Brandon's movie memory

“A film should never be an illustration of a book or a play; it should be itself.”

Welles is in a good place here – not a passive interview subject nor the hammy magician from F For Fake nor the self-important actor/director, but some happy role in between those. But I know Welles can be a suave, informative and entertaining fellow; what’s surprising here is that it’s a 90-minute Q&A, seemingly unedited (except when the camera ran out of film) without being full of stupid questions from the audience. The same day I watched this, Katy & I attended a Q&A with an author at the book festival at which ALL (or at least most) of the questions were stupid. Somehow, some university found a group who was familiar with The Trial (maybe they’d just watched it), interested in the conversation, and not just raising their hands to ask “what are your influences?” in order to get themselves on camera.

So, a good interview, full of valuable material. It’s inexcusable that this isn’t out on DVD alongside the film itself. Welles was making great DVD extras twenty years before there were DVDs.

Nonstop talking for ninety minutes! Nonstop talking for ninety minutes! Nonstop talking for ninety minutes! If someone pauses to take a breath, they quickly cut to someone else so the talking won’t stop!

For some reason I listened to the commentary for a while. Paul and Penn are very proud of their interviewee picks and of their independent filmmaker status. Big Hollywood never would’ve dreamed of filming The Aristocrats!

I guess it was good to see some of my favorite people hang out and talk about The Joke and each other and performing and everything. Jon Stewart, Drew Carey, Richard Lewis, Sarah Silverman, Bill Maher and Rip Taylor were all in there. I didn’t realize how much of a big deal they were gonna make about Gilbert Gottfried doing The Joke a couple weeks after 9/11/01. It’s the dramatic climax of a movie that had no drama or story up to that point, and while it’s true that humor was in a sorry state for those few weeks and it’s true that Gilbert is hilarious, they overblow the whole thing.

Anyway I didn’t mean to write so much because this was hardly even a movie, but here are some fun screenshots I took where you can see the cameraman in something reflective: