition, and obsession (silence made emotions more extreme in many ways), and it produced obsession in its huge audience. I’m hardly the first man to worship at the shrine of Louise Brooks’s careless but overwhelming appeal. “The Artist,” a likable spoof, doesn’t acknowledge that world of heroic ambition and madness—it’s bland, sexless, and too simple. For all its genuine charm, it left me restless and dissatisfied, dreaming of those wilder and grander movies.

Accompanying Denby's piece is a slide show, The Lost Stars of Silent Film. The title is a bit askew as its nine images present three of the great women of silent cinema — Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, and Louise Brooks. One commenter there gripes that too many of the truly fine silent-film women go unrepresented altogether, and even I — who, like Denby, am reduced to bibbling tumescence at the existence of Louise Brooks — wouldn't allocate four of only nine slots to her. Still, I'm pleased to see it there.

On my iPad, the tablet version of Denby's article adds a video. It's Denby explicating Louise Brooks' backstage seduction scene in Pandora's Box. It's a scene that literally took my breath away the first time I watched it, and it still leaves me swooning many viewings later. Denby's video is not available for linking, alas. (My own say on Pandora's Box is at DVD Journal.)

In related matters...

The 16th annual Kansas Silent Film Festival starts tomorrow at Washburn University. Among the numerous delights there will be the newly restored version of Georges Méliès 1902 ur-classic, A Trip to the Moon, which featured so prominently in Hugo.

Next month, the 17th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival headlines a new restoration of Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon, "the Holy Grail of silent masterpieces," with a new score conducted live by composer Carl Davis, at the Art Deco Paramount Theatre in Oakland. "Due to the expense, technical challenges, and complicated rights issues involved, no screenings are planned for any other American city." Hoo boy!

Finally, at We Are Movie Geeks, TCM Celebrates THE ARTIST With List Of 10 Most Influential Silent Films. I appreciate that the list does hit "most influential" rather than just "most popular/familiar."

Midnight in the Tree of Life with Hugo the Artist and His Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close Descendants. Get the Help, We're Being Moneyballed!

And the Academy Award nominations are now out.

Not a lot of refined commentary from me about them as my opinions regarding the influences behind, and thus the merits of, the Oscars have declined sharply over the past decade or so. (The year Crash took "Best Picture" I didn't just throw in the towel, I set it afire and salted the ashes with uranium isotopes.)

However, albeit unasked for and risking my Good Guy rep by joining the movie-centric blogosphere's pathological drive toward attitudinal carping, here are some random thoughts as I look at that page.

Overall, what a tepid bunch of Best Picture choices. With the exception of The Tree of Life — the obligatory film tossed for public "it's art!" cred — there's not a truly interesting pick there. Some good movies, yes, even a very good movie or three. But not much that makes you sit up and go, "Oh, that's a choice that inspires confidence in the process!" Not a surprise, really, although I'm ever hopeful for more actual surprises to poke the inevitable obviousness, to zazz up the annual lassitude, to bring some disruptive interestingness to the repetitive parade. Instead, here's the final confirmation that 2011 won't be a year that looms large in my movie memory.

PREDICTION #1: The most entertaining thing about Oscar night will be Patton Oswalt's Twitter feed.

Speaking of interesting: Melancholia ... ?... Paging Melancholia ... I'm not certain that it's a "great" film, or even a good one in some godlike objective sense, but I am certain that it was one of the few films in 2011 that left me with some lasting impressions. It's not in any category at all and yet Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close made it to the Big 10? What the? Kirsten Dunst? Lars Von Trier? Not even just to class up the joint a bit more? To see if Von Trier will joke about Nazis again? No? Harrumph.

Probably just as well. Nooses would have to drop from the Kodak Theatre's chandeliers after Melancholia's interpretive dance number.

And Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close squeaked onto the expanded "Best" 10 list but Drive could not? Yes, I know: a "heartwarming" "issue" movie vs. a summer genre action entry. But as summer genre action numbers go, Drive rose above old stale formulas while Extremely Loud used them like Velveeta on mac & cheese.

