Movie feels like it's been made 10 or 15 years ago straight to DVD, before Reynolds became famous and now the creators want to cash in. Michael Bay is great with short forms - like those he originated from - music videoclips. He lacks the ability to tell stories, just shoves CGI and other Movie feels like it's been made 10 or 15 years ago straight to DVD, before Reynolds became famous and now. News: Meta's New Enterprise User Video Shows Signs of Life at Cash-Strapped Augmented Reality Headset Maker. By Tommy Palladino; Meta 2; Despite funding difficulties that forced Meta to place employees on temporary leave in September, the augmented reality headset maker is reminding enterprise companies that it remains a viable option for visualizing and working with 3D design models. Metacritic aggregates music, game, tv, and movie reviews from the leading critics. Only Metacritic.com uses METASCORES, which let you know at a glance how each item was reviewed. META 2.0 stores are planned to be opening in various Canadian cities in 2019 and beyond. We look forward to serving you through our Friendly Guides. Stay tuned for future news about store rollouts by signing up for our newsletter.
7. Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973)
The film that destroyed the friendship between Godard and Truffaut is one of the core examples of films about filmmaking. It stars Truffaut himself as Ferrand, a film director facing troubles in the middle of the production. With this obvious alter-ego, Truffaut shows the process of filmmaking as an exhaustive task where emotions are not controlled and everyone has something more important to do.
How much can someone sacrifice through filmmaking? Can someone give up their life for filming? These questions couldn’t be more personal coming from Truffaut, a filmmaker with a great and deep love toward cinema. But becoming a filmmaker after his life as a critic on cahiers seemed to be hard, and all the emotions involved in making a film are shown as something that consume your life little by little.
The film echoes a prior work by Fassbinder, “Beware of a Holy Whore”, where filmmaking is shown as a way to exploit emotions and to generate dependence from anyone.
8. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975)
Comedy was one of the first genres to explore self-reflection as tool, because of the potential that parody had to make people laugh. Film conventions are one of the ways to make every film look the same without making a reflection, but revealing these conventions proved to be a very effective way to make the audience laugh.
Monty Python wasn’t a crew that was interested in portraying society in a realistic way; instead they preferred to exaggerate and make everything bigger and ridiculous. In their first feature, they made an epic based on King Arthur, and they used and revealed every topic of knight films.
From the indisputable courage of their characters to the rudeness of the villain, “The Holy Grail” was a funny film because it made fun of what the film was supposed to be. One of the most brilliant gags of the film makes fun of how the film’s sound is unrealistic, and how we are used to it. We hear the sound of the horses before they appear, and it sounds grand and rude.
Then we can see one of the members is in charge of going around hitting two shoes to make the sound of the horses. Monty Python made a funny joke out of it, and at the same time made an ahead-of-time reflection on the nature of sound on film.
9. The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985)
Woody Allen’s films are full of cinema references; his passion for making films comes from cinephilia and he doesn’t hide the fact at all. Fellini and Bergman are clearly his two favorites and most referenced directors, but he plays with their themes in a more relaxed and lighter way. His films are more of an honest tribute to his idols, and to the experience of watching a film rather than a theoretical way to play with narrative.
His most explicit love letter to this experience is “The Purple Rose of Cairo”. Cecilia (Mia Farrow) is an unmotivated waitress who runs every night to the cinema to disconnect from her problems. She gets especially engaged with “The Purple Rose of Cairo” and she goes to see it every day.
Suddenly, the main character realizes that she came again to see the film and starts to talk with her. The rest of the film follows this impossible love between a girl and a movie character, and the difficult love between life and cinema in Allen’s world.
10. Close-Up (Abbas Kiarostami, 1990)
Iranian cinema pays a special attention to the way people behave toward the “other”. In this questioning, the directors had included their own way to relate as filmmakers and as celebrities. So when Abbas Kiarostami found the history of Hossain Sabzian in a newspaper, he decided to make a film about it immediately. Split screen 3 9 download free.
During the late 80s, a cinephile named Sabzian convinced a family that he was Mohsen Makhmalbaf, one of the most famous directors in Iran. Sabzian made many visits to their place and asked them for money to finance the film, a film that he obviously wasn’t prepared to make. After some suspicions, the family called a journalist and they denounced Sabzian to the police.
Kiarostami makes a documentary on this process, recording the whole trial and a series of interviews with both Sabzian and the family. In the middle he makes re-enactments of the facts, but the special and brilliant element of these re-enactments is that they are played by Sabzian himself and the family.
