Finding Neverland & F for Fake

Finding Neverland was much better than I was expecting. Very emotional movie, and my biggest complaint about it is the fact that it's not really true. It's more effective in the fictionalized version of the events than in the true story, so it's not a big problem. Depp is, of course, amazing. What the hell was he doing for all those years of not acting well? Oh, that's right, he was just picking some bad movies. It's also nice to see Kelly Macdonald in a role, and Ian Hart. This was a much better film than Monster's ball, so at least that movie did one good thing.

F for Fake is outstanding. There is nothing at all wrong with it. It's a masterpiece of editing, fakery, storytelling, and just overall awesomeness. It's a shame that F for Fake isn't up there with Touch of Evil and Citizen Kane as Orson Welles's best films. Or maybe it is, and I'm just not up on the general consensus of film critics on Welles's films. It's just a magnificent little film, well worth watching. Just don't trust anything. Which Welles himself says early and often in the film. The use of his own history in the film, and his referring to filmmaking as the ultimate fakery just adds another level, along with his illumination that Citizen Kane was originally about Howard Hughes rather than William Randolph Hearst. Well, possibly, because why should we believe anything that Welles says in this film. I'm not really familiar with the Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving stories, beyond the very basic parts. I watched it on TCM, on a special night picked by Penn & Teller, meaning that they had both an intro and exit by them. Pretty interesting, and it really does fit in perfectly with their show. Their show is like little half-hour bits of them both exposing as fakes and completely misrepresenting everything in it, just like the 85 minutes of F for Fake. And I just love that it's an ostensibly true story, and a documentary, but so much of it is from such a biased vantage point, that it actually feels just like a normal political documentary of today. If Michael Moore hadn't seen this film, I'd be amazed.