![]() But no: What it looked like was… a movie the cast and crew were making up as they went along. Which would be a juicy joke if the film, when we’d first seen it, looked like something other than that. ![]() Except that now, we know the inside story of the awful movie it is, and we see that everything that happened before was the cast and crew making up the movie as they went along. ![]() He also hooks up with a producer, Mounir (Lyes Salem), who is such a corner-cutting grade-Z dirtbag, with an amusing resemblance to Tom Jones, that he’s actually the most entertaining person in the movie.Īnd then - are you ready for this? - we have to sit and watch “Z” all over again. He hires Raphaël (Finnegan Oldfield), who plays Bang the blue zombie, because his daughter tells him that Raphaël is the next Adam Driver. The director, played by Romain Duris, with his gregarious Mick Jagger-meets-Martin Amis sexiness, is not the angry megalomaniac we thought he’s a family man trying to reignite his faltering career, which is why he’s willing to take this scuzzy job (and act in the movie). Matsuda (Yoshiko Takehara), who simply wanted her script to get produced. It is, we discover, a 30-minute-long livestreamed web movie, financed by the elderly Mrs. But then, cutting to a month earlier, we learn how this masterpiece got made. Suddenly the end credits roll, and the fact that we aren’t going to have to watch this movie anymore comes as a vast relief. The lead actor, painted so blue that he looks like an extra from “Avatar,” keeps gassing on about zombies and capitalism, which of course is George A. Most of what we see is simply garish and unpleasant, like a lumbering zombie who spews yellow vomit in someone’s face. Time and again, though, it stops to delineate the rules in a laborious fashion, like the fact that they’re shooting on a site where the Japanese army did experiments to bring back the dead, or the murky mythology of the Star of Blood Brotherhood. Oh, and why does everyone have a Japanese name? Heads are split open with an axe, and the makeup woman (Bérénice Bejo), for no good reason, turns out to be a master of the military martial art Krav Maga. One zombie loses an arm, and several characters play catch with the bloody disembodied limb. There is, however, a great deal of in-your-face random hysteria, as when the film’s director explodes in an abusive manner at his lead actress (Matilda Lutz). That puts this squarely in the genre of “Shaun of the Dead,” “Planet Terror” and “The Dead Don’t Die,” except that nothing we see is remotely scary or remotely funny. In the film we’re watching, zombies attack a film crew that’s shooting a low-budget zombie movie (quel meta absurdité). It’s a messy and annoying one-joke movie that repeats the joke over and over again - and guess what, it was barely funny the first time.Īt first, we think we’re watching a slovenly French zombie movie, titled “Z,” shot in one weirdly rambling hand-held take on what looks like smeary video, the set an abandoned factory splashed with colors (teal, orange) so high-intensity gaudy that the movie seems almost stylish in its lack of style. But “Final Cut” is the first Hazanavicius movie where the filmmaker seems barely in control of what he’s doing. I love the “OSS 117” retro-spy comedies (featuring Jean Dujardin in a performance sly enough in its myopia to compare to Peter Sellers), I found “The Artist” to be an enchanting bauble (though no, it shouldn’t have won the Oscar), and his Jean-Luc Godard biopic, “Godard Mon Amour,” was, to me, a fascinating deconstruction of Godard’s late-’60s misanthropic bourgeois Marxist narcissism. “Final Cut” is Hazanavicius’s eighth feature, and since he’s considered far from a god in cinephile circles (“The Artist” is routinely dismissed as a blight on the Oscars), let me say for the record that I’ve enjoyed most of them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |