We’ve all heard of movies that are based on video games, and even video games that are based on movies, and you might be thinking to yourself “oh, this is probably a video game based on a video game based on a movie and also I really have to pee” but you’d be wrong. Not only wrong because you just wet your pants while reading this review you sicko, but also because this movie has nothing to do with the concept that is in your head.
This is actually a documentary about a guy who is making a movie about a guy making a video game about people that play video games. You might be asking yourself “wait, isn’t that Movie, the Movie: Video Game, the Video Game” and seriously, just stop. You’re confusing the shit out of me. Just go pee already and leave me alone.
This certainly isn’t the first documentary about someone making a movie (literally, Movie, the Movie). In ‘82, Burden of Dreams captured Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and the driven insanity of dragging a steamship over a hill, in 1991, Hearts of Darkness expertly captured Coppola’s struggle to film Apocalypse Now and, of course, Hungry for Shakespeare, the award winning documentary about Gwyneth Paltrow’s nutritionist during the 1998 film Shakespeare In Love.
This is, however, the first documentary that I am aware of about the filming of another documentary. And whether you consider the protagonist to be Sawyer Davis, the video game designer not particularly struggling with his game about people playing video games, or the man calmly and easily documenting him, or the man documenting documenting him… there’s nothing much at stake here, except for perhaps your sanity as you attempt to contemplate the utterly absurd and complex nature of the film’s structure and concept.
While the filmmaking of a David Lynch or a Christopher Nolan arguably rises to a level commensurate with the often complex and sometimes confusing ideas presented therein, this film is more akin to a jigsaw puzzle that is impossible to fit together, just like the Donald Duck one my mom bought me at the Dollar Store for Christmas when I was 7 (THANKS FOR RUINING CHRISTMAS, MA!!)
Aside from my childhood traumas, this movie was a little traumatic too, especially considering the fact that I have clearly repressed the memory of having seen the whole thing. I promise that I stayed until the end of the movie, but for the life of me I can not remember what happened. So, as I always do and always will, I’m going to make up the ending in my head: the video game designer finally kills his brother in a boat on the lake.
The Fake Movie Critic 