Who's Camus Anyway?
Director: Mitsuo Yanagimachi
Year Released: 2005
Rating: 1.5
Students with heads full of film decide to make a film (called "The Bored Murderer"), all the while name dropping famous directors (Lang, Truffaut, Welles) and authors (Camus naturally, Mann, my snarky idol Houellebecq) and going through the usual hassles associated with filmmaking. The trouble is, this doesn't amount to much more than the sum of all its references, snatching pieces of The Player, The Stranger, Death in Venice and several other pictures to generate substance - when the aging professor actually dresses up like Dirk Bogarde in Visconti's Death in Venice adaptation, the pomo meter literally explodes. The ending successfully blurs "fiction" and "reality," but the preceding scenes are much less ambiguous. I prefer the director's rare biker-doc God Speed You! Black Emperor, which takes a very similar 'natural' approach.
