A Pan-tastic Journey: looking at various renderings of Peter Pan

Peter Pan - 1924, d. Herbert Brenon - youtube
Peter Pan - 1953, d. Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi, and Wilfred Jackson - Disney+
Hook - 1991, d. Steven Spielberg - Netflix
Peter Pan and Wendy - 2023, d. David Lowery - Disney+

"I don't ever want to be a man. I always want to be a little boy and have fun!" - Peter Pan

I have been alive for just shy of 2550 weeks, and in the past week I have spent more time partaking in and thinking about Peter Pan then every week prior to that in total. I have never really cared much for Peter Pan as a character, nor the "boy who never grew up" mythos. Neverland has never enchanted me as an escapist fantasy. 

There are famous people who have obsessed over Peter Pan... Michael Jackson probably the most notable, himself a boy who never truly grew up. Stephen Spielberg was another, as for quite some long time in the first two decades of his career, he seemed to be targeted by his most severe critics as a director who never wanted to grow up. The Blank Check podcast has been picking at Spielbergs early career, especially framed in the light of his pseudo-biographical film The Fablemans, leading up to the trifecta that was the turning point in his career: Hook, Jurassic Park and Schindler's List.

But I'm here to talk about Peter Pan, not Stephen Spielberg, suffice it to say that I decided to watch Hook (perhaps for a second time?) before listening to the Blank Check episode on it, and knowing the pop-culture tourist tendencies that I have, I knew I would be sampling other Pan wares soon after. 

Hook is an "unofficial" (whatever that means) sequel that presupposes that one knows the tale of Peter Pan rather intimately, which, at the time of viewing, I did not. It posits Robin Williams as Peter Banning, a workaholic father of two who can't seem to break away from his career to spend time with his children. It's very Spielbergian in this regards, the regrets of fatherhood and the feeling that one's career means both abandoning one's own youthful enthusiasms and one's tolerance for youth. Many times Williams' Peter yells at his pre-teen son to grow up. 

In a 1992 interview (stealing from the research done by the team at Blank Check) Spielberg said about initially abandoning his intents for a faithful Pan adaptation following the birth of his son "...suddenly I couldn’t be Peter Pan any more. I had to be his father. That’s literally the reason I didn’t do the movie back then. And I had everything ready and Elliot Scott hired to do the sets in London. In a way, my son took my childhood away from me.”  This unlocks a lot of Hook for me, the fact that Peter has given up his childhood to be married, and to have children and to have a career...he's bitter and resentful for having let go of his eternal youth.

Hook is not a great film, but then again, I don't think Peter Pan in general is a great story. Hook at least has a...ahem... hook to it, a reason for existing, which is to remind adults that it's okay to still connect with your childhood.

It's a long, long half hour (plus!) of the film before we get any hint of real whimsy or magic, and in that time the film is exploring its theme intensely while also trying to catch us up on Peter's life following the fabled story. It's definitely too long and most of it wholly unnecessary (although there's a bittersweet sentiment to Wendy becoming the mother to lost boys for decades, and something unsettlingly weird about Peter, effectively, imprinting on Wendy's granddaughter...it's like when Steve Rogers kisses Sharon Carter in Captain America:Civil War...it's hard to explain exactly why it's wrong, we just sense that it is).

Peter's kids are kidnapped by Captain Hook (how Hook enters the real world and steals the kids, I don't rightly understand) and Peter is brought to Neverland by Tinkerbell (Julia Roberts) to get them back. Peter, having forgotten all about his past youth, hasn't the skills, the magic, nor the playfulness to take on Cook.  Tinkerbell bargains with Cook to get Peter into fighting shape over three days so the pirates can have their epic war with the Lost Boys that they've been dreaming of (boys will be boys).  This leads Peter to the current spate of Lost Boys who have been living under the protection of Rufio. Where we see Lost Boys in other interpretations in animal costumes (like Max from Where the Wild Things Are), here they're like the lost children from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, all feral looking.

The best part of Hook is the actual Hook of the film. Dustin Hoffman puts on a surprisingly game performance (I don't know why I'm surprised any time Hoffman puts on a game performance, I always just am...like I think he's a more annoyingly serious actor than he is) and his plot to woo the children, which leads to him effectively adopting Peter's son Jack, is the smartest and most resonant part of the film. Unfortunately, Hook isn't terribly interested in developing Captain Hook beyond his well-mannered, if anxiety-ridden pirate persona. It never truly establishes any desires, any objectives, any growth beyond Peter's destruction, and the film is the poorer for it.

Roberts is wasted as Tinkerbell, a real thankless role, given a sub-plot that intones that she has still been pining for Peter all this time, even for grown-up, hairy Robin Williams-looking Peter.

What the film really needed was a character Peter could introduce Neverland to, whether it be his wife (who just gets left behind for the whole adventure) or his kids. Instead it gives us an amnesiac Peter rediscovering Neverland which, for me, didn't work at all.

Of course the classic Disney animated feature would be the first stop after Hook, as it seems to be what Spielberg's film is most directly referencing. The cartoon is, point blank, gorgeous. It's is so vibrantly coloured and so lovingly illustrated that it's clear this was a labour of love for the folks at Disney at the time.

I noted in the opening credits that the film was based off a play, which was the first that I'd learned that Peter Pan was indeed first scripted as a play by J.M. Barrie in 1904 ("Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up") and only later adapted into a novel in 1911 ("Peter and Wendy"). The credits also held the tidbit that the right to Peter Pan were (and still are) held by the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (though it seems anyone can use Peter Pan without oversight, as if in Public Domain, royalties must be paid to the hospital by special concession).

The credits also play under a groan inducing choral crooning of the like that was surely outdated even by 1953's standards, and there's a few other sing-songs in the feature that don't quite hold up to the high standards of songs featured in Disney films.

As we saw in Hook, and we'll see again in Peter Pan and Wendy, here the Darling children, John and Michael are playing Peter Pan and pirates in their room. It's this weird part of these stories where Peter Pan is already a legend, and not something new to be discovered, and I don't quite care for it. It doesn't make a lot of sense, and adds nothing to the story.  In the cartoon though, it hints that Wendy has been having visits with Peter on a regular basis, and so it makes sense when her father is telling her it is time to grow up that Peter looks to remove her from that threat.

It seems like the story is meant to focus on Wendy's turmoil over growing up, with "the boy who never grew up" both her guide and her cautionary tale, but once taken to Neverland, the perspective of the tale shifts quite heavily to adventure centering around Peter, such that we lose most of the narrative thrust on what Wendy is going through.  

