By The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to Michel Hazanavicius’ Best Film Oscar winning French silent film The Artist, starring Jean Dujardin, Bérénice Bejo and John Goodman.
Aaaah, the French…they’re a very sneaky bunch. A whole crew of them collaborated with the Nazis during WW2, but then the rest of the nation made up for it with the celebrated, impressively arse-kicking French Resistance, who fought both the Germans and their countrymen who had sided with them. The French also essentially kick-started the whole big mess that was Vietnam, but eventually backed out of the situation, leaving the Americans with most of the blame.
France has also convinced the rest of the world that it is culturally, physically, and intellectually superior. They have lots of poets! They have top notch chefs! They invented the auteur theory (gee, thanks for that)! One of their PMs was married to a model/actress babe. Some lady even wrote a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat…and everybody believed it! It started a lifestyle revolution (of course, France loves revolutions), and changed the way that people think about their bodies. French women don’t get fat? Really? Says who? The Butcher has certainly seen a few croissant-hoovering Gallic porkers over the years, that’s for sure!
One of the greatest sneaky acts pulled by France was the 2011 flick The Artist. Up until this Gallic fucker, foreign language films never won the Best Film Oscar, but cunning French director Michel Hazanavicius cooked up a brilliant plan to get his hands on that little golden man: let’s make a silent film…about Hollywood! Ha! No subtitles! On top of that, he opted to kiss the collective posterior of all the Oscar voters by swooning over Hollywood in The Silent Era, effectively telling them how great they all were. Sacre bleu! Genius!
Just to shore things up completely, Hazanavicius also put a cute dog in the film, just in case. Despite all this, all that The Artist really does is remind us how truly awful The Silent Era was. Those hammy gestures; the bad acting; the simple, childish story; the obvious, telegraphed music…it’s all here, but done even worse. Sure, the dialogue in most Hollywood movies isn’t worth listening to, but give us that crap over this pantomime act of Oscar winning French subterfuge any day! Qui, qui, monsieur!
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his angry missives against Only God Forgives, One Battle After Another, Birdman, Lethal Weapon, Blazing Saddles, Strictly Ballroom, Donnie Darko, Psycho, 12 Years A Slave, Red Dog, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Breathless, Elizabeth, Miracle On 34th Street, The Full Monty, There Will Be Blood, Les Miserables, The King’s Speech, Picnic At Hanging Rock, The Magnificent Seven, Gone With The Wind, The Right Stuff, 81/2, Pulp Fiction, Easy Rider, The Shawshank Redemption, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wizard Of Oz, Jaws, Black Swan, Gladiator, Chopper, I’m Not There, Interstellar, Marvel Studios and Citizen Kane.