Kiarostami asks about the nature of reality, and the nature of film, which are both extremely close to each other. “Close-Up” made it impossible for festivals and producers to label it between documentary and fiction, and after this film’s release, those borders are harder to distinguish.
11. The Player (Robert Altman, 1992)
Altman was always an outlaw inside Hollywood, pulling out narrative mainstream films with an authorial point of view. This way wasn’t easy for Altman, as he always found different difficulties coming from the studios. Tired of a homogeneous and non-creative industry, he made a film about it. Tim Robbins portrays a cruel executive producer in charge of choosing potential films. When he starts to receive death threats by mail, the film turns into a dark thriller.
The film is full with meta jokes all around. Altman throws darts against every Hollywood convention about how a movie should be, and the restrictions against a more courageous kind of film. It seems that the critique was widely shared between his co-workers, as we can see cameos from every popular actor from the early 90s: Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis, Susan Sarandon, John Cusack, Jeff Goldblum, and many, many more.
Toward the end, the meta references start to go in a serious direction, turning the film into a much more complex tale. The Hollywood spirit starts to take control of the film and takes it out of Altman’s intentions in one of the most funny and smart meta narrative closing of a film.
12. Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)
“What’s the point? They’re all the same. Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act who’s always running up the stairs when she should be going out the front door. It’s insulting.”
Later in the scene, we see Neve Campbell trying to escape through the front door, but when she is blocked by Ghostface she has to run up the stairs. This is only one of many meta jokes in “Scream”. The actualization made by Craven is pretty ingenious: a slasher film in the 90s couldn’t ignore the fact that the victims knows how a slasher works. Some of our fears are configured by cinema, and the way we should react imitates it.
In “Scream”, there is a horror fan geek who explains the rules of slasher to everybody in the room: the virgin lives, the other ones die. Craven explains the rules of his film directly to the audience, and then adds some changes both surprise and also subvert the genre.
13. Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas, 1996)
A film about a crew trying to pull out a film wasn’t such a novelty idea in the 90s. But the way Assayas mixes elements from everywhere makes the film go beyond this notion, turning it into a reflection about the French and world cinema situation.
An old novelle vague director played by Jean-Pierre Léaud wants to make a remake of “Les Vampires” (Louis Feuillade, 1915), but he finds constant trouble with his crew and his own mental stability. Maggie Cheung plays herself as the Chinese protagonist of the film. It is not a coincidence to put the main novelle vague actor to play the old novella vague director, or to have Maggie Cheung play herself as a naïve and complacent foreigner.
With this exercise, Assayas can question French cinema audiences and their excitement toward Asian action cinema. Assayas is not defending the old art-house cinema against John Woo, but he makes us question what to do with this old-fashioned cinema when no one wants to see it.
The ending is probably one of the most radical closings in French cinema since Godard’s filmography. This confusion around film itself gets condensed in this extremely weird segment. “Irma Vep” works as an intellectual reflection, which mocks intellectual exercise at the same time. The film questions its own themes and dialogues and constantly gives back the look to the audience.
“Don Quixote” is considered the groundbreaking novel responsible for the beginning of modernism in literature. The thing that made Cervantes’ work special was the way he talked about the novel within the novel, creating a literary world self-aware of literature. In the evolution of any art form, there is a moment when art starts to ask questions about itself.
There are some prior examples, but since the 60s it has been one of the most explored and rich questions to raise. Format experiments (Greaves, Kiarostami), vengeance on Hollywood (Altman, Lynch), genre mocking (Craven, Goddard) or autobiographies (Truffaut, Fellini) are some of the forms of meta experimentation in the next 20 examples.
1. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
The Soviet montage was the first moment in cinema when filmmakers started to make films to talk about cinema itself. Eisenstein proposed different categories for editing, and for applying them onscreen.
Kuleshov experimented with editing to prove how much of the emotion and acting skills of a face come from what image is next to it. But the most radical of them was Dziga Vertov. He didn’t believe in telling a story and he saw straight narrative as a bourgeois pleasure, so he just went to film his city, Moscow, without an organized plan.
At the same time, he shows this idea and it resulted in editing with some scenes in the editing room, and using every montage technique to remind us that we are watching a film. Film as a way to forget about your day was against the Marxist conviction of Vertov, so he tried every way possible to make us know this is a film.