Tinkerbell is great in the film, Peter's faerie companion who gets immensely jealous of Wendy, as does every other young lady in Neverland, from the mermaids to Tiger Lily, the daughter of the (*cough*) "Indian Chief". (Ok, those are the only other female characters in the film, and they're all gaga for Peter who doesn't seem to have the time of day for girls or kisses. 

There's an aspect of this story where Peter's only relation to women is looking for a mother figure, for which he presents Wendy to the Lost Boys as. It's weird, and confusing and oedipal in so many ways that I'm sure there's many an essay written around it.

The use of indigenous people on Neverland basically intones that they are fantastical beings like elves and orcs, and not real people and culture. Peter and the boys like to appropriate that culture, and the godawful reductive stereotype that they're presented as here is really hard to stomach.

The Captain Hook of the joint is, again, a highlight. Hans Conreid (in a performance very much coopted by Hoffman for Hook) delivers a vocal performance that make Hook far more charming than insidious. He is a likeable guy, but can be totally callous when the time comes. The rivalry with the alligator leads to some intense Looney Tunes-inspired slapstick which is both delightful and somewhat out of step with the rest of the story.  It's a real mixed-bag of a production.   

But that bag only gets more mixed up in Peter Pan and Wendy, David Lowrey's follow-up to the assured and magical The Green Knight. Disney has been on a decade-long kick of turning their classic (and even not-so-classic) animated features into live action versions, with, at best middling results, and this is not a best-case scenario. In many respects, Lowrey seemed to be keen on re-imagining the Peter Pan story into something more Wendy-forward, but then seemed to have to compromise that with being beholden to scenes and sequences from its animated predecessor.

From the film's opening moments it shows this Wendy is much more free-spirited and action oriented as she gets in the mix of John and Michael's bedroom swordplay, taking a sword of her own, until a mirror is smashed (no talk of 7 years bad luck) and father (Alan Tudyk) comes down hard on her. In the animated version, Wendy is the great bedtime storyteller that Peter wants to bring back to the Lost Boys as mother, but in this version, Peter's been listening to Mary Darling (Molly Parker) tell bedtime stories. It's because Wendy is sad that she's getting sent off to a boarding school that she proactively asks Peter to take her with him to Neverland.

This Neverland, like all the Neverlands, is a small, unimpressive island in the middle of a great sea. As a fantasy retreat, I just don't get the appeal. Here, at least, the Lost Boys aren't all boys at all, which I liked tremendously... or would like if they had any distinctive personalities to speak of at all. At least in Hook there were a handful of the lost boys who had prominence and screen presence.  Here, they're basically crowd fill.

Jude Law plays Captain James T. Hook (ok, I added the "T") and... well.... Look, Law is a great actor, but he's a pretty serious one. He can be playful, and charming, but his playful charm is always filled with different levels of menace (see A.I. Artificial Intelligence or Star Wars: The Skeleton Crew), what he's not great at is giving over to anything overtly comedic or silly, and, in my very limited and recent experience with the Peter Pan mythos, that is absolutely what Hook needs.  As such, Law's Hook comes off as too intimidating, too scary.  Peter Pan and the Lost Boys shouldn't be frightened of what are essentially bumbling pirates (clearly the animated Hook and crew was part of the inspiration for Our Flag Means Death...like a total prototype) led by a Captain with a clock phobia.

In any of these adaptations the flying sequences have all been pretty ho-hum though each of them have a moment or two that comes close to grandeur (if never fully obtaining it). Here, the flying is perhaps overextended, basking too much in it, but I did like the visual of flying through Big Ben, the clock separating into component pieces intoning that they've left our reality and are traversing to another. But the effects of Peter Pan and Wendy vary drastically, from very impressive to utter ass. I have no issues at all casting a Black actress (Yara Shahidi) as Tinkerbell, but it's the way in which they shot her, the cut-tos, the center-of-frame framing, the clearly Volume soundstage backdrops...it's all really ugly and the effect is off putting. I appreciate that they kept her dialogue as a tinkling bell, but they took away Tink's swooning and territorial aggression towards Peter which was, I have to say, one of her charms in the animated feature, and in the 1924 silent film as well.  There's not a scene that I can think of in this production where Tinkerbell works well, and it's all a matter in how they decided to employ her visually (again, nothing to do with skin colour and all to do with cheap special effects that look more Disney Channel than Disney Motion Picture).

The biggest change of the Pan story (besides the total elimination of the "Indians" as residents of Neverland - Tiger Lily is instead another Lost Boy ... I think...) is in Hook's story. The reveal here is the Peter and Hook used to be mates, best friends, Lost Boys forever, until James decided he wanted to go seek out his mom, and Peter would not accept him back. James did not find his mom, and he lost his friend, and his youth. No wonder he's so bitter and angry. I actually liked this shift to the story, it really did add something, it's just a shame it's largely an ugly, muddled mess of a production that truly doesn't work.  If there's a signature style to COVID lockdown-era productions, this one hoists it in spades. Everything seems so sparse, and full of hesitation. I really would have liked to have seen Lowery's vision for Pan without meeting the needs of Disney.

Of the versions of Peter Pan I watched, the 1924 Paramount production, available in multiple forms on YouTube, was perhaps my favourite. Maybe it was because it was a silent picture and I could put it on double-speed and not lose anything at all about it, and for me, shorter Pan is better Pan... but also the practicality of it all, the hybrid between early studio cinema and stage production really gave it a feeling that I was watching something closest to its roots.

I'm not a lover of silent films, generally, but I was rather engaged by this, I feel moreso than I have been about any of the other Pan films. Weirdly, because of the title cards in the film, I had to pay more attention to it, rather than distract myself with IMDB deep dives or looking up trivia (or playing a game) on my phone while the film runs its course.

Nana, the Darling family's Saint Bernard which also doubles as the children's nanny, is played by a man in a dog suit. It's not convincingly real in the slightest, but for 1924 it's pretty great (except those eyes).  Nana performs all sorts of actions, like drawing and bath and giving the children their medicine, which are clearly tasks above and beyond what an real-world dog can do. I thought the ever-active Nana in the animated Disney version (the best character in the film) was purely a Disney creation for comedic purposes, but no, it's clear it was in Barrie's source material.  Lowery didn't bother with much Nana business at all in his movie and Hook, being sequel decades in the future meant Nana wasn't around anymore.