No Tilda Swinton? Michael Fassbender? Shailene Woodley? Ryan Gosling? Albert Brooks? Vera Farmiga (for as either director or actor in Higher Ground)? Charlize Theron and/or Patton Oswalt for Young Adult? When was the last time an Oscar ceremony was better defined by who and what didn't get nominated? (Okay, easy answer: most of them for the past 20 years.)

Oh, I'd love to witness Albert Brooks' acceptance speech that magically manages to say "Thank you" and "Fuck you" without using any of those words.

Of course The Artist is there, given the confetti-cannon reception it has received and especially given Hollywood's penchant for both nostalgia-fantasy and licking its own nipples. I'm still lukewarm on it despite my sincere desire to be otherwise.

Likewise Midnight in Paris. I found both films enjoyable and charming in the moment, but neither is a movie that we'll be talking much about in ten years. Or five. Two? (That said, I'm such a lifelong fan of Good Woody that I have Midnight in Paris on Blu-ray. So, yes, I will be watching it again when the mood strikes as I know it will. Just call me full of wacky contradictions.)

And really, The Artist is also up for "Music (Original Score)"? Shame.

PREDICTION #2: The entire ceremony will be scored to Bernard Herrmann's "Scene D'Amour" from Vertigo. Kim Novak will strangle Billy Crystal with a rape whistle.

Speaking of Shame, I'm not upset that that movie is nowhere in sight, although one of my drinking game cues will be whenever a camera zooms in on Carey Mulligan.

I assumed Midnight in Paris would get a nom for Cinematography. Wait — it did for Art Direction. Okay, that's what I meant.

The Tree of Life gave me the most surprising and sincere positive emotional moments I experienced in a theater this last year. I think it's a remarkable piece of work, one that demonstrates film's equivalent of abstract expressionism, and the closest I'll ever get to being in an audience in 1968 that's alternately enthralled and perplexed by 2001: A Space Odyssey. It moved me in some subliminal ways that left me quietly observing, "Whoa. Where did that feeling come from?" And I love when a movie does that to me. 

But I'm still not settled on what I think of it as a whole, especially Sean Penn's part of it. I will see it again, and I'm just pleased that we had a film that bears rewatching through different lenses. Right now I agree with Christopher Plummer, who worked with Terence Malick on The New World — Malick could use the hands-on objective wisdom of a first-rate collaborator, a fully tuned-in screenwriter other than just himself. Someone whispering into his ear now and then. That opinion might change after subsequent viewings.

The Tree of Life is also there for Cinematography and Directing. I'd like to see it take at least one of those, followed by studios banking more on Malick so he makes more movies more often. But it's not up for Editing? Huh.

I wish mightily that Jessica Chastain had been nominated for that one rather than The Help. Pleased that she had such a good year, though.

You already know my love for Hugo. Whether it's "the best" or not is beside the point, as it should be.

Elizabeth and I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with Gary Oldman in attendance. He gave a warm Q&A afterward. I remember more about the Q&A than I do about his performance. That pretty much means he nailed George Smiley, doesn't it?

I smile and nod to see both Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo there for The Artist, though it was Bejo who made the bigger impression on me. Whether or not either wins, this probably means we'll see a lot more of both of them in the future and that's okay by me. I still think they (with Uggie the Dog) should take over the leads in the talked-out remake of The Thin Man.

Christopher Plummer vs. Max von Sydow: Glad to see the 20th century representin'. I love that it's 2012 and we have Rudyard Kipling from The Man Who Would be King up against the chess-playing medieval knight from The Seventh Seal. And neither has won Old Goldie before. It's Plummer's in a walk and hooray for that.

And yet, if that statue goes the other way, would the great von Sydow really want to cap his long, august career by finally winning an Oscar for a movie as aggressively ordinary as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and as hackneyed as his role in it? It would be like finally giving one to Peter O'Toole for Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage.

At the risk of being seen as a humorless contrarian shit (I'm only one of those three things), I'm relieved that Bridesmaids didn't make it to the final list. I am, though, tickled indeed that Melissa McCarthy did for Best Supporting Actress. My fondness for funny women is an eternal life-giving flame within me, so I enjoyed Bridesmaids. I LOL'ed, mainly because I loved Bridesmaids' cast — as I do in their individual work elsewhere too — particularly McCarthy and the supremely likable Kristen Wiig. (Oh, if only Kristen Schaal were there with them!)

