{"id":13479,"date":"2017-02-15T09:00:36","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T17:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=13479"},"modified":"2017-02-14T11:09:17","modified_gmt":"2017-02-14T19:09:17","slug":"to-see-or-not-to-see-the-player-a-film-about-filmmakers-making-films","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2017\/02\/15\/to-see-or-not-to-see-the-player-a-film-about-filmmakers-making-films\/","title":{"rendered":"To See or Not to See<\/em>: The Player<\/em> a film about filmmakers making films"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Player
\n<\/i>4\/5<\/p>\n

In art there exists the now-well-documented phenomenon of the \u201cmeta\u201d: a piece of art, literature, theatre, film\u2014anything\u2014that is self-referential, self-conscious, about its own existence.<\/p>\n

In the art world, there\u2019s Andy Warhol\u2019s pop-art \u201cCampbell\u2019s Soup Cans\u201d; literature has Miguel de Cervantes\u2019 Don Quixote<\/i>; in film, there\u2019s Robert Altman\u2019s The Player<\/i> (1992).<\/p>\n

But what is vital to note is that Altman, like the great artists before him, uses the meta aspect in his film not for cheap laughs or celebrity cameos but because the story needs it. Without it The Player<\/i> would merely be a \u201990s crime film, and not the dashingly clever, enthralling, elbow-nudging work that it is.<\/p>\n

Like most good things, though, meta\u2019s reputation for being edgy or clever has been severely tarnished\u2014so much so that some would suggest meta is no more\u2014by feckless screenwriters and directors who lean on it as a crutch and not as a device to draw the viewer in further. Examples of this include Deadpool <\/i>(2016) and the abominable Sausage Party<\/i> (2016), where, in absence of direction, message, ideas, and laughs, the filmmakers turned to making fun of themselves\u2014their medium and their characters\u2014and other celebrities, leaving the viewers asking themselves why they should bother watching a film when even its creators didn\u2019t care about it.<\/p>\n

The Player<\/i> is much more closely related to Adaptation<\/i> (2000), where the filmmaker\/writer team was so full of ideas that they couldn\u2019t help but loop the story back to their own reality\u2014a practice that implicates the audience in a surprisingly immediate way. In that vein, The Player<\/i> is so dense with references\u2014verbal and visual\u2014that it demands not only that you watch it multiple times, but also that you watch its influences; in doing so, you will appreciate what Altman has done with this picture.<\/p>\n

For example, in the opening shot, the roving camera eavesdrops on a pair of men discussing the brilliance of Orson Welles\u2019 own opening shot in Touch of Evil <\/i>(1958)\u2014an immensely complicated three-and-a-half minute virtuoso shot.<\/p>\n

Altman then proceeds to extend his own opening shot to the eight-minute-plus range, and you can\u2019t help but smile at its superfluousness and at its technical brilliance\u2014and at no point does the audience feel like Altman is taking a shortcut or referencing the past because he\u2019s out of ideas in the present.<\/p>\n

The greatest films are the ones that feel as though they\u2019re so full of ideas that you could watch them again and again and never quite plumb their depths\u2014Annie Hall <\/i>(1977), Being John Malkovich <\/i>(1999), <\/i>and Pulp Fiction <\/i>(1994) are this way, so inventive that every minute with them brings something intriguing and new. These are generous films, films that are so alive they can\u2019t help but share their idiosyncrasies with the audience.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth noting that these movies are all in the meta strain of filmmaking, with Annie Hall<\/i> and Pulp Fiction<\/i> drawing attention to the editing structure of films, and Being John Malkovich <\/i>drawing a parallel between the voyeuristic tendencies of the cinema and spying on John Malkovich by being inside his head.<\/p>\n

Perhaps The Player<\/i>\u2019s greatest drawback is that to really appreciate its intricacies one must be willing to do the research\u2014to watch the films it references\u2014and be aware of its great, winking intelligence.<\/p>\n

This is a film made by a filmmaker about filmmakers making films. It knows what it\u2019s doing, and all it asks is that you keep up with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Player 4\/5 In art there exists the now-well-documented phenomenon of the \u201cmeta\u201d: a piece of art, literature, theatre, film\u2014anything\u2014that is self-referential, self-conscious, about its own existence. In the art world, there\u2019s Andy Warhol\u2019s pop-art \u201cCampbell\u2019s Soup Cans\u201d; literature has Miguel de Cervantes\u2019 Don Quixote; in film, there\u2019s Robert Altman\u2019s The Player (1992). But what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,182],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-february-15-2017"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13481,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13479\/revisions\/13481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}