Spoilers herein.
There are three ways to make a film. You can find a mood, embed it in a style and just carry the audience into the taste. You can engage in the fluids of life, the humanity of events and desires. Or you can concern yourself with the art of what it means to make a film and essentially produce an imaginative essay on creation.
Coppola senior is the second type of filmmaker. Sofia Coppola is the first.
In all three, the story plays a role, but never the central role any more than what you eat has to do with why you are alive. Each of us as watchers have a similar choice to make, a choice that determines our lives in film.
Our man Roman has decided to take the third way. If he was starting when his father did, the `third way' filmmakers would be the French New Wave guys, plus the early Fellini. Except for the genius Kubrick, who in 1968 made a film set in and called `2001' that was itself a third way film, and which concerned the battle among the three ways.
Kubrick's three `ways` are three completely independent cosmologies who tussle for control over the film: the humans, the machines, and some undefined supernatural consciousnesses. It is a masterpiece of self-reference.
Now along comes Roman and makes a film in 2001, set in 1968 about a science fiction film. It deals with the same three agents, this time as discrete films: the human diary of Paul, the scifi film and the wrapper film.
That scifi film stands for the style piece. It starts life as a New Wave film, with a French director who is obsessed with the revolution. It features a Cronenberg-inspired `gun' (reference eXistenZ about the same three levels) that represents the camera: it freezes things. That director (played by the most recognizable French film icon alive) ensures that the camera is returned to the revolutionary.
The film is then turned over to the `mood' director, here a parody of Roger Corman. And then Paul, who takes the third way under the nose of the Italian boss, his dad.
It is an amazingly clever construction, much deeper and richer than `Adaptation' for instance because it actually wears what it sews, and integrates the three layers. It absolutely sets him apart from Sophia and Francis. I'll take one of these over one of those any day, even if the product is as dreary as `the Auteur Theory.'
Others have rattled off many of the references to other films, mostly new wave, but I didn't see this one: the bit at about the stolen film references the chase in `Give my Regards to Broad Street,' which had very similar aspirations. Instead of relying on Kubrick, who had worked out some of the outstanding problems of the construction, it more ambitiously leveraged Alfred Jarry. But alas, it was tedious. This isn't.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
There are three ways to make a film. You can find a mood, embed it in a style and just carry the audience into the taste. You can engage in the fluids of life, the humanity of events and desires. Or you can concern yourself with the art of what it means to make a film and essentially produce an imaginative essay on creation.
Coppola senior is the second type of filmmaker. Sofia Coppola is the first.
In all three, the story plays a role, but never the central role any more than what you eat has to do with why you are alive. Each of us as watchers have a similar choice to make, a choice that determines our lives in film.
Our man Roman has decided to take the third way. If he was starting when his father did, the `third way' filmmakers would be the French New Wave guys, plus the early Fellini. Except for the genius Kubrick, who in 1968 made a film set in and called `2001' that was itself a third way film, and which concerned the battle among the three ways.
Kubrick's three `ways` are three completely independent cosmologies who tussle for control over the film: the humans, the machines, and some undefined supernatural consciousnesses. It is a masterpiece of self-reference.
Now along comes Roman and makes a film in 2001, set in 1968 about a science fiction film. It deals with the same three agents, this time as discrete films: the human diary of Paul, the scifi film and the wrapper film.
That scifi film stands for the style piece. It starts life as a New Wave film, with a French director who is obsessed with the revolution. It features a Cronenberg-inspired `gun' (reference eXistenZ about the same three levels) that represents the camera: it freezes things. That director (played by the most recognizable French film icon alive) ensures that the camera is returned to the revolutionary.
The film is then turned over to the `mood' director, here a parody of Roger Corman. And then Paul, who takes the third way under the nose of the Italian boss, his dad.
It is an amazingly clever construction, much deeper and richer than `Adaptation' for instance because it actually wears what it sews, and integrates the three layers. It absolutely sets him apart from Sophia and Francis. I'll take one of these over one of those any day, even if the product is as dreary as `the Auteur Theory.'
Others have rattled off many of the references to other films, mostly new wave, but I didn't see this one: the bit at about the stolen film references the chase in `Give my Regards to Broad Street,' which had very similar aspirations. Instead of relying on Kubrick, who had worked out some of the outstanding problems of the construction, it more ambitiously leveraged Alfred Jarry. But alas, it was tedious. This isn't.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.