Friday, April 24, 2009

Movie Log: Living in Oblivion

Living in Oblivion is a funny movie about low-budget filmmaking which I saw a few weeks ago now, and don't remember a whole lot about at this point.

Well, that one character is clearly a satire of the young Brad Pitt. (He was just the plain old Brad Pitt when the movie was made, of course -- this was a dozen years ago.)

And the repeated "and then he/she woke up" either happened one too often or one too few times; if you're going to repeat something, the magic number is three. Two just looks sloppy.

Steve Buscemi plays the director of a low-budget movie filming somewhere vaguely downtown in Manhattan, and the rest of the cast is his cast and crew -- mostly not people I recognized, except for Catherine Keener as the female lead.

And the movie rambles on through several long scenes -- three sequences of scenes, actually -- all about the various problems that arise when you work with people like these on a movie like this. Everyone involved in the movie-within-a-movie is moderately competent (with the possible exception of James LeGros as the not-based-on-Brad-Pitt-at-all-oh-no Chad Palomino), but they're all also neurotic and dysfunctional, so there are always more problems.

I gather that this was most interesting to other indy filmmakers in the mid-90s, but it's still pretty funny, and only very slightly self-indulgent -- I was expecting that level to be much higher.

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