The Artist (2011)
I don’t get how this movie won several Oscars. It has some really good elements and the basic premise of making a silent black and white movie today does warrant some praise in itself. But the end result felt like wasted potential.
The first part was a little goofy but charming. Went a little longer than I would have preferred but glad the whole movie wasn’t like that. The dream sequence got my hopes up that they might have ambitions for this movie to something unique and interesting. Sadly that fell apart because the rest was pretty tedious and frequently boring. Like, I get it - he is no longer a big movie star! Spending more than 20 minutes in unimaginative basic symbolism to underline that got very tedious. At the end I was just waiting for it to make its point and it never really did. There appears to be little more than a superficial love letter to old Hollywood romanticism. If only they had used that creativity they did have with that dream sequence in more places, it could have been really interesting. Also, if anyone deserved an Oscar for this movie it should have been Bérénice Bejo.
Rating: 2.5