 "Photo: Courtesy Photo")
Now don't get me wrong. Despite the critical tone this article will take, I love movies about movies, especially those about movie making. Generally it is because they are few and far between. In the early days of cinema, the motion picture camera was too new of an entity to make a movie about because filmmakers were too interested in using them to tell stories that they previously were not. They were not able to turn the camera on themselves for a new type of story. The exception came in 1929 when Dziga Vertov made his masterpiece "Man with a Movie Camera", which chronicles a cameraman traveling the streets of a Russian city filming a day in the life in the twenties. I am not nearly well versed enough in film history to say that this is the first time that it had been done but for the sake of this article it is the earliest example I am aware of to make my point. My point is this; movies about movies have been around for a while.
It is also the medium through which the introductory scene of Orson Wells' altogether over rated "Citizen Kane" is presented, in that the sequence is reviled to be a newsreel that the main characters are watching. It is also a major presence in the 1960 Michael Powell film "Peeping Tom", where a psychopathic serial killer gets off to filming his victims screaming as he murders them and then watching them die on his film projector in his apartment.
For the remainder of this article there needs to be a way to refer to "movies made about movies" that is not repetitively restating the idea "movies made about movies" a dozen times, because that will just get unbearably annoying incredibly fast. Therefore it shall be called a subgenre, but only for the sake of discussing it in this article, as I do not feel subgenre is an appropriate word in a broader sense.
To connect the subgenre to our generation this concept is present in some of the world's favorite films, such as "American Beauty". With the money made from selling drugs, Ricky, played by Wes Bentley, purchases a vast amount of videography equipment and proceeds to film everything around him. It is also the central theme to the turn of the millennium comedy "Road Trip", in which Sean William Scott and company take a cross country road trip to retrieve a homemade X rated video tape accidentally mailed to the protagonist's girlfriend. This subgenre is even present in children's films like the 2002 Frankie Muniz film "Big Fat Liar', where an ill-fated middle school essay ends up as a script to a major motion picture.
Recently however there has been a trend in showing characters in movies watching movies. Starting summer of 2005 the "thing to do" became, or so it seemed, to have characters watching relatively famous classic black and white films.
In some films it works toward adding dimension to the character, "V for Vendetta", for example. Through most of the film it seems that V, the revenge seeking man in a Guy Fox mask, is a cold unfeeling man bent upon retribution, but his obsession with watching the 1934 version of "The Count of Monte Cristo" adds a hopeless romantic air to the man seemingly made of stone.
However, in other films this movies-in-movies subgenre seems entirely unnecessary. I love Jim Jarmusch, but the 2005 film "Broken Flowers" is a prime example of the unnecessary abuse of the subgenre. The opening sequence is of Bill Murray's character watching "The Private Life of Don Juan", also from 1934. Considering that the character Bill Murray played was named Don Johnson, the use of the 1934 film was to cement the association between the two characters and create the pretense of Bill Murray as a womanizer. It seemed to me however that the name choice was enough and the use of the film within the film was overkill.
Then again, there were several other films this past summer that did this exact same thing but with seemingly no reason. It seemed as though the filmmakers had finished writing the films and began to shoot them and realized that they had made a two dimensional character. How then will they ever make these characters not suck? I know add a scene of them watching a classic black and white film! Of coarse!
What did it add for Owen Wilson as Dupree in "You Me and Dupree" to be watching the 1953 "Roman Holiday"? Or John Cusack watching "Dr. Zhivago"? Now after Say Anything, Cusack can never do wrong in my book, and Owen is just Owen, so I don't hold it against them. "The Lake House", however is "unforgivable." The fact that they selected one of Hitchcock's best films, "Notorious" , to randomly add in is just asking for a blasting.
So while appropriate use of movies within movies is awesome, the gratuitous unnecessary exploitation of it is, well annoying to say the least, or at least that what I think, but what do I know anyways?
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