Meta cinema evolved later in other ways, with many of the ideas applied on a narrative structure, but Vertov first placed this mechanism that leads to question what we are watching, and why are we watching it.
2. Duck Amuck (Chuck Jones, 1953)
Animation can be seen as a meta-fictional exercise by itself. Even if the audience, especially the children in the audience, can get immersed into a story, you are aware of how real the situation is. Chuck Jones always took advantage of this feature, playing with meta-fiction all around.
Little jokes about drawing in Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, or a huge number of inter-textual references, can be find in Jones’ works and show how much consciousness he had in his art. The greatest example of this is seen in one of his masterpieces “Duck Amuck”. The film shows Daffy Duck trying to have a new adventure, but being interrupted constantly by his creator.
A hand of an unseen animator takes off Daffy’s mouth, changes his background and clothes, and morphs the shape of his body. The audience is completely aware of how animation works, how any background is handmade and repeated and how there is somebody dubbing Daffy.
When we see Bugs Bunny as the animator some of the meta experiment is over, but this is just a way of making the film lighter and more friendly. But the philosophical issues are already there, and our relationship with Daffy Duck changes forever.
3. 8 ½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
This is the most important meta film, period. After the groundbreaking success of “La Dolce Vita”, Fellini was only able to find inspiration for another film through himself and that situation.
After making a film that was recognized as one of the greatest pieces of filmmaking ever made, the most important thing that Fellini had to express was his inner feelings. Guido (Marcello Mastronianni) is a film director suffering a lack of inspiration after making a successful film. Pressured by everyone around him, his process of filmmaking is mixed directly with his personal life and history.
Obviously talking about himself, Fellini accomplished the most complex and beautiful film about filmmaking. Life and film are impossible to separate. A critic once said that Fellini made a film so incredibly personal that he ended up making a universal statement. “8½” was the number of films that Fellini had made at the time, and reflected this lack of creativity, hence the title.
4. La Ricotta (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963)
A tableau vivant consists on recreating a painting with live actors. Pasolini made more than one in his life, bringing a solemn and sacred aura to his proletarian characters. Mixing these high concepts with the low-depths was his way to express where he really saw the sacred elements of these paintings.
“La Ricotta” presents another way of taking a tableau vivant of its bourgeois conception, this time with humor. Orson Welles plays an intellectual director, making the main character a meta joke from the beginning. Welles is filming a tableau vivant with non-professional poor Italian actors.
The result is a comedy fest where mistakes and problems turn the living picture into a joke. The intellectual director gets mad while nobody seems to take the religious elements seriously.
Pasolini made this film showing his canon elements, including his view on sacredness and its relationship with the working classes. But he also made a big meta joke on his own intellectual cinema. If we were able to see what they were filming, the result would be a dead-serious and intellectual tableau vivant, but being on the other side the reflection is far deeper.
5. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One (William Greaves, 1968)
“Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One” is not a film with meta elements but a complete meta experiment. William Greaves proposed a way of filming that didn’t had any guarantee; he had no way to be certain of what he was filming. We say Greaves had directed an amateur film, and at the same time there is a crew simultaneously following his crew.
With a split-screen we see the film he is working on, and the making-of the film. But after awhile we can start to question which film he is making, the fiction or the documentary about that fiction, or both. The same confusion is felt by the crew, and we can see them discussing it a number of times throughout the films.
While some of them claim it is Greaves’ idea, others think he is just a clueless and inexperienced director. We see Greaves frustrated when he is incapable of getting good acting from his stars, but in these discussions a cameraman starts to ask if that is his idea. “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One” is about the process of filming, but more deeply it’s about the fiction and trickery of cinema.
At the end we don’t have a revelation from Greaves, but rather a failed fiction and documentary. But like the crew, we can start to ask how much of this was his idea, or furthermore, how much of this could have been staged.
6. F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973)
Orson Welles made a documentary on art forger Elmyr de Hory, and he applies the same rules of the man he is portraying. Welles lies to the audience, and he is not afraid of telling us. In the presentation we know that half of the documentary will be a lie, and that he is going to trick us.
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The film moves from the main narrative and makes a trip through Welles’ own life, Howard Hughes, art history and the nature of documentary. Welles shows us how everything in a documentary is a narrative construction, and how editing is the important part where a filmmaker turns a film into his own narrative and view, and how we must not believe it so easily. The film is also a big step further in “mash-up” editing, previewing what was going to happen with MTV culture.