Though used sparingly, I think Tinkerbell is incredible in this film. For the few up-close scenes, they created maximized sets to look like she was interacting with giant drawer handles or window latches, and in other scenes the compositing is astonishing (any time I see compositing in a silent film I'm always astounded, first by just the sheer ingenuity in the face of limited technology, and second because it almost always looks fantastic). 

In this telling of the story, Wendy is once again running away from growing up, and Peter is her escape. As in most versions, its clear she likes Peter and, as always, wants to give him plenty of kisses. And just like in most versions Peter is curious about kissing, but where later films try to play it as youthful romance, here Peter seems to be confusing romantic versus maternal.  All throughout he debates with Wendy about whether she's a mother figure to him or something else...and he's always on the side Wendy being his mom (except when he's not).  The oedipal confusion is especially high in this version, as is Wendy's vexed feelings about Neverland. It is an escape from the growing up her father is charging her with, but if she's only going to become a mother to all the Lost Boys then isn't that just another form of growing up too soon?

Peter here is played by a woman, Elisabeth "Betty" Bronson, as was traditional for stage versions of Peter Pan. I really would like a version of Peter Pan that plays with the gender fluidity of Peter, and tells a more queer story of puppy love. It's subtext that should have been there this whole time but seems to have been cleared out of every major version of Peter Pan where a male lead stars.

This version also has "Indian" inhabitants of the island, but I dare say (besides my earlier comment of envisioning indigenous culture as something mythical) they're role is far less ugly than in the animated version, in no small part thanks to it being a silent movie. Their role is much more limited as well, but, unfortunately they're also brutally slaughtered by the pirates when watching over the Lost Boys encampment, so they're definitely not treated well.  In fact there's certainly more death and violence in this version than any of the others I saw (the Lost Boys, including young Michael get real busy stabbing pirates dead).

This silent version moves the story's framing base from London to...somewhere in America, and along the way makes young Michael into a rah-rah-America boy, who at times elicits yelps of pro-America patriotism that, somehow, remains quaint, I guess. At one point, the boys (all the Lost Boys included) start singing "My Country 'tis of Thee" (how do the Lost Boys know that song)a, and in another scene after the boys defeat the pirates, they lower the Jolly Roger and raise the Stars and Stripes (where'd it come from....? Magic?). 

"The Lost Boys are the children who fall out of their perambulators when their nurses aren't looking," Peter says, and to me, there's an aspect to Peter Pan that has me wondering if metaphorically Neverland is meant as some form of afterlife, that the Lost Boys are dead children.  It's a theory that doesn't hold water in the actual execution of these stories, but it is said that Peter Pan was based on Barrie's brother who died at 14 and his mother would say he was the boy who never grew up.

One of the aspects of Peter Pan that isn't always consistent is that the actor who plays Captain Cook *sometimes* also plays Wendy and the boys' father. I'm not really sure whether that's just casting simplification or, if there's supposed to be some thematic connection there, well I'm not seeing it, especially since Wendy barely interacts with Cook at all. This is true of 2003's Peter Pan from Australian director P.J. Hogan for Universal/Columbia where Jason Isaacs plays both roles.

I started watching this version of Peter Pan, and, honestly, think I was enjoying it more than any of the other retellings, since as a live action translation it was really effectively threading the line between live action and cartoon, and it was setting Wendy up in a way I found lacking in most other interpretations. But I only got maybe 20 minutes in before I was pulled away and I can't say I've found the urge to go back to it. My trip into Neverland is over and it's likely to be a while before I'm ready to go back.

[For the record, my favourite all-time Peter Pan adaptation is the legal musical Michael Bluth starred in as a child in Arrested Development.]

KWIF: Hundreds Of Beavers (+4)

KWIF = Kent's Week in Film, which in this case is actually Kent's Week in Film two weeks ago and then again this past weekend. Assuming I finish this post this weekend.

This "Week":
Hundreds of Beavers (2022, d. Mike Cheslik - Tubi)
Cast a Deadly Spell (1991, d. Martin Campbell - HBO)
Absentia (2014, d. Mike Flanagan - AmazonPrime)
Hush (2016, d. Mike Flanagan - Tubi)
Emilia Pérez (2024, d. Jacques Audiard - Netflix)

---

A lot of movies have tried to emulate zany cartoon energy in live action. It so rarely works. Whether they're taking inspiration from Tex Avery or Chuck Jones or they're trying to put live actors into a Hanna Barbera or Jay Ward property, the results have mostly been of the "not great" sort. Outside of films that blend human actors with animated characters (again, more misses than hits), the only flat out successful humans-as-cartoons production I can think of is Stephen Chow's masterpiece, Kung-Fu Hustle.

Hundreds of Beavers (surprise! It's not porn!) isn't quite that level, but as an independent production it is quite ambitious and remarkably clever in its aping of animated forms. The film's creators, director Mike Cheslik and star Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, credit the slapstick of the 20's and 30's silent and black and white era of cinema as inspiration, but it's hard to not see the Loony Tunes influence painted all over the first act, especially as characters pop in and out of rabbit holes that join different points of the terrain.

The film opens with a merry melody that spells out the disaster that befell our applejack-selling protagonist, a drunkard name Jean Kayak. Left with nothing in the dire 1800's winter wilderness, Jean is forced to learn how to hunt and trap in order to survive, and square off against the ingenuity of the wild animals he cohabitates with.

He finds the trading post where he can exchange his hides or fish for goods that will level up his trapping ability. The trading post also houses a fair belle who can skin a carcass in record time, and their flirtatious connection in the lonely wilderness is much to the chagrin of her father. 

The "animals" of the film -- beavers, wolves, racoons, rabbits, even a horse -- are just people in cheap mascot suits, but in washed-out black-and-white contrast, the cheapness has kind of the perfect effect.  Especially early on, it's the suits as much as anything else that establish the surreal world of the film.  

The environments are snowy and vibrantly white, which gives director/editor/effects creator Cheslik all he needs to disguise his deceptively rudimentary effects. As much as the film takes inspiration from slapstick and cartoons, it's also feeding off of video game structures at their most primal level. Feeling much more "Commodore 64" than "X-Box One", Hundreds of Beavers finds over it's hero levelling up and level restarting constantly over its 108 minutes, until its final act which goes full-blown Super Mario as Jean Kayak must navigate his way through the massive and intricate fortress the beavers have constructed. There's a Temple Run chase, a Frogger-like crossing, there's map discovery and puzzle solving of the try and try again variety. 

