I am inspired by the success of The Artist to write about an even better silent film–1927’s It.

The title refers not to a sci-fi creature but to that dazzling human quality which entices members of the opposite sex, and herein Clara Bow enacts (outstandingly) a comely character with It.  She’s a frisky salesgirl who falls for her handsome boss, and vice versa.  Because of a misunderstanding, the boss thinks the salesgirl has been non-virginal enough to have given birth to a child and so he spurns her.  The Bow character is taken aback by the boss’s failure to give her the benefit of the doubt . . .

Directed by Clarence Badger and an uncredited Josef von Sternberg (why did it need two directors?), it’s a well-made, charming, amusing rom-com and a perfect vehicle for Bow with her wholesome face and killer eyes.  It’s very much a girl-in-love role.

Available on DVD.

Clara Bow (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

A mostly silent film made in black and white, The Artist (2011) is a novelty piece which ought to have had a better plot.  Its value lies in its details and its cast (Jean Dujardin and Berenice Bejo are as self-assured and winning as it is possible to be).  There is another asset too:  The Artist is moving.

No, I don’t believe it’s a masterpiece, but I’m glad I saw it.

Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius.

Since I am displeased with the review I wrote for the 2008 French film, The Class (or Entre les Murs), I wish to supplant it with the following:

During the Aughts, Laurence Cantet adapted a French novel titled Entre les Murs for the screen.  Called in the United States The Class, it’s a gem of a picture, set in a Paris inner-city school, which has no faith whatsoever in multiculturalism and very little in urban public education.  The novel was written by the schoolteacher, Francois Begaudeau, who plays the lead role–that of schoolteacher Francois Marin–in this film.  Though dedicated, Marin is not nearly as effectual as a pedagogue should be:  the school is a multiracial semi-horror.  There is constant disrespect and constant egalitarian sensibility.  Absurdity involving meetings and student representatives paves the way for Marin’s losing his temper and telling two misbehaving girls, the student reps, that they behave like “skanks.” He never apologizes.

The movie invites us to wonder just what kind of country France will be in the future.  The liberalism underlying multiculturalism seems unsustainable.  Yes, you can get a student expelled from Marin’s school, but can you get a satisfactory education re-admitted?

Cover of The Class (Entre Les Murs)

Obviously there are severe limitations in the Paranormal Activity-videocam mode of moviemaking, and I wish never to see a picture made in this mode again.  In Chronicle (2012), however, for all the severe limitations, it’s fairly free of hokiness.

Written by Max Landis, the son of John, and directed by Josh Trank, the film centers on three teens who unexpectedly receive a talent for moving things with their minds–telekinesis–and proceed to have a lot of fun with it.  The top dog with this power is Andrew (Dane DeHaan), a friendless boy with a horrid home life, who nevertheless decides to stick a camcorder in other people’s faces (whether he knows them or not) and who finds it offensive that his nice cousin used to consider Andrew hard to talk to.  Presented without pathos, the lad becomes desperate and hostile.  Telekinesis gets very dangerous;  it’s now a weapon.

The film avoids all blandness and predictability, and is somewhat more than a middlebrow indie curio.  Like so many other entertainment movies these days, it finally exhibits way too much destruction and mayhem, but it’s not without smarts and thrills.  It’s recommendable–more so, I think, than Paranormal Activity.

Now, no more camcorders.

Image via Wikipedia

I decided to watch I Know Who Killed Me (2007) on DVD because a critic, Jim Ridley, at the Village Voice liked it and opined that moviegoers shouldn’t have overlooked it. 

He’s nearly right.  For over an hour this horror film by Scott Sivertson, starring Lindsay Lohan, is an intriguing bundle of nasty realism, and it does have the damaged Lohan’s magnetism.  It’s unfortunate, then, that this flick which Ridley says was “sold as torture porn” ends up as weak as contemporary torture porn.  The last one-third is rushed and ludicrous, with Sivertson’s flashy, gimmicky style always present.  It could have achieved a gory marriage of Hitchcock and David Lynch, but no.  I know what killed it.

I Know Who Killed Me (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)