Director's Cut

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!

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.

Since Laserdiscs and even more so DVDs and Blu Rays (and who knows what's next apart from streaming), the special feature that involves filmmakers and stars or crew commenting on the movie you're watching, the question is, if sometimes the movies may only be entertaining or watchable with the audio commentary on. It's certainly true with most films by Uwe Boll and it's a feature you get here for free.

I do wonder if there will be an audio commentary for this one. Which would be breaking more than just a fourth wall, which the movie incidentally does already. It's funny and it's a gimmick, that does pay off if you like this sort of thing. Some jokes (most of them actually) are not really sophisticated, but rather low and simple. Still this was a lot of fun to watch and the actors obviously had fun doing this. Sit back, relax and enjoy this silly fun too then

Others have already explained the plot so I won't go into that here. Let's just say that Director's Cut has a lot more layers than you might expect. The underlying cop drama is beautifully shot and Herbie's director's commentary is very funny.

There are numerous throw-away one-liners and inside jokes and some of the special effects will have you laughing out loud.

The car chase near the end was spectacular!

Great piece, throws the movie rules out the window and twists its will onto the screen.