List Price: $39.95 Our Price: $35.96YOU SAVE $3.99!
Buy it
DVD F for Fake - Criterion Collection
To call Orson Welles's F For Fake a documentary would be somewhat deceitful, but deceit itself is very much the subject of this curious film essay. Welles ruminates on the nature of artistic fakery through two examples, that of infamous art forger Elmyr de Hory and the writer Clifford Irving, whose bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes set off a minor media flurry in the 1970s. Postmodernist that he is, Wells then proceeds to narrate and edit the film in such a perversely frenetic way as to blur the lines between what is real and what is deception, making for an often confusing but engaging work of art in itself. We even see the footage we've been watching as it's being spliced together in Welles's editing room. The specter of Welles's often maligned later career hangs over the proceedings like a challenge--is he going to actually complete this strange movie about chicanery, or will it become one of the many unfinished experiments of his twilight years? Happily, Welles concludes the proceedings with a delightful sequence about Picasso, lust, and what constitutes real art. F For Fake is a fine example of a master filmmaker who had at least a couple tricks left up his sleeve. --Ryan Boudinot
Fascinating and subtle: essential viewing for cinephiles, philosophers, and artists of all stripes
This is a fascinating film on the nature of art, the relation between beauty and truth, the ethics of expertise, and on realism in cinema. Having said that, I want to make clear that this is not a stuffy and slow artistic analysis of BIG ISSUES. Welles pulls out all the stops to make it sexy and exciting -- he prepares us from the very beginning to see him as a cinematic magician, with a beautiful assistant, whose beauty (as in such magical acts) is used to distract the audience from the games he will play with truth and illusion. An intriguing set of stories, well told, and beautifully shot, with the most masterful use of editing (for both sound and picture) techniques I've seen in any film (I understand that he and his crew were working almost exclusively on editing this film for over a year).
While this is a unique project in Orson Welles' career, the obsessions it plays with are there from the beginning. It is not always noted that even in Citizen Kane, for example, the questions of reality and illusion are central. That film began with what is effectively a newsreel documentary, setting off a series of reflections on the relation between documentary and truth, and the question of how best to get at the essence or meaning of a man's life. F for Fake explicitly connects its own concerns with Howard Hughes with the fictional biography of Charles Foster Kane -- since (in part) it tells the true story of another fictional/fake biographer of Hughes, and even reveals that at one time Welles considered modelling Kane more closely on Hughes than on William Randolph Hearst. In any case, this is an essential piece of Welles' work, and Criterion Pictures has done a wonderful job making it available in a such a good looking DVD.
a documentary of fakery
This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.
"F for Fake" known in France as "Vérités et mensonges" is a documentary mainly on the life of art forger, Elmyr de Hory, and Clifford Irving who wrote a phony biography of Howard Hughes.
It talks about the details of their lives and many other aspects of fakery throughout the ages. The film is presented by the great actor Orson Welles.
The DVