Feb. 01, 2003 - 2:30 pm
hmmmm...yes 8 1/2. i'd been working on getting my hands on a copy of this for a while now. it took me about 3 weeks to finally track it down to where i could watch it at home. that can be a more difficult process than you'd think if you're not willing to actually spend any money to check out a movie. but i finally got it and watched it with Colin and two of his cooler theater friends, Angel and Czyz. we were all baffled by this insane insane film about filmmaking.
and this is the paragraph where i usually describe the content of the film. this might be the most difficult description i've ever had to come up with. this is a movie that is constantly verbally and visually telling the audience that it doesn't know what it's going to be about when it finally gets made. during the process of the film, we watch "the director" work on creating the film that he's currently starring in. he can't come up with material that anyone likes. lots of dreamy passages involving himself, the things he wants to happen to him, and things that did happen to him in his childhood. and that's what we see onscreen happening as well. every idea he has throughout the movie gets incorporated into the movie, sometimes for no reason at all. i think my favorite part of the movie is the opening scene where he dreams that he is trapped in a car, then he starts flying away. very abstract and fascinating.
i think through most of this Colin and I were just sitting there with this look on our faces like we'd just smelled something bad. i think i was not confused as to what was going on for approximately 1/3 of this film. it's really incessant. there's constantly something happening and it usually has very little to do with what was happening 60 seconds earlier. it's scatterbrained i guess is what i'm saying. all over the place.
and the same weird dubbing/voice thing that happened in Fellini's La Strada (1954) the other day, yeah that was happening here too and Colin totally agreed with me on that.
it does have some redeeming qualities though, the acting is really good. especially the actor who plays the aging, confused director. awesome cinematography. they find great ways to keep a shot going for a really long time while still involving lots of movements and scenery changes. and the meta-filmic qualities of the movie are really worthwhile as well. it's always interesting to see someone talk about what they want to have happen in the hypothetical movie and then see it actually come to life within the same film. one interesting scene is where the director is sitting in a theater watching screen tests and his writer starts nagging him. he simply raises a finger because he's tired of hearing it. two men quickly appear from the shadows, place a bag over the writer's head, turn him around, place a noose around his neck, and hang the man. quite comical really.