Ça tourne à Manhattan

"Living in Oblivion" is one of your video store's coolest secrets. Writer-director Tom Dicillo takes a satiric look at independent films while capturing the ups and downs of making a movie. For the cast and crew of the film within this film, the downs hilariously outnumber the ups.

Steve Buscemi shines in an all-too-rare lead role as the frustrated director. There's also great work by James LeGros as the pompous leading man, Catherine Keener as the insecure leading lady, and Dermot Mulroney as the broken-hearted cinematographer.

Dicillo is especially concerned with the nightmares and daydreams of his characters, and rightly adopts a dreamy visual style that shifts between black and white and color.

It all adds up to an uncommonly intelligent, artistic, and funny(!) comedy that deserves your attention.

Living In Oblivion is a mad-cap, zany, and often surprising film about everything that can go wrong while making an independent film. Superbly acted by the entire cast, especially Buscemi, Keener, Martens, and Mulrony, the movie is full of twists and turns that keep you longing for more. Tom DiCillo's wit and humor are outrageous in the best sense. Beware, however. The movie is full of well-used and perfectly-placed profanity. Not for the weak at heart where such language is concerned. If you've got the stomach for good, solid funny times with lots of 'off' words, this one will do it for you. I give it a "10". I've seen it more than 3 times and its humor holds through each viewing.

A movie director and his leading lady feel the pressure as their shoot teeters on the edge of disaster ...

Witty and big-hearted satire of the process of making an independent movie. This comes in three parts, each act dealing with a particular scene and bringing a change of emphasis. The story is almost perfectly self-contained, with unity of action, place and time, and the writing and editing keeps it clipping along at a good pace. The writer/director uses the full potential of his set up by bringing in a host of characters and a range of technical aspects of the shoot, and yet wraps it up nicely through the romantic concerns of his creations.

Performances are good all round, and some real insights are delivered - the objection to dwarfs in dream sequences, the most self-obsessed person in the room coming up with the best idea (the blocking for the "admired from afar" scene). It's not a laugh a minute, but there are plenty of good moments.

The only time I noticed the music was when the director was giving a pep talk to one of the actors. Maybe there could have been more jokes on that "score" - or maybe I missed them.

Overall: Not a classic, but thoroughly enjoyable.

Living in Oblivion is an unusual, funny, and interesting example of the movie-about-movies genre, focusing on the low budget, independent movie making scene. The lead performances by Steve Buscemi and Catherine Keener are first-rate, and the supporting cast is excellent as well. The film veers from satire to realism to surrealism in depicting the problems and tensions involved in off-off-Hollywood filmmaking. One problem with its structure, though, is the repeated "dream trick." Its first use creates shock and interest, but its second use creates a serious distraction in the third act since the viewer keeps wondering whose dream he or she may be in this time. Overall, an enjoyable film - highly recommended to indie film buffs.

I'm also an independent director. Yes, I've made movies. And if you don't know what it's like, then this movie will tell you.

This movie was shown to me on the first day of film school. I don't know if they were being ironic or simply warning us for what would come in the next two weeks, but as a director who would then go on and direct my own film over those two weeks, this movie is painfully accurate and very hilarious.

When I first went into this movie, I thought it was some sentimental thing about the art of making a movie and the spiritual journey your soul goes on or whatever. But it's not. Again, this movie speaks to me, and is just so funny, just because of the way that it's relatable. I would definitely recommend all aspiring filmmakers to see this one, partially because it is demonstrative of the often-hilarious Murphy's Law-esque antics that happen on film sets.

You know a film is good when you have a theatre full of film students laughing their heads off every ten seconds. And that was exactly what was happening. This was actually the first movie I saw back in the theatre after an almost-2-year-long pandemic-related hiatus, and it really was genuinely a great film to see on the big screen.

The movie has a really unmistakable style, with a lot of clever colour-to-black-and-white switches to signify the difference between the film world and the real world which I really enjoyed. On top of all of that, everyone delivered excellent performances which elevated the comedy of it all even further.

One of the best comedies out there, and a must-see for indie filmmakers. Thank you MFI '21!

-Sasha.