The film's title card doesn't really emerge until the 30-minute mark, complete with another song and credits, but it feels like it should be at the point where a cartoon with this kind of energy would normally end. Yet it keeps going for [time check] another 75 minutes. From what we've seen to this point, it doesn't feel like there's enough juice to sustain another 75 minutes, but it's a clever switching of gears, changing the pace and rooting down into the silly character drama, establishing relationships and rivalries and running gags that, quite astonishingly, actually sustains the enjoyability and fun of the production.

I should also note the film is completely silent, or at least, there's no spoken dialogue (what dialogue there is we see on olde-style screen cards). The score, from Chris Ryan is absolutely essential to the success of the film, and it's flawless. It's doing so much heavy lifting in a film where every element is pulling more weight than it should bear.  To me it felt like Terry Gilliam drawing Looney Tunes but directed by Guy Maddin. It's irreverent, pushing boundaries, but also reverent towards old cinema styles. It's a film that shouldn't work at all, and that it not only works, but works resoundingly well and manages to sustain it's total running time is an absolute feat (even if I think shaving off 20 minutes would have done it some good).

Dam fun and dam enjoyable.

---

Cast A Deady Spell is a fantasy-noir set in an alternate 1940s where everyone seems to have some capability to use magic. It's a film that stars Frank Grillo precursor Fred Ward (Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins) as former cop, now hardboiled P.I. Harry Philip Lovecraft, a good detective who refuses to do magic.  A case comes his way to recover a stolen book, the Necronomicon, which leads H.P. to a swanky club owned by his former partner, an ex-dirty cop also named Harry (Borden, as played by Clancey Brown, Highlander). Singing at the club is Borden's girlfriend, H.P.'s ex, Connie Stone (as played with full femme fatale sultriness by Julianne Moore, Boogie Nights).

There's undead henchmen, gargoyle spies, deadly magic, and clever tricks, not to mention the looming threat of a Lovecraftian elder god. It's a film full of special effects, extensive prosthetics and make-up, not to mention being a period piece, so it's all quite stylized.  Martin Campbell, not yet the man behind Goldeneye, or The Legend of Zorro, or Casino Royale, but he's been in the game for 20 years at this point and shows off all the skills that would put him at the helm of some truly great action and genre pieces [and, to be fair, some not so great ones *cough*Green Lantern*cough*). While not the most lush visual production, everything work quite well in unison. There are no flat beats, no wrong notes, it builds its world adeptly, leaning both into its fantasy and noir influences (it's far heavier on the noir, and it abandons any real attempt at the horror side of Lovecraft).  

So I have to ask... why have I never heard of this before? I know all manners of sci-fi, horror and fantasy films from the era, including a broad range of low budget, direct-to-video garbage (now on Tubi!) but I've never heard of this film from a known director of some renown, with a handful of quality (and, in Moore's case, A-list) actors, with really good special effects, and a thoroughly enjoyable production. 

The answer comes back to the same problem we're facing with streaming: movies that don't go to theatres get lost. They get no promotion, and so there's no awareness of them. They don't get a second life on video, so there's no secondary "new release" push. They just live on in the archives to be randomly discovered. Oh, here's a Jennifer Lopez sci-fi movie I've never heard of, or a hanful of Chris Pine action movies that nobody knows existed, or movies starring Chris Evans we've watched and all forgotten about. Without being released to theatres where it would reveive even a modicum of marketing push, there's no sustaining a movie in the consciousness. They just disappear, a faint whisper of a memory when playing a movie trivia game.

Even now, at the end of this write-up, I've already forgotten the name of this film and had to scroll back up to read it.

[Side note: there is a gay and a trans character in this film who are a couple, and I'm not certain how I feel about their representation. H.P. drops casual slurs and gets physically rough, which I feel is to the detriment of H.P.'s characterization. At the same time, I feel like the couple are treated sweetly and sympathetic by the filmmaker and script, and their fate is tragic which may fall into the "kill your gays" trope, but also so many people die in this thing...so Idunno. Is it inclusive or exploitative?]

---

As noted on my previous post, I'm all aboard the Flanagan train, and I'm wading knee deep in the Mike Flanagan waters, but I'm starting to worry it may be too much too soon.  After watching Midnight Mass, I started trolling Toasty's Flanagan reviews past, and I decided to hit up a personal favourite of his, Absentia. Both Midnight Mass and Doctor Sleep impressed me so much I really needed to go back and see Flanagan's beginnings.

Watching Absentia reminded me of watching the films of Benson and Moorehead, The Endless and Resolution... just supremely well executed small-budget indies that intone much grander conceits and ideas without needing any real budget for it.

Here, a woman is in the final stages of having her husband declared dead in absence of a body after 7 years. She's pregnant, having become close to an officer on the case, and she's looking for a new start on life. Her sister, fresh out of rehab from heroin addiction is there for the mutual support feedback loop. 

A couple weird things happen to the sister, and then the husband returns. Questions are asked, emotions are heightened, and the whole world seems to go pear-shaped. The sister's maybe relapse-fuelled investigation yields dozens of disappearances in the neighborhood in all recorded record. There's something going on here. It only gets worse from there.

It's an early example of what Flanagan seems to do exceptionally well, which is set up a supernatural scenario, maybe even a horrifying one, and then let his characters live in that world, getting really intriguing reactions from them as they try to psychologically rationalize what is happening to them, or get a little off kilter from the realization that their understanding of the world is completely upended. Flanagan also likes to toy with religious themes as well as ideas of perception, and with the sister's substance abuse history, her view of what is actually happening is perhaps distorted.

I liked the film a lot, but it's let down by many of its performances. I've noted that Flanagan enjoys giving his characters a monologue (we've watched The Haunting of Hill House since I watched Absentia and that show is absolutely rife with them). It's a stylistic choice of his, as he must know it's utterly unnatural for people to monologue like that in the presences of others. What has made it tolerable in most of his productions is skill of the actors in delivering their speech, but here, these indie, probably novice actors, can't quite get there, and they come off pretty clunky.  Also, the only "name" actor in this is Doug Jones, and I would have loved to have so much more of him.

I tried to watch Hush immediately after watching Absentia but it's a film starring a deaf character (unfortunately not an actual deaf performer, instead co-writer and Flanagan's wife Kate Siegel) and I was multitasking so I couldn't track the subtitles and had to stop early on. What I didn't know was that within 15 minutes there's no more sign language and most of the film is pretty wordless.

