Director: Jim McBride
Year Released: 1968
Rating: 2.0
Title character (played by L.M. 'Kit' Carson) decides to film his life with his 'truthful' movie camera, only for we, the audience, to discover that he likes chasing women with it, photographing his girlfriend naked, peeking in windows and sitting in front of the lens and pitying himself. I didn't find it enjoyable - if, as a 'movie,' its ultimate purpose is to be in some fashion 'enjoyable' or 'stimulating' - because every single scene seemed to be surrounded with gigantic quotation marks, as if to notify the knowledgeable audience (note how Godard and Visconti are name-checked) that each and every sequence is 'significant,' and that we're to be aware that Carson is aware that he's playing a role ("David Holzman") and that the 'participants' are not, in fact, playing themselves (the woman in the car that has an obsession with men, his model girlfriend, the man who criticizes the 'diary'). It deserves a modicum of credit for being one of the earliest and most prominent of the postmodern films, but if I really wanted to watch JLG - who does the same thing with Anna Karina - I'll watch JLG instead of someone who's watched JLG and repackaging his concepts.
