Movie movies
A movie movie is a movie about the motion picture business. Sometimes, as in Movie Movie, it’s not really a backstage movie, but just pointing out (affectionately) the foibles of the business. In Movie Movie, you get a double feature: a B&W boxing movie—the kid has to fight to get money for his sister’s eye operation—and a Technicolor backstage (theatrical) musical. Much to enjoy—for example, the night club in the boxing movie reappears with some furniture changes as the star’s dressing room in the musical.
A movie movie can be a comedy, as is Movie Movie; a drama, as in Sunset Boulevard; a musical, as in Singin’ in the Rain.
Last night I watch a great example of a movie movie, plus a terrific comedy: Bowfinger, written by and starring Steve Martin, directed by Frank Oz, with Eddie Murphy, Heather Graham, Christine Baranski, Terence Stamp, and a cameo by Robert Downey, Jr. It is insanely funny, but it’s also a very affectionate take on the movie business and in particular the struggles and improvisations necessary to make a low-budget (under $3000) film (the film the director/producer Bowfinger (played by Martin) is making). It includes the magic of Martin and some of his crew seeing a crowd enjoying and applauding their movie: magic.
It also has a very intriguing color palate with a lot of golden hues. Watch for it.
Wonderful comedy. I think this is the third time I’ve seen it, and I laugh my head off every time. You can tell that the people in the movie know in detail about making a movie, and they love it.
UPDATE: And there’s a lot in the movie, lots of little stories—the Mexican apprentices who become experts, the bed-hopping career woman, the insane cult that captivates a high-roller movie star and milks him for all he’s worth, and more.
LOVED Bowfinger! But a funny movie like that is almost never seen on the movie channels. Other movies about movies I liked were:
– American Movie (1999) Love it!
– 8 1/2 — Fellini (1963) [I'm a Fellini nut]
– Ed Wood (1994)
– Living in Oblivion (1995)
– Barton Fink (1991)
– The Player (1991)
– Extras (HBO/BBC by Ricky Gervais — a true delight)
zaine_ridling
12 August 2011 at 9:18 pm
Barton Fink, like so many movies by the Coen Brothers, seems to me an intriguing take on the Unreliable Narrator device so beloved in fiction and so difficult to portray in a movie. In Lolita (the novel, not the movie) it is obvious that Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator and we have to see through his portrayal of events to understand what actually happened—in Lolita’s “seduction” of him, for example, we can in the novel figure out what is going on. But a movie has trouble with this kind of ambiguity, since it must show a single version of events. And yet movies do find ways to present stories told by unreliable narrators.
I think, for example, that the movie King of the Hill by Stephen Soderbergh shows a series of events recounted by the protagonist, an overtly unreliable narrator in the story on the screen. The trick is then to figure out what really happened through clues in the movie. For example, the on-going frustrating encounters with food—with almost getting food, only to have to slip away—shows to me that the underlying reality was one of constant hunger. Other approaches to unreliable narration are see in movies by Dennis Potter, though perhaps those might be called symbolic narration, and in the movie Angel Heart with Robert De Niro playing (in my view) the figment of a schizophrenic imagination.
Barton Fink is in reality (I think) a dream that a young, bright ,sexually inexperienced, star-struck ambitious adolescent is having in a tenement flat on a hot summer night on the Lower East Side. Sounds impinge on the dream (e.g., plumbing sounds) as well as the heat and discomfort of the night. Watch it from that perspective and many things fall into place.
LeisureGuy
13 August 2011 at 5:54 am