The gist is Siegel plays a deaf writer who is terrorized by a serial killer. The killer has murdered her neighbour and now is outside her home holding her hostage, toying with her rather than going straight for the kill.  It becomes a tense cat-and-mouse game as the killer waits to see what his victim will do, only she starts incrementally getting the better of him, though not without taking a few hits herself.

I don't like home invasion thrillers/horrors. It's a definite thing that causes me anxiety, so movies like this, even when they're not particularly very good, are still pretty effective in raising my blood pressure, and that's really all Siegel and Flanagan are banking on here.

It feels like a small, contained indie production, like Absentia, but with much better cameras and lighting. It looks good. And if you don't think, like, at. all. about it, it's pretty intense. But the more you start looking at it, the more the flaws become apparent. 

The mask the killer wore had a texture of melted flesh, with a slight smirk on it, which gave the killer a cockiness that made sense when he decides to toy with her. But he very quickly reveals his face and the threat level drops sooo many notches once he does.  Something about that mask really brought out the angry, misogynistic alt-right white kid vibes that dissipate once we see John Gallagher Jr.s face.

There's also not much, if at all, in this home invasion/hostage thriller that utterly necessitates the lead character being deaf, except for the gruesome opening murder scene in which Siegel's bloodied neighbour is banging on the patio glass with Siegel completely oblivious. It's not an essential element to the story, or really, the character.

Siegel does a very good job at alternating between afraid, in pain, and steeling herself to do something probably stupid or brave or daring. She's the defacto final girl by nature of being pretty much the only girl in the cabin in the woods.

Overall, I was entertained but it felt like it was maybe a 30-40 minute short film stretched out into a feature length, and it's easily the weakest and least Flanagan-esque of his works I've seen so far.

---

It's been a stressful few weeks at work with time being eaten up by demands in the off hours, so while I was working on a volunteer project I did so with Hallmarkies as a backdrop. I got three of them in before I finished by project and once complete I needed something ... not so trashy and mindless to watch.  I had clocked that Emilia Pérez was available on Netfilx and it was one of those titles I had stored in the back of my brain, even though only had a vague memory of what it was.  What I knew was it was boldly a musical about a drug kingpin who is a trans woman and wants to transition. It also won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

What I also learned, less than a minute into the film, is it's set in Mexico, almost completely in Spanish and stars Zoe Saldana (as well as Selina Gomez, of the familiar names), all from a white, cisgender French director.

Saldana is, Rita, an exceptionally competent lawyer overlooked by her superiors because of racism. She's approached by drug kingpin Manitas in secret with the promise of untold riches if she can help source out his transformation. Manitas tells her his whole life is a condition of his circumstances and as wealthy and powerful as he is, he cannot live this life anymore. He would commit suicide, if not for the desire to first live life as she truly would like to live it, to experience the world as her true self.

Manita's wife (Gomez) and children are escorted to Switzerland by Rita, while Manitas undergoes her surgeries, and Manita's death is faked and reported on television. Satisfied with the job, Rita is set free, with her riches, to live her life. 

Except, four years later, Rita, now living big shot lawyer life in London, meets Emilia Pérez, and Rita soon fears that this is a spectre from her past coming to kill her. Instead Emilia once again wants her help to bring her family back to Mexico, under the guise of being Manitas' beloved aunt.

While settling in, Emilia and Rita meet a woman searching for her son, who has been missing for 10 years. Emilia knows through old connections she can find out where the body is buried, and does. Emilia soon finds a path for her wealth and atonement for past sins, in trying to uncover the whereabouts of the hundreds of thousands of missing persons, all likely a victim of the drug cartels of which, in a past life, she was a part.

It is indeed a bold film, weaving between its criminal elements and its trans elements, it's attempts to be both an ally to trans women and innocent victims of the drug trade in Central America, all while jutting in and out of song and dance numbers that, more often than not, never fully flourish, or feel complete. The lyrics dip in and out of singing and dialogue in a way that's largely unsatisfying. Some tunes that have catchy hooks never play out in full song. I never thought about pulling up the tracks on Spotify because they never felt like whole songs.  

The nature of this hesitant musical is intriguing in its own right, and I found myself drawn to its rhythms, its beautiful costuming, its lush colours...even its dingy settings were captured so perfectly. But all the while  I was feeling uneasy in my gut with how it was portraying its transness, its victim advocacy and its conceptualization of the drug trade.  It all felt... at least to some small degree... exploitative.

I never truly got a sense of the characters in the film, what they actually were feeling. In a musical, emotions are supposed to come out in song, but the emotions presented seemed beside the plot of the film. I didn't connect with these characters like I wanted to, and every turn that sent the plot in a new direction seemed to put more distance between me and them.  I think the performances throughout were fabulous, but the material let them down.

I came out of the film feeling like I watched something very unique, but I didn't feel enriched by it. I didn't feel like the film ever really dealt properly with the material it was presenting. I was entranced, but not enlightened.

In watching the film, I was reminded of Annette, another askew musical by a French director that couldn't be more different, story-wise, and yet tonally felt so much the same.  Probably a very fucked up double bill to explore one night.

[I'll come back to all those Hallmarkies mentioned at the top of this review another day]

 

New Year's Countdown...of Excellence: 10 - Battleship Potemkin (1920's selection)

Another year is coming to a close, and though it got off to a very rocky start, and such a bumpy middle, we can all agree it's ending in an unceremoniously shaky fashion.  A return to normalcy was attempted, and it failed to take, but it was nice while it lasted, though the nagging sensation of gloom never completely dissipated. Pop culture is still a steamroller that won't let anything get in its way. Any threat of a slowdown in content has since been met with an aggressive new wave (not to be confused with nu wave) of seemingly endless new content to keep us distracted and, if not happy, at least placated.  If you were into playing sports or outdoor recreation or big live events or travel, yeah, things are pretty different, but if you just liked retiring at home and chilling out with new books, comics, TV, movies, podcast, music...it's just like old times, if perhaps even more overwhelming. 
After spending the past two months of rolling around in the deep fryer of the made-for-TV holiday romance genre, it's time to cleanse the palette, partake in some arts and culture, and build some brain muscle rather than fattening it up.  It's time to travel through time, and around the world, partaking in some of the best cinema I've never seen.  10 movies, each a certified classic from some "best of" list or another, almost each from a different country, and one from each decade of the past 100 years of cinema.

