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Reviews
The Last Movie (2012)
Film noir about the making of a film noir.
The Last Movie is one of the most intriguing, involving, and multi-leveled films I've seen in a long time. It takes the sensibility of the noir universe and shifts it even further off center from every day life. And it took me along with it. It's haunting in every sense of the word. While it is not a ghost story, it could have been: the imagery alternates between commonplace and otherworldly; there are two houses that could be haunted. Virtually every aspect of the film serves to disorient the viewer. Plot-wise, it's about a director re-making and casting a Russian noir that's a leaner and meaner Double Indemnity. Yet nobody makes that connection. The director should know; we see his collection of books on film noir. So I was left feeling "wait, am I the only one who sees the connection?" (As in "am I the only one who sees the ghost?") Conversations between actors, crew, director, producer, characters occur simultaneously via different means (face to face, computer, phone, etc.). This auditory and visual overload keeps everything off-kilter. It's also a film about identity in the actor-merges-with-character tradition, but with a twist. The actress playing the femme fatale in the remake morphs not into her own character, but into the character in the Russian original (who appears to her like a ghostly apparition). Yet it's not without humor. There's a friendly nod to the "a little sex" scene in Sullivan's Travels. This is a film for people who love film of any type.