The Movie Hero

I just saw "The Movie Hero" today at the Cleveland International Film Festival. I was pleased.

"The Movie Hero" is hilarious, for one, and also really makes you think about your laughter. The main character keeps talking to his "audience" (us, in a way), but everyone thinks he's crazy for that. He then goes and gets a side-kick, love interest, all the stuff for his movie. The premise is unique and the way it plays with its ideas are just fun. The acting is great and makes it a wonderful, light-hearted film about finding your inner "audience".

We got to talk to the director of this movie after it was shown and he pointed out that he wrote in a week. As a writer, I was amazed. Stupid movies, yeah, maybe, but something like this should take way longer. Kudos to him on that.

"The Movie Hero" is so smart about movies, too, that I even thought about the wonderful film "Adaptation" during the movie. That should tell you enough.

I saw this film at the Cleveland Film Festival, it was one of the few US films showing, so I wanted to see it, but after reading the review in the festival magazine, my expectations were low. The only reason I call this film "kind of original" is because the concept was original, yet the humor that was employed, has kind of already been done.

It is about an aspiring actor in Los Angles, who is considered a failure by most around him. Because of his failure, he creates an imaginary "audience" (that's you), that watches him as he goes through daily life. He goes to great extents to impress his audience by doing things like attacking random suspicious-looking characters on the street. After a few violations, a judge has him see a psychiatrist, and from there, things start getting a little bit more interesting.

It was a pretty upbeat movie, and a few parts had me laughing, but it mostly consisted of making-fun of common film clichés and stereotypes, and despite this, the film still employed a few of these on its own. The main character often talks directly to the audience, which gets sort of irritating and there's also this villain that runs around, who also becomes annoying. The acting was nothing special, but I will give the writer a bit of credit, sometimes you are left wondering where he will go next, but for the most part the film manages to remain entertaining. Pretty average: 5/10.

An incredibly insightful and daring film that works on so many levels that my friends and I are still talking about it and going "Whoa!" The dialog is impeccable, the acting and directing are brilliant and the premise is a very funny testimony to our current paradigm shift in consciousness.

It begins as a movie about a man who believes his life itself is a movie, and that he has a responsibility to live it very deliberately, offering all the drama and nuances that we, his audience, deserves to see....without boring or offending. While the people around him are convinced that he is crazy, we are not so sure, because after all, we are watching his movie, aren't we??

The writer/director who discussed his movie after the screening at the Ashland Film Festival, said he made this movie based on his own experiences making movies...and while it pays a hilarious tribute to the process of film making I think it goes even deeper. The very nature of performing for an "imaginary" audience invokes the same questions posed by such movies as "Matrix" and even the "Holodeck" on Star Trek, where we realize that we are the direct creators of our own realities. We are the writer, director and producer of our own life movies, which helps us out of the victim role and into the creator mindset. And yet, for all our omnipotence and freewill, life created in a vacuum, without feedback or accountability, is meaningless. Doing or being just for it's own sake feels empty, so we must have a more tangible reason for doing the things we do....hence our audience (or higher power, or inner critic or what have you) that helps us be more aware of and deliberate in our life choices. Makes us want to become the hero instead of the villain or the loser who gets dumped in the end.

So here we are, watching a movie about a guy wanting to create a meaningful movie (ie: Life) for us, his audience, who is watching a movie created by a guy (the director) who wanted to create a meaningful movie for us, his audience, who will hopefully leave the theater wanting to create a meaningful movie of our own lives....so as not disappoint our inner audience.

Whoa.

The very talented Jeremy Sisto let his hair grow long in 2003 to play the pleasant but delusional hero of THE MOVIE HERO. Sisto imagines he is constantly performing before an audience that only he can see, and he imagines he is a hero looking for a villain to defeat. He finds his nemesis in the versatile Peter Stormare as an apparent serial killer. Along the way, he also picks up a sidekick (Antoin Thompson). The one problem is, he is an unemployed 20-something whose parents are always hoping for better from him. He eventually ends up in the office of a therapist (Dina Meyer of STARSHIP TROOPERS) whom he imagines is his "love interest." Some of this stuff is very funny, but most of the film is a series of closeups of the actors speaking directly into the camera, and they clearly were working with no budget to speak of. It shows. Worth a look by the cineaste, not the mainstream viewer.

most of the critical explanations of this movie i have read are way off...this movie is brilliant and has nothing to do with being overtly charming or endearing... the dialog is complete genius as well as the underlying message..

hope

psycotic

i hate movies, yet i live in an uscripted version of dillusion and surreal reality...the film that all indie films wish it could be when they are through being pretentious and for lack of better words, boring..(from someone who respects indie films in a creative and cinematic way) learn how to script the unscripted and feed off of tragedy...