10
Battleship Potemkin
1925, d. Sergei Eisenstein - Criterion Channel 

The Story (in two paragraphs or less)
Circa 1905 as Marxism is rising in esteem, the sailors on the Battleship Potemkin are not happy with the quality of food.  There's no such thing as refrigeration and the meat has gone rancid.  The chef is forced to cook borscht but the men refuse to eat it.  They are all called on deck by the Admiral, asked to self-identify who did and did not have issue with their meal, and the those that object are judges as insubordinate and threatened with hanging and being shot.  But an appeal to the men with guns turns the tide and a mutiny ensues.  Though victorious the leader of the mutiny is killed.  His body put on display in Odessa with a note: FOR A SPOONFUL OF BORSCHT.

Thousands descend on Odessa in support of the men who rose up against their aggressors, bringing food and love. The rising anti-autocratic sentiment turns ugly as the Cossack host arrives and begins firing on the crowd of people.  A child injured.  In appealing to the Cossacks for help, the mother is slain.  In retaliation, the crew of the Potemkin fire upon the opera house where the Cossack leaders are headquartered.  A fleet of warships are on their way to support the Tsarist infantry, and the outsized, outmatched Potemkin heads out to face them only to find they too have become brothers in the revolution.

What did I think I was in for?
I honestly knew nothing about Battleship Potemkin prior to constructing my list to watch for this year's countdown.  I didn't know it was made in the 1920s, or that it was black and white and silent.  I didn't know it was Russian.
Frankly, I thought it was a 1960's war movie, maybe with a harrowing escapade about the sailors escaping it sinking or something.  I didn't know it was basically a story of the first Russian Revolution, but, then again, I barely know anything about the Russian revolution

What did I get out of it?
A lot of questions about what, actually, was going on.  Clearly the time period (shot in the mid-1920's but noted early on it's set in 1905) had definite significance, so I had to look it up, and then poked around the wiki-wormhole for a while digging into a bit of Russian history.

I was also curious about what the impact of the film was.  Was this actually communist propaganda? A lot of the film seems very aggrandizing towards the usurpers and demonising of their Tsarist superiors.  It was actually a commissioned film to commemorate the 1905 revolution, and I imagine was fairly celebrated. 

I did find the scale of its production fairly impressive, there are scenes in Odessa with likely thousands of extras which was pretty awe inspiring.  The scenes aboard the ship have hundreds of players, and it's evident that most of them are not trained actors.  It's also clear, though, that Eisenstein had an eye for both scene composition and dramatic flair.  There are some absolutely stellar shots in this.

The fabricated massacre at Odessa is easily the highlight, the film at its most epic, and clearly familiar as its been aped across TV and cinema for decades, most notably in DiPalma's The Untouchables borrowing rather liberally the deal with the baby carriage.

Do I think it's a classic?
There's obviously something to it that, without research, I know I won't get.  Just from a cold viewing, I can tell it's influential, many aspects throughout I can see aped in subsequent pop cinema, but having not studied film per se, I can't say specifically what it is that makes it a classic.  (Eisenstein is known for his theories of montage, and how editing influences the audience, so without knowing intimately how storytelling progressed before this, it's hard for me to say its specific impact).

The idea of revolution, of the subjugated masses standing up against those who think themselves superior is powerful, and surprisingly underutilized storytelling.  The only real example of this that sticks in my head are Conquest of the Planet of the Apes but I know there are others  (is Bravehart one? Never saw it.)

Did I like watching this?
It certainly swept me up after a certain point, though I find silent films generally struggle to hold my attention throughout.  I liked it's five act structure, and the Edmund Meisel score does a lot of impressive heavy lifting. I took a 10 minute intermission around minute 50, and it felt like a long-ish slog that should be over already, but I was also committed to finishing it, with no thoughts of abandoning it.  I definitely want to read more about the time period, the revolution and the pre-Communist historical events that led to modern Russia.

So, to answer the question, sort of.

Would I watch it again?
Unlikely.

20/20: #16 Twin Peaks: The Return (second half)

[Like the "10 for 10" series but a little longer.  It's my endeavor to clean the backlog slate (with some things watched well over a year ago now) "this" month with 20 reviews written in 20 minutes (each) over 20 days...
...two in one day!]

2017, d. David Lynch

I was pretty high on Twin Peaks: The Return in my review of the first half, having watched it all in a rather brusque 2-day binge-fest.  At the time of writing had decided to wait and stockpile the remaining 9 episodes, as I felt that the binge watch made the slower parts less painful and the intriguing parts had better payoff.

Well, I couldn't wait.  I would up watching episodes 10 and 11 back-to-back, but went pretty much week-to-week from therein, and man it was not only an infuriating experience but I've gone from loving it to almost bitterly loathing it.

The tangential nature of the show, the means-nothing asides, the Audrey Horne diatribes, the seemingly endless Dougie Jones escapades, the awkward line readings, the cheesy effects, the just bum-fuckery of it all got to me.  When you don't immerse yourself in it, the corniness and rudderlessness of the production constantly slap you in the face, jarring you out of the reality the show/movie has built for itself.

Twin Peaks: The Return is a behemoth, David Lynch's 18-hour art-house experiment that has allowed all his childhood influences and directorial impulses manifest, seemingly at random.  You can tell there's a solid story in the through lines, but the meandering pace (all that footage of driving... splice it together it probably takes up a whole episode) kill so much of the momentum each storyline has.

There's little satisfaction to be had here.  There's the odd bone-throw like Nora and Big Ed finally getting together after all these years, there's Cooper's return (in episode bloody 16!), there a wonderful moment for Lucy in the penultimate hour, and a really sweet and solemn goodbye to the Log Lady/Catherine Coulson, but it's all buried in Lynch's perverse desire to explore randomness.

It's a certainty that the show was assembled in the editing room, that very little of how the show plays out was scripted as such.  Perhaps the Gordon Cole, Albert Rosenfeld, Tammy Preston, Diane Evans thread was one straight script, and the Dougie Jones story another, but the mixing and meandering between became quite tedious.  The stories we start to explore, like Shelly Brigg's daughter's turmoil, or Harry Dean Stanton's neighbourhood samaritan, or almost anything that happens at the Bang Bang Bar... they aren't given any satisfactory purpose, nevermind any resolution.

