A moment of silence

Rating: 8/10 (28 January 2012)

A one point in the movie, where the cliché is for music to swell, there is silence instead. It was that silence that made the movie for me.
Though this does follow the norms of a silent movie, it's very much like Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936), in that sound is being played with. There is music throughout, and occasional humorous deviations.
I thought the first half of the movie was okay, but I started seeing where certain scenes were going. Contrast that with Modern Times, where I hardly ever knew exactly where Chaplin was going, and he frequently did things that amaze me every time I see them. Jean Dujardin will not be replacing Buster Keaton. In a few spots, the movie even used CGI effects. For being true to the original spirit, I thought Shadow of the Vampire did a better job.
For discussing flammability of film, Inglorious Basterds does a better job, as does Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (which cameos in I. B.). The dog Uggie is top notch, though I liked Milo the Dog better in The Mask.
I was comparing The Artist to all these other films, but then a moment of silence happened at the right spot, and the film won me over. I liked a lot of this film.
Recommended.