bytch please we know you already watched it in your orson welles robe
Nah, I did not. I mean, now I have watched it but I didn't receive my robe yet.
Anyway, I loved it. It's a strange movie, what with it being an unfinished experimental film by Welles completed by others. It is frantically edited and fast paced so it is never boring but it can be difficult to keep track of who's who and what's what. It throws you right in as well, and only as the movie progresses can you see the big picture.
As expected the film is very meta. The entire cast of characters seems royally based around Welles' own circle and experiences, deconstructing the Hollywood myth through a barrage of old Hollywood dinosaurs encircled by young up and comers, the film presented as a quasi-documentary of numerous reporters and critics following director Jake Hannaford (John Huston), a mixture of Welles himself, John Ford and Ernest Hemingway, as he screens footage of his latest unfinished film. Huston plays the role with delirious glee, gratefully chewing into the writing which is every bit as sharp as you'd expect from Welles, and with the subject matter so close to his own base, Welles may very well have never been sharper. This is one entirely quotable movie, if you can keep up.
In the middle of the veering mockumentary madness is the film within the film, the titular "The Other Side Of The Wind", a strange, silent arthouse film modeled after the French and Italian arthouse movies of the 60s/70s. The lead actress in the film is Oja Kodar, Welles' lover of the time, and her stark beauty and sexuality is on full display. It plays weirdly with conventions and Welles uses the angle of an "in-production screening" (shots are missing, some scenes still have the director's directions audible) to play with perception of what we're seeing. It is all madly inventive and visually a blast, and even though it is the most atypical Orson Welles film ever made, it is still undeniably an Orson Welles product.