Even if I had sat through Twin Peaks: The Return's second half in one or two sittings, while I may have been more appreciative of the unique craft with which Lynch puts together his stories, I still would have been wholly pissed off with the finale.  In the show's final hour, instead of bringing things to a close or even just letting the existing events linger, Lynch saw fit to give Coop another journey, that took him to yet another strange realm, with Diane and Laura.  We got barely 20 minutes across 2 episodes of bright and perky Coop, before the finale left him poker-faced, confused, and almost bumbling through reality, not even in a heroic Dougie Jones style, once again ending with a whole pile of questions, this time with little apparent intent to answer them.

Twin Peaks: The Return (Season 3, the first half)

(2017, d. David Lynch)

We're in the "new Golden Age of Television", also known as "Peak TV", due to both the immense amount of programming being released each year across a great number of channels, as well as the unbelievably high quality of a great many of those programs. But "Peak TV" wouldn't feel so peak if we didn't get an 18-hour movie (broken out in 1 hour increments) from David Lynch.  I mean, if that never happened, I'm not sure that we'd actually have missed it, but now that it's happening, I can't see this new "Golden Age" existing without it.

Lynch is a force unto his own, an absolutely unique talent that attracts and repulses in equal measure.  His impulses are to stare into the darkness, to confront the grotesque, yet unlike a schlockmeister he does so not with reverence, but with curiosity.  Repulsed, but nonetheless, fascinated.  "Lynchian" is a term used by cinephiles to describe others movies, usually to represent a film that revels in inexplicable weirdness and absurdity.  This stems from as far back as his art-house debut, Eraserhead, which is in equal measure mesmerising and impenetrable and repulsive.  But to solely tie Lynch to his more outre efforts is to miss the storytelling deftness he is more than capable of, such as with The Elephant Man or The Straight Story.  He may prefer atypical storytelling structures, but he's not abject to telling a straightforward story.

Paired with Mark Frost, Lynch's sizeable fan base today is primarily a result of the 1991 phenomenon Twin Peaks.  "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" was a question people decidedly wanted an answer to, and they embraced the inexplicable weirdness of David Lynch amidst the nighttime soap operatic in order to get it.  By the time the mystery was resolved however, in the middle of the show's second season, Lynch had parted ways with the series, and the show floundered without his creative guidance, promptly being cancelled despite an absolutely arresting cliffhanger ending. The steadfast, unflappable, heroic Dale Cooper was possessed by the menacing dark force, Bob.

The show was given a follow up feature film, the relentlessly dark prequel Fire Walk With Me from Lynch, that shared very little of what fans liked about the show.  A story of youth spun out of control, telling the back story of Laura Palmer, as she became a slave to darker impulses that were both internal and external in nature.  There wasn't room for the whimsy or curious weirdness of the TV show, Fire Walk With Me  had its own purpose and story to tell.  We would never know how Coop would drive Bob free.

25 years later, we have an answer though.  Lynch and Frost back together, and Lynch at the helm for the entirety of the return, to learn that Coop has been trapped in the Black Lodge all this time, while his Bob-infested doppelganger has been spreading his evil across the States unchecked all this time.

The concept of an 18-hour movie is fully at play in the return.  While Lynch/Frost could have just focussed solely on Cooper's attempts to escape the Lodge, to fight his evil twin, to learn the secrets of the strangeness infecting this world, they don't, not in any simplistic straightforward fashion. Full of absurd asides, obfuscated conversations, telling looks with no outright meaning, painstakingly long takes of seemingly meaningless moment, this is at once Twin Peaks as we knew it, and yet nothing like it... simultaneously the most Lynchian of all Lynch productions and yet so often unlike anything he's done before.

It's easy to forget, among all the strangeness of Mulhollad Drive, The Lost Highway and Inland Empire, that Lynch has an immense fascination with television.  Mulholland Drive  started as a pilot for a TV show that was never produced.  Inland Empire is a surreal meditation on television's influence, and the Lynch/Frost duo went on to make the short-lived quasi-variety-show On The Air.  There is a peculiar fascination with the way television and TV storytelling works, in all its formats.  Twin Peaks:The Return is an 18-hour movie in a TV format, embracing aspects of both worlds like few others have (Louie CK's Louie is the closest example I can think of right now).

Within The Return you will find Lynch and Frost playing with everything from murder mystery, to slapstick situation comedy, to soap opera melodrama, to horror, to metaphysical discovery, to spoken word, to experimental art house, to silent film, to satire, to absurdity, to rock concert documentary and on and on.  Lynch is unchained, restricted probably only by budget (of which he's rarely needed a large one).  He weaves between genres and film styles with purpose, eliciting from his vast cast (attempting to rival the sprawling Game of Thrones in sheer volume of characters) some, at times, wonderful performances, and othertimes, most bizarre ones.  Some sequences play out like stilted public theatre, as if intentionally, while others are startlingly affecting, lingering in their power.  There's purpose to it.  Dodging between high quality and low quality acting, from tautly written scenes to meandering ones, disarms the viewer from having any expectations as to what's "normal" for this show.  Wavering quality means that the audience will come to forgive some janky special effects.  Even wild tonal shifts that lead from shocking horror to big laughs and back again mean that unintentional laughs at weird line readings or silly floating head images are just as earned as well-crafted comedy.

I can barely go into specifics about what's happening in this show, but needless to say Lynch seems to be having a blast.  He's throwing everything at the canvas, and nobody's telling him not to.  He doesn't care what sticks, because in his art the stuff that falls to the floor is just as important as what winds up in frame. Every episode, save for the first and eighth, ends with a live band a the Bang Bang Bar playing over the credits (the first has no band at all while the eighth episode has the Nine Inch Nails playing mid-episode) with no actual story purpose, just Lynch uncaged to do what he wishes.  What's most amazing about watching the first 9 episodes, in a concentrated sitting or two, is how carefully calculated the show actually is.  What seems absurd and random in one episode will reveal its meaning later on.  Even then you're never entitrely certain if you're getting the intended meaning or not.  Through his unusual storytelling style -- which will see threads drop for episodes at a time, only to crop up momentarily, then disappear again -- Lynch somehow manages to tell a cohesive, if overly complex tale, though still I'm unsure where it's heading and how all the threads will tie.

