The Auteur Theory (1999)

The Worst Film Ever

i must have seen a different film!!

Good movie but grossly overrated

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Spoilers herein.I am deep into a study for a book on folding in film. "Folding" is a general term for various types of selfreference, awareness, self-creation and reflection. The very idea behind my study is that this is a very useful thing to understand and use because it makes things more powerful. When exposed as the point of the art -- as in "Adaptation" or any number of similar films -- it serves as a fun playground, for particularly intelligent games.This film puts the lie to that. It doesn't work. It isn't fun. It DOES march through a few of the folding types I have categorized: films about other films, films that make themselves, films about the pretense of folding, films where the game of detecting gets wrapped up in both the story and the story about the story. Judges judging judges.Metadocumentaries.But there isn't a shred of cleverness, not a speck of fun. Even "Final Cut" was better. What could have made this work was better reflection between the two panels of judges and the revelation that the redhead executive was the murderer for reasons having to do with artificially enhancing the folding.When Chris Guest tried this, he knew that the films within the film within the film had to be really good. JJ Leigh worked in "The Big Picture."Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 4: You can find something better to do with this part of your life

Well, I certainly had a good laugh -- actually, many good laughs -- while watching this film. Quite clever stuff, and a delightful savaging of the pretensions of student and "indie" filmmakers.Especially enjoyed the exploits of The Unknown Filmmaker -- perhaps, following in the footsteps of the protagonist here (the delightfully-named George Sand) I'll do my own documentary, "In Search of The Unknown Filmmaker"!A rousing cheer for this film, what what!

I just watched this movie on the The Movie Channel about an hour ago, and frankly, I must say that I am shocked to see that the 18 people who voted for it here averaged a 7.0 in their ratings of it. The plot is already explained here so I won't go into it, but I really must voice that I thought this was a truly awful movie. I understand that that may be "part of the point", the "in" joke on independent filmmaking, but what I viewed was a thoroughly - and at times, painfully - bad film. The art of satire is to mirror life while leaving an artist's touch (of opinion); however, if this is dir. Evan Oppenheimer's genuine take on indie films, he is missing something big. The basic idea for "The Auteur Theory" really isn't bad, but the script and acting are so genuinely awful that they really make it impossible for this film to convey itself as any kind of a legitimate satire. Maybe I'm just missing something, I don't know, or perhaps I don't know enough about the inner circles of independent film-making to be able to see how this film succeeds; but if that is the case, then what are we supposed to think of a film so "smart" that its audience doesn't even get it?Or maybe, this was simply a bad film by a bad director who failed to convey his criticisms, let alone cast them as satire. If this is the case, then bam!, you hit the mark Oppenheimer.

Just caught this on The Movie Channel. Downside: it's occasionally a little goofy. Upside: it's really funny most of the time, and more than that, it's INCREDIBLY clever. Looking forward to more and bigger films from this guy.