But that screenplay really put me off with its achingly trite romance-paperback throughline between Wiig's character and Chris O'Dowd's banal stock love interest. It felt so false, so jackhammered in by some studio committee barely visible behind their tired old assumptions. It tainted the better stuff around it like a thin layer of old anchovies baked into the center of a fine spice cake. As far as I'm concerned, if O'Dowd's character and the romance subplot had been removed after the first draft — or, more realistically: if the rom-com angle had been approached from a fresher vector — the whole final movie would have been (for me) stronger, more memorable, and more in keeping with the "see, women can be raunch-funny too!" plaudits Bridemaids has received. But as it is, that part wrecks the "Girl Power!" vibe Bridesmaids' PR seeks to generate.

Wiig has said in interviews that she worked on the script for four and a half years. Billy Mernit, story analyst at Universal and convivial blogger, has said that he spent over three years giving notes on some eleven drafts of the project. Although some of the gags onscreen developed through improvs from the talented cast, and Apatow is known for his avoidance of studio notes, Bridesmaids felt like a product run through the Quisinart too many times by too many cooks.

It's likely that I'll feel better about it when I watch it a second time, which I surely will because I do like Wiig and her castmates so much. (Actually, that touches on why I'm not a "movie critic" and didn't wholesale enjoy it back when I occasionally was. With every passing year I'm more distrustful of absolutism, even my own.)

Oh, look. Bridesmaids is also up for Writing (Original Screenplay). Well, it is nonetheless heartening to see first-timers Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig on the list. I'm pleased that they're now on bigger radars as I'm looking forward to seeing more from them.

You don't have to see War Horse (I haven't) to know that it's the sort of emotive contrivance precision engineered like the President of Switzerland's watch to appear on this list. It'll be forgotten within 24 hours of the ceremony.

Ditto The Help, this year's The Blind Side.

I was dead certain that Contagion would place a contender in the Best Performance by a Virulent Mutant Bat-Pig Pathogen category. And the guy who said that single line after sticking his fingers in Gwyneth Paltrow's brain, where is he?

But seriously, folks — I was pleasantly surprised by the way Contagion's screenplay subverted its audience's long-conditioned expectations and found a narrative structure other than the over-familiar three- or five-act formula. Really, I think about things like that.

Iran's A Separation made it to the Foreign Language Film category. That may be my favorite inclusion of the whole bunch. Israel is in the same category for Footnote. I'm just naively romantic enough to fantasize about neocon wetdreams being dashed by the directors' handshake backstage.

Loved Rango both times I saw it. Need to see A Cat in Paris and Chico & Rita ASAP.

Puss in Boots? Only if strapped to a chair like Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

After what I've read about it, I'm unexpectedly interested in seeing Pina.

And all those shorts. Thank you, Scarecrow Video and all the new streaming movie sources that I added to my big-screen TV in 2011.

PREDICTION #3: Throughout the ceremony, for the third straight year the sexiest couple will be George Clooney and his tuxedo. Although Kristen Wiig with Melissa McCarthy after a few drinks at the after-party might just take the glory.

For your consideration — "So much for that 'Intermission' " edition

Addenda to my December 21 collection of "the Year's Best Movies" lists:

• The 40 Best Films of 2011, according to the Pop Matters staff. X-Men: First Class ahead of A Separation?
• New York Magazine: Vulture Critics' Poll: The Complete 'Worst Movie of 2011' Ballots — A comprehensive gathering, with some thoughtful and conversation-starting (or teeth-gnashing) choices, occasionally with a little added commentary. Jack and Jill appears to set the bar, to no one's surprise.

Also not surprisingly, you'll find some titles shared across both of those lists.

Meanwhile, Julie at Misfortune Cookie offers the Best overlooked and underappreciated performances of 2011 and Roger Ebert declares They wuz robbed.

