Please Consider Uggie... plus Cameo seasons and competition winners

All you regglars'll know I was seriously nervous about going to see The Artist, from the fear that it could not possibly live up to the promise of its trailer. My friend Damian swayed me in the end; he got in touch to say that it really was as good as it looks, to the point that even the fonts were authentic. And this is a man who knows a thing or two about movie fonts.
So yesterday we crossed our fingers and went to see it and by heck it really is sensationally good. I've reviewed it at Movietone Cameos.

The film is full of great performances, but the undoubted star is Uggie the dog, who delivers a multi-layered performance of exceptional subtlety and skill. So much so that I am delighted to see there is a movement afoot to overturn the speciesist shortsightedness that has rendered him ineligible for the Oscar he so richly deserves.
There's more on the campaign here, including a link to the 'Consider Uggie' Facebook page.

By the way, and speaking of Movietone Cameos, after months of at best sporadic activity interspersed with wide slabs of stasis, the site(hereafter referred to as the aforementioned) is undergoing something of a relaunch this year.
You could all be forgiven for forgetting there ever was such a blog. The original idea was, because I don't tend to do short reviews of individual films here, to create a place where I could index all the reviews I've done over the years for other people's magazines and books, and also websites like the BFI's ScreenOnline, and especially the reviews I did for those awful Movies You Must See Before You Die books that got edited and partially rewritten, to the brink of illiteracy and bravely beyond, without my permission.
But what I also wanted to do, and spectacularly failed at, so heroic is my laziness, was make the site into a kind of evolving film journal in which I would record every film I see.
And it is in that capacity that I have vowed to bring it back from the grave. My aim is to post something new every morning, and I've managed it this week at least, so if you feel like dropping by it would be lovely to see you there.
Something else we're doing, the wife and I that is, that I'm linking-in with the relaunched Cameos is watching films in self-curated seasons.
Every month we take it in turns to pick a subject for a season and choose the films we want to see for it, and I'll put reviews up on Cameos as we go.
There are ground rules: modern American romcoms are okay now and then but not permitted in a whole month-long season; Angela in turn has prohibited me from suggesting "any of your 'house of blood' type films".
I get to go first because I just do and that's all there is to it, and so this month it's Fay Wray. (I sense little by way of surprise.)
You can find out what the current season is by going to 'This Month at Cameos' at the top of the page, and then by clicking the link you can isolate all of the films under that heading.
Your comments on the way will, as always, jolly us both along no end.

Now on to our competition winners.
We had two copies of the new Steve McQueen biography and two of Piper Laurie's autobiography up for grabs, and the lucky Steves were
Heather Terry and The Lady Eve,
while the fortune-dusted Pipers were
Russell Peterson and Sherry Smith.
Thanks to everyone who took part, and congratulations to the lucky four. Your books will be mailed next week.

There's more Movietone Books up next, with features on the Marx Brothers, Leslie Halliwell and the next of my Movie Books I Couldn't Live Without.
So meet you back here soon, and in the meantime, don't forget to consider Uggie...