The New Hampshire

Issue date: 4/27/07 Section: Arts & Living

Media Credit: Courtesy Photo Natalie Portman in 2006's "V for Vendetta" watching 1934's "The Count of Monte Cristo".

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.

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