IndieWire/Press Play: The winners of the Vertigoed contest — In response to the foofaraw (given a wobbly rocket boost by Kim Novak) over that pivotal scene in The Artist scored to a distinctive Bernard Herrmann cue from Hitchock's Vertigo, the Press Play staff launched a contest among their readers. Rule #1:

Take the same Herrmann cue -- "Scene D'Amour," used in this memorable moment from Vertigo -- and match it with a clip from any film.... Is there any clip, no matter how silly, nonsensical, goofy or foul, that the score to Vertigo can't ennoble? Let's find out!

And so they did. The results are in. Click here for the full scoop on the contest, its criteria, and the judges, followed by the Grand Prizewinner — STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, by Jake Isgar — the four finalists, and some special awards (e.g., Citation for Homoerotic Grandeur: TOP GUN by De Maltese Valk).

My glowering assessment of that Vertigo cue in The Artist is here.


NPR: Movie Titles That Might Have Been — From Teenage Sex Comedy That Can Be Made for Under 10 Million Dollars, That Your Reader Will Love But the Executive Will Hate to (wait for it) American Pie.


How many movies will we watch over a lifetime? AD Jameson is keeping track of his own number — 1,925 so far:

That doesn’t sound like too many, not after fifteen years of avid cinephilia. But to put it in some perspective, that’s roughly 128 feature films/year, or about one every three days. ... We found last week that there have been at least 268,246 features made. (Since then, the IMDb’s count has grown to 268,601.) So I’ve seen little more than .7% of them—and remember, I think that IMDb count far too low.

Why he has given so many poor ratings to contemporary movies:

The more you watch from the present day, the more garbage you’re bound to see—but your conclusions will be your own. Conversely, the further back you go, the more you’ll be guided by the opinions of others. (If nothing else, what’s available will be largely determined by what’s remained popular.)

"What if..." Movies reimagined for another time & place — Artist Peter Stults asks "...what if movies we were all familiar with were made in a different slice of time? Who would be in it? Who would direct it?"

Watching "The Artist", feeling the "Vertigo"

Last night Elizabeth and I caught a SIFF Cinema screening of The Artist, which is already appearing on a number of 2011 Top 10 lists, occasionally in the #1 slot.

I found it attractively shot, charming, and enjoyable most of the time, though it didn't Wow me as much as I anticipated given the Oscar-buzzy hype and the lustrous trailer (see below). The story is too slight and too reliant on trite melodrama conventions (and big lifts from Singin' in the Rain), which fit the time period but don't, in my opinion, fully provide sufficient substance. The screenplay is curiously thin even given the faux-"silent film" format — partly, I think, due to a number of missed opportunities, especially in the second half. (And Penelope Ann Miller needs some stern words with her agent.)

On the other hand, the three leads — Jean Dujardin as a Douglas Fairbanks-like silent screen star washed up with the advent of the "talkies," Bérénice Bejo as the bit player who achieves Hollywood stardom, and Uggie the dog as the loyal pooch who saves the day — are marvelous and must be signed for a remake of The Thin Man, pronto. Elizabeth and I had already come to love Dujardin from the two French "OSS 117" spy-film spoofs (also directed by Michel Hazanavicius and featuring his wife Bejo), and now we learn the guy can dance Gene Kelly-style too. Yet it's Bejo who's the breakout star for me. She held her own as the co-lead with Dujardin, while doing it, as they say, backwards and in high heels. Together they have an easy chemistry, and I hope the success of The Artist means we'll be seeing more of both of them, singly and together, for years. And seriously, Uggie gives one of the best canine performances in decades.

As a pastiche of the black-and-white "silent" cinema of yore, The Artist is appealing and good-looking (though hardly accurate-looking), with some clever touches. However, the conceit wears thin without further narrative oomph starting around the half-way mark.

Trumping much of the good stuff on display, though, is one peculiar element that sore-thumbed a key scene for me: Late in the story, when Dujardin's George Valentin has hit rock bottom, having lost his career and his chance at true love, he wanders Hollywood like the Ghost of Movies Past. What jarred me during it is the choice for its musical scoring — Bernard Herrmann's "Scene d’Amour" from Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece Vertigo (YouTubed here).

