11-13-2018, 12:28 PM
I debated which to watch first -- this or They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, which is a documentary on the making of. I chose this, and I think it's the right decision.
It's a glorious mess of a movie, likely closer to Welles' intent than you might at first think -- as he was purposely breaking with his old ways and trying for an unscripted feel. Annoyingly rough through the early goings, the shots and dialog so rough-cut that one begins to suspect this is raw discarded footage pieced together in a lame salvage effort. But then it starts to grow on you, and there's so much circularity and recursiveness and an overall noise that ever more strongly suggests a signal that, well, it reaches a fever pitch, becomes a trippy fever dream, almost psychedelic, and in places is powerfully erotic.
I don't mean to oversell this. It is a mess, and your mileage is likely to vary. But by the end of this I was glad I had watched it. It's such a time capsule, if anything else, so many familiar faces and faces I should have recognized, and scattered themes, stabs at Hollywood, stabs at friends and foes -- just a rich, chaotic, savage brain dump from a genius at the end of his career.
It's a glorious mess of a movie, likely closer to Welles' intent than you might at first think -- as he was purposely breaking with his old ways and trying for an unscripted feel. Annoyingly rough through the early goings, the shots and dialog so rough-cut that one begins to suspect this is raw discarded footage pieced together in a lame salvage effort. But then it starts to grow on you, and there's so much circularity and recursiveness and an overall noise that ever more strongly suggests a signal that, well, it reaches a fever pitch, becomes a trippy fever dream, almost psychedelic, and in places is powerfully erotic.
I don't mean to oversell this. It is a mess, and your mileage is likely to vary. But by the end of this I was glad I had watched it. It's such a time capsule, if anything else, so many familiar faces and faces I should have recognized, and scattered themes, stabs at Hollywood, stabs at friends and foes -- just a rich, chaotic, savage brain dump from a genius at the end of his career.
I'm nobody's pony.