Director's Cut

This movie isn't funny, in fact after about 15 mins I was ready to throw my remote through the screen just to shut Penn up! Oh and all his dumb goofy faces he makes through this entire thing, never have I ever, wanted to punch someone in the face so hard, in my life. Skip this garbage.

Loved The Last Movie Star so I streamed this on Amazon. I came away underwhelmed. A little too much Penn Jillette for one movie and basically one joke about his character being obsessed with Missi Pyle.

Well I'm fans of P&T so maybe I'm biased but I liked this movie. Penn is at his heaviest and looks really old with the dyed long hair. He looks so much better today.

Anyway in some weird way the whole thing works!

With this premise and the paring of Penn and Adam Rifkin, I was expecting this film to be hilarious but I didn't expect it to be so nasty! I really liked the way that they used this wild way of making a movie but part of me was left wanting more strong female characters. I get that it's from the perspective of the lead character who is a horrible man but I still think they could have found a way to make the female characters feel more than one note. That being said, this movie is wild, it's hilarious and it's very weird. Will watch again.

Full disclosure: I contributed enough to the crowdfunding site to get invited to the premiere and meet Penn and Teller, so I would have enjoyed the experience even if the movie had been terrible. Luckily, it wasn't.

The plot is pretty original. It's about - surprise - a crowd funded movie. One particular contributor - Herby Blount, played by Penn - donates enough money to hang out on the set and even film with his own hand-held camera. It turns out he's obsessed with Missi Pyle, who, like all the actors, plays herself. He uses his footage together with raw footage he steals from the movie to cobble together his own version of the movie, in which he's the hero. What we're supposedly watching is the director's cut of *that* movie, with his commentary. How meta is that? The result is something of a cross between a classic "movie within a movie" and a "found footage" documentary.

It's really two separate movies. They create a good part of the movie "Knocked Off", a low budget but completely credible slasher/horror movie, and they also create Herby's amateurish additions and edits. During the Q&A, they claimed all of "his" editing and special effects were done with free software that a crazy person really could use.

The acting is quite good. The main characters in the "movie" are Missi Pyle and Harry Hamlin. She in particular does a good job of playing both her role and herself playing her role.

Of course, the whole thing is narrated via Herby's (Penn's) "director's commentary", and that's where all the humor comes in - and it is very funny.

All in all, a quite enjoyable movie.