Now, I may be just a big ol' film geek, but it's not as if Vertigo is some obscure forgotten film, or that Herrmann's work isn't one of Hollywood's more famous and distinctive movie scores. I love Herrmann's music in Vertigo and others, but it threw me right out of The Artist as I was sitting there asking, almost out loud, "What the hell is music from Vertigo doing here?" Instead of joining George Valentin in his cinelicious despondency, I had visions of Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak dancing through my head.

By my lights, that particular motif doesn't wed itself naturally to the scene in The Artist. It's hardly an ideal bit of scoring for the moment. For one thing, using it is the very definition of uninspired, even in our pop culture of mashups and creative appropriation (which I agree can be artful and inspired).

Secondly, the piece is distracting as it brings to mind a real (and better) movie made nearly 30 years after the story's setting.

Thirdly and most damningly, it's almost mawkish as it tries hard to make us feel something, thus kneecapping any earned feeling the scene may elicit. To me, it felt as though someone was trying to tap my emotional memory of Vertigo and hijack it for the scene in The Artist, rather than crafting the scene so that it generated the emotional layering on its own.

During those minutes of being kicked out of the movie's narrative, my mind wandered. I was curious whether Herrmann's "Scene d’Amour" landed there initially as some temporary scratch track filler that Hazanavicius decided he liked well enough, or else using Herrmann's music was less expensive than rescoring the scene with an original piece.

So when I got home I did what people do when disconcerted in the 21st century: I googled. Here's what I found:

A.O. Scott's New York Times review notes the Vertigo lift as one of The Artist's built-in cineaste references.

According to the film's English press kit (PDF), Hazanavicius played mood music from vintage movies on the set:

The shoot being silent, did you give your actors much direction during the takes?

What I did was play music on the set and it literally carried them. So much so that at the end, they couldn’t do without it! I played mostly Hollywood music of the '40s and '50s: Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner, Frank Waxman, but also George Gershwin, Cole Porter... I used SUNSET BOULEVARD a lot but I also played THE WAY WE WERE and even Philippe Sarde's music for THE THINGS OF LIFE. It's a beautiful melody and I knew Jean has a particular relationship with that theme. I didn't warn him the first time I played it and I knew that by playing it on set I'd trigger something during the take. That’s exactly what happened. I did the same with Bérénice when she arrives in hospital; I played the theme from LAURA, which she loves.

In the Chicago Sun-Times, Laura Emerick's 'The Artist' is director's love letter to early Hollywood includes this unhelpful quote from Hazanavicius:

"The 'Vertigo' music is here to help shape the emotional structure of the climax.... But it's also heard in the finale [of 'Vertigo'], and the theme worked perfectly here. It helps to create a sense of resolution."

Finally, an A.V. Club interview with Hazanavicius addresses the lift directly:

AVC: Like your OSS comedies, The Artist has a Hitchcock influence—you use Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo score for a pivotal moment in the movie. Was that intentional?

MH: For The Artist, the music from Vertigo came in post. I guess all the directors in France are influenced by Hitchcock, because he’s the perfect visual director, in my eyes. So I guess, yes, certainly he was an influence, but it wasn’t a reference. I mean, I wasn’t watching Hitchcock movies, I was watching silent movies. But when I was writing the script, I was listening to a lot of classical composers, and there was a lot of music from movies in that, and the music from Vertigo was one of them. So when we were editing, I went back to the script and told the composer, "There are nine narrative blocks where we need nine big scores." So I gave him all the points of what kind of emotion the music should have. And for that particular scene you're speaking of, I wanted something special. I wanted it to be the final movement. I wanted a slow love theme, and the music from Vertigo just fit perfectly. And it's not Herrmann's score, in fact, but the score re-orchestrated by Elmer Bernstein [from 1992].

After seeing that sequence cut together, our composer [Ludovic Bource] used that style as an influence for the rest of the music he created for other parts of the movie. I'll admit it's strange to have the music from another movie in your movie, but finally I chose to accept it.

Okay. So there's the answer. Not a very satisfying answer, but at least he addressed the question. I too love Herrmann's music and if I were writing a darkly moody love scene I'd have it in the background too. But it is indeed "strange" and it did toss me out of a key moment in The Artist. I recovered, of course, even if it did niggle at me until I got home and sought answers to my burning question online.

So file this post under Curiosity, qualified satisfaction of.

The year in rearview

It's that listy time of year. Naughty vs. nice, art vs. commerce, Tree of Life vs. Twilight, etc. Movie critics, film pundits, and cine-bloggers are compiling their summations of what happened, or didn't, onscreen in 2011.

Here are some I find most useful and meaningful. Between now and January I'll be adding to this list as more appear.


The Atlantic: Richard Lawson's The Best Movies of 2011

A.V. Club: 15 Best Films of 2011

Roger Ebert's Journal: The Best Films of 2011 and The Best Documentaries of 2011

GreenCine Daily: Best of 2011: Supporting Performances

The Guardian: The best films of 2011: Peter Bradshaw's choice

IndieWire: Annual Critics Survey 2011 and overview article

io9: Best and Worst Science Fiction/Fantasy Movies of 2011

L.A. Times: Year in Review: Kenneth Turan's best film picks of 2011

Movie Line (Stephanie Zacharek): The Artist, Tinker, Midnight in Paris: Stephanie's Top 10 Movies of 2011

Movie Morlocks (TCM): The Top Twelve Genre Films of 2011

MSN:  

• Top 10 Movies of 2011
• Contributors' Individual Top 10 Lists (Sean Axmaker, Jim Emerson, Don Kaye, Glenn Kenny, Richard T. Jameson, Dave McCoy, Kim Morgan) 
• MSN Movies Bloggers' Top 10 Lists
• Users' Top 10 Poll

The New Yorker (Richard Brody):  The 26 Best Films of 2011

The New Yorker (David Denby): The Best Films of 2011

The New York Times: Riding Off Into Civilization's Sunset — Stephen Holden's Top 10 movies of 2011

NPR: 2011 In Film: Bob Mondello's Top 10 (Plus 10)

Online Film Critics Society: 15th Annual OFCS Awards Nominations

The Oregonian: Top Movies of 2011 — Shawn Levy — Mark Mohan — Mike Russell (pleased to see 13 Assassins here)

Salon: Andrew O'Hehir's The 10 best movies of 2011: Brilliant movies for a bleak year 

Scanners (Jim Emerson): My First 2011 "Ten Best" List

Slant: Top 25 Films of 2011

Sunset Gun (Kim Morgan): Magnificent Melancholia: 11 Best of 2011

Time: Richard Corliss' Top 10 (one of those annoying click-through formats, but glad to see Rango there). And the Top 10 Worst.

Time Out London: Time Out's film team nominate their favourite movies of 2011

Village Voice: 2011 Film Poll, including J. Hoberman's Personal Best. The Critics List is here. Click the names to see individual votes.

Also looking back at the year in movies:

Ferdy on Films: My Year at the Movies, 2011 and Confessions of a Film Freak, 2011

Glenn Erickson: DVD Savant picks the Most Impressive Discs of 2011

Huffington Post: Best Films Of 2011: 11 Great Films You May Have Missed

IndieWire: The 30 Top-Grossing Indies of 2011, Led By Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris'

IndieWire: A Complete Guide To 2011-12 Awards Season / Summary of Winners

IndieWire: Indiewire's Greatest Hits: The Top 10 Reviews From 2011

io9: Lessons that 2011 Has Taught the Entertainment Industry

New York Times: Old-Fashioned Glories in a Netflix Age by A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis

New York Times: A Year of Disappointment at the Movie Box Office

The New Yorker: Anthony Lane's The Year in Movies: Gladness, Despondency, Madness

Slate:  

1. The Movie Club Entry 1: What movies gave you the goosebumps this year? How about nausea?
2. Entry 2: Why I loved Melancholia, and why Tree of Life left me cold
3. Entry 3: If Hollywood made more movies like Bridesmaids, garbage like Sherlock Holmes might bother me less
4. Entry 4: Can you admire a movie without enjoying it?
5. Entry 5: Bridesmaids proved a comedy could be big and brash and rude and still fully, proudly female
6. Entry 6: A defense of The Artist, offered without disclaimers or shame
7. Entry 7: They don't make bad movies like they used to
8. Entry 8: There is no single movie this year that everyone is excited about