Edward
Bartender
- Messages
- 25,081
- Location
- London, UK
100% agreed! I hated that movie, except that it had some beautiful scenes. Waste of a lot of time watching that one.
The Artist could not have been more of a "regular joe" kinda film. Especially today with so many losing lower-tech jobs to hi-tech. It made me think of how I feel - constantly trying to stay relevant at work...
Mnn. Tree of Life was savaged by the critics here and by populist intellectualism, though 99% of all that was purely an attack on its claimed promotion of a Christian worldview, which clearly did not match with what the critics expected. I watched it on a plane journey in December largely as a result of such criticism (would probably never have heard of it otherwise). I loved how it looked - beautiful photography, and the wardrobe was lovely. I did find the narrative very hard to follow, however. This does seem a common problem with art films - as if somehow being as obtuse as possible about what is actually going on gives it some sort of gravitas. [huh]
I just read this Blog regarding the clothes in the Artist. He has a point. But honestly it didn't bother me much. One of the extras had a nice beltback suit when they rescued Valentin from the fire.
http://www.gentlemansgazette.com/the-artist-mens-clothes/
(Link may have some spoilers)
Interesting take on it. IMO, that the blogger has to go to such a level of finicky detail, for the most part, to find anything wrong speaks very highly of the wardrobe crew on this film. Bear in mind how easy it is for a production to simply decide "oh, no-one will ever notice", which is true for 99.9% of the audience.... I spotted the black bow tie with tails as 'off' myself pretty much immediately. I can let it slide for the Twenties, though. Remember that this was a transitionary period for men's evening wear with black tie gradually emerging to supplant white tie, and all sorts of in-between variations mixing the two. The most common mix was to see white tie rig worn with a dj replacing the tailcoat, but it makes sense to me that some would have opted for other variations. Of course in any given period there will be people who get things "wrong" too (I'm sure there were as many stars back then that have just been forgotten now who were as prone to ill-advised 'creative' takes on evening wear as we see nowadays! ).
The one thing where the blogger is, IMO, dead wrong is this:
The tailcoat trousers lack a double galon stripe, even though this remains the absolute standard for men’s evening wear to the modern day.
This is wholly correct over here in Europe, but in the US they always wore (and still do wear) the same, single-stripe trousers for both black and white tie. I actually have a Thirties midnight blue tailcoat with matching trousers - single stripe. This is a US / Europe difference. Personally, I prefer the European pattern, but I can very much see the utilitarian appeal of the US approach. Myself, I quite like to wear white tie trousers with black tie. Oh, I know, I'm incorrigible...