See Hugo for a better homage to silent films - walked out of this scam

Rating: 2/10 (29 January 2012)

Initially this movie is an interesting experience in sensation and perception, playing with what is silent and what is not.
But once you are accustomed to the gimmick, it is nothing more than boring movie with minimal plot stretched out extremely long. The plot idea (one star sinks while another rises) has been done before, and this one had nothing new to add. Additionally, the story was shallow because there was almost no interesting dialog enriching the plot -- any time there was a conversation that might be of interest, most of the time dialog cards were NOT shown, so we could only guess what they said, the result being a very simple cartoonish-level plot. There can be a lot of potential in this rising/falling star plot, but the story didn't mine any of that territory.
The only time the plot sparkled was when the director did something interesting with sound and sight about 30 minutes in (don't want to give it away for the victims of this scam who might watch it) - at that point I thought the story and perceptual experience was finally going to be interesting, but the director abandoned that promising approach.
Two weeks ago I saw Hugo, and the silent film excerpts and shooting scenes in that movie were interesting and enthralling, and the ones in this one were not. And the overall plot and camera work were much better than in this one.
I walked out of this after an hour. The only reason I am not giving it one star is that I can imagine even worse productions.