Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Hattie I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

goods116 As a hardcore 70s film buff I really wanted to like this 7.8 rated film by a master, Orson Welles. Unfortunately, there is really nothing here, it's just a complex editing job that initially seems interesting but in the end is tedious. You can sort of listen to the narration and be intrigued, and the editing was painstakingly handled, but again, there is nothing much going on here. I consider this simply a curiosity for 70s film fans or Orson Wells completists. For everyone else, move along.

LeonLouisRicci A Masterpiece of Manipulation from a Master Manipulator, Filmmaker and Magician, "Orson Welles" delivered His Last completed Project to Audiences with Joy and Abandon. Welles seems as Giddy as a School Boy in this Documentary/Essay Rambling on about Art, Art Forgery, Fakes of all sorts, and Admonishing "Experts" and Their Elevated place in the Art World. This is Probably also Meant to Include Film "Critics", but Welles Never makes that Implication.Welles' Film is like No Other and it Sits as a One of a Kind Conglomerate of Documentary and Entertainment, Showmanship and Thesis. It's Editing, very New and Off putting for the Period, using Freeze Frames, Swoops, Pans, and Fanciful Film Techniques Not usually Found in Nonfiction, add a Surreal Sense to the supposed Veracity of this Type of Thing.It manages to Comment on Real Life Figures like Art Forger "Elmyr De Hory" and Literary Hoaxer "Clifford Irving" and Their respective "Careers" as Real Fakers. The Film is Fun, full of Interesting Folks, not the least is Welles Himself, adding some "Facts" about His Start in Theater, Radio, and Hollywood.This Movie is a Whiz-Bang Joke of sorts that Bounces around its Subject with Guts and Gusto so Effortlessly that One Can't Help but be Caught Up in its Playful Attempt to Poke Fun at Art and its Ultra-Serious High-Brow Investors and Patrons. Orson Welles Spews so Much Material at the Viewer in such a Disjointed Display of Connecting Examples of the Subject that much is Lost in the Stream of Consciousness Style at First Glance. But it is so Resonant afterwards as it Speaks of the Power of Cinema and after all is Said and Shown, the Thesis Compels, Persuades, and Probably most Importantly, Entertains.

gavin6942 A documentary about fraud and fakery, which focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger.Clifford Irving is something of a legend, and definitely belongs in this film for his work as author of a fraudulent Howard Hughes authorized biography. This film purports that Irving and deHory both worked their schemes from the same tiny island, and yet were in no way connected.Sadly, De Hory would commit suicide a few years after the release of Welles' film, on hearing that Spain had agreed to turn him over to the French authorities."F for Fake" faced widespread popular rejection. Critical reaction ranged from praise to confusion and hostility, with many finding the work to be self-indulgent and/or incoherent. "F for Fake" has grown somewhat in stature over the years as cinephiles revere almost anything the notorious filmmaker made.The question remains: how much of this film itself is true or just one big hoax?

popcorninhell What is art? What appeals to our senses and informs our worldview? What doesn't? What is considered forgery and how does that relate to artistry? Is there a link and if so, which is more legitimate? These questions and more are what Orson Welles attempts to illuminate in his irrevocable final finished film F for Fake (1973). It's a movie without equal and goes right into the heart and soul of the self-described charlatan of the stage and screen.This film is not a story, nor is it a documentary; it is an essay film, considered the first of its kind. F for Fake is a supposedly true film about falsity that examines the value of forgery to find deeper artistic meanings. It begins with Welles arriving at a train station doing magic tricks for kids, attention drawn on actress Oja Kodar. He makes a promise to the audience, "For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact." F for Fake is part autobiography of iconoclast Orson Welles who made a name for himself directing, producing and acting in "The Best Movie Ever Made," Citizen Kane (1941) (perhaps you've heard of it). Yet the film also encapsulates the life's work of Elmyr de Hory, arguably the most infamous art forger to ever live. Over his 71-year lifespan, de Hory had sold over a thousand forgeries to art galleries all around the world. His exploits are chronicled not only in F for Fake but the book Fake by Clifford Irving. As if things weren't strewn enough, the film also expands on Irving who served a prison sentence for attempting to publish an unauthorized "official" biography on billionaire recluse Howard Hughes.Hughes and Pablo Picasso are also in the mix but the film avoids clutter by throwing away a linear narrative in favor of stream of consciousness rumination. The editing jumps playfully from subject to subject while Welles makes the occasional on camera remark. He toys with the presumption of reality and scoffs at the pomposity of words like "art" and "experts". His main subject de Hory shares Welles desire to pull the wall over people's eyes and show that the emperor has no clothes but does so while asserting he had never had the passion to become a true artist. His exchanges with Welles and Irving remind me of the film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) when Michael Caine's character admits, "As a younger man I was a sculptor, a painter, and a musician. There was just one problem: I wasn't very good…I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that I had taste and style, but not talent." Yet all the people exposed in F for Fake do have enormous talent even if that talent is limited to creating fakes and forgeries. de Hory paints a Picasso within minutes then signs it with Welles's signature. Welles produced the "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast which caused a public panic and Irving produced fake letters and recorded hours of fake "interviews" with Howard Hughes. Did they do these things for recognition? Perhaps cash; de Hory does explain he got more money from fakes than his own original works. Likewise Orson Welles explains that the first time he joined a travelling theater show professionally he pretended to be a huge Broadway star to make it in.F for Fake is Welles's "Finnegans Wake" and I dare not try to analyze it anymore. I leave you with a quote from the film that I think captures the point of the film succinctly: "Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."http://theyservepopcorninhell.blogspot.com