As much as The Return could have attempted to replicate past success, it's decidedly forging its own past.  Yet, Lynch and Frost haven't forgotten the past one iota.  Wherever possible they've found room for former cast, sometimes with pivotal roles, sometimes with slight asides.  Key players have yet to pop up, and some who wouldn't return are handled offscreen (Michael Ontkean's Sheriff Harry Truman is battling cancer offscreen, paying respect to the character and the wishes of a retired Ontkean, where Robert Forster as brother Sheriff Frank Truman talks to him on the phone without any cut-to scenes).  Even during filming or shortly thereafter, the show lost some cast, including Log Lady Catherine Coulson, Miguel Ferrer and Warren Frost.  David Bowie intended to return to reprise Agent Jeffries (from Fire Walk With Me) but passed before shooting began... his character is reverentially name checked.  The Return respects its past and reveres its mythology as much as the fans do.  There is indeed a nostalgia trip, not just for the old show its reviving, but for Lynch's relationships with actors.  He's brought in favourites from past works, like Laura Dern (in a key role) Harry Dean Stanton, and Balthazar Getty, while also heeding the call of fans across Hollywood to put them in the show. But more than anything Lynch serves his muse, Kyle MacLachlan, giving him at least four roles to play (so far), in Dale Cooper and his nefarious doppleganger, and the dual personas of Dougie Jones.  Escaping from the Black Lodge into Dougie leaves Cooper almost an invalid, unaware of pretty much anything, a childlike alien learning every aspect of humanity on the go, unaware of all the forces conspiring against him.

Not just reliving the past, it builds upon it to tell a new, unique story that feels both a natural extension and kind of its own thing.  It's not the most accessible show, but then it never was.  Lynch is rarely an accessible director, and yet here he's striving for intriguing amidst all his tone shifts and genre flourishes.  People will know pretty quickly whether they're in or out before the first episode finishes, but for those that are in, there is a plethora of reward... just try to pay attention.

Having caught up to the airing schedule in quick order, I would say that watching like a movie (binge-watching, in other words) is the way to go.  It allows you to pick up on the nuances and connective threads that you might miss over week long spans between episodes, and it balances the long methodical sequences that don't have an obvious point with more revealing moments.  Having reached the mid-way point in two days, I think I'm going to resist picking it up week to week and binge the back nine as another.  If I had to say though, I think episode 8 (which spends the bulk of its runtime in a mesmerizing silent art film exploring the anatomy of an atomic explosion resulting in the manifestation of the dark forces into "our" reality before giving way to  a Fritz Lang-style gothic-inspired silent film, ultimately lurching into a 1950's-era monster/invasion horror) is the natural stopping point, and a high point of the series.  It provides answers I honestly never thought we would get, and yet, doesn't truly explain very much, leaving the audience to interpret the imagery their own way.

The Return is truly unlike anything that's ever been on TV, but it embraces the format while pushing it to its very extreme. 

The Artist

2011, Michel Hazanavicius - theatre

The Artist is a film about the silent film era, told in silent film.  It sounds like pretentious art-house fodder, but, like the films of the time, it's populist entertainment, not heavy in its drama, or sophisticated in its comedy.  Yet it is in that very regard that it succeeds.  You believe in the authenticity of this silent film because it is, indeed, a silent film, albeit armed with a modern storytelling sensibility.  It's a bold production in a modern era of Bay-splosions and and Crank-style ADD editing, a film that not only requests your complete attention but your silence as well.  Encouraging a modern audience to keep mum when, in general, the quiet makes them uneasy is a tall order, but the Artist doesn't command your respect, but earns it.

It takes a good twenty minutes, at least, to settle into the rhythm of the picture, to acclimatize yourself to the lack of verbosity, but it comes.  The gestures are broad and the story is simple that it always seems clear what the characters' motivations are.  The film takes place at the dawn of the "talkie", following silent film superstar George Valentin as the world changes around him.  Almost in an instant he goes from the toast of Hollywood to has-been, watching as a young aspiring starlet, Peppy Miller, once an extra on one of his films, surpasses him to become the new darling of film.  Peppy, in her rocket to fame, never loses her crush on George and despite his fall and her rise, like the twist of DNA they keep crossing paths.

The leads of the film, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo remind you how much a film in the silent era depended not on acting ability or directing or sets or special effects, but on attractiveness and,  moreover, sheer charisma.  Dujardin and Berjo have it in spades, with wide, bright smiles that elicit sheer joy, and faces that please even when performing in the most dramatic or downtrodden scenarios their characters face.  Like the film itself, its stars are all charm.

*POSSIBLE SPOILERS BELOW*

Above I mention how it seems clear the character motivation at all times.  The emphasis should be on the "seems".  The film critiques the way silent film stars were cast aside once the talkies broke (and erupted in virtually an instant).  Silent film became passe in rapid fashion, and new stars were born.  There's a sense of injustice with the system, careers cut short by technology, when, theoretically there should be no reason why a silent film actor couldn't transition to talkies.  In the film's specific case, George finances his own film, writing, directing, and starring in it, and going head to head against Peppy Miller's first starring talkie, and bombing.  He obviously had a talent but the industry and the system weren't terribly favorable to talent.  They were meat, the product they ground out was disposable (much as it is today), and there was always more where they came from.  Nobody missed them when they're gone.  Except Peppy did miss George, and she tried to help George transition into talkies, but it seemed his pride got in the way.  "Nobody wants to hear me speak," his dialogue card reads.

In the film's finale, Peppy and George have figured out that dance, elaborate and glee-filled tap routines, were the way to not just embrace sound but equally defeat the talkie.  At the end of their staged routine, the camera pulls out and the sound of the stage, including conversation, erupts like a sonic boom.  Their producer Al (John Goodman) shouts with sheer joy "Perfect!" Pauses, then asks, "Can you do one more?"
George replies with his broad, bright smile, and in his own voice as opposed to the one the audience imagined, "With pleasure," which sounds, in Dujardin's thick French accents more like "Wiff pleah-zeehure".

It's that simple moment, that single which shifts the entire context of the film that came before it.  George didn't fight the system and accepted his fate because, frankly, he's not American.  In the silent era, anyone from anywhere, if they had the glint in their eye, could be a star in Hollywood.  But come the talkies, they had to sound the part as well as look it, and George' saying "No one wants to hear me speak" weren't the words of a depressed, suicidal man, but a man speaking the truth.

If you've seen Dujardin accepting any of the many awards for the film over the past few weeks, you're aware of just how thick his accent is, but watching him in The Artist, you're quick to forget just how French he is, and instead you believe he's the biggest star in America circa 1928, but also perhaps wonder why Dujardin, so charming, so entertaining, isn't a big star himself.  "Wiff pleah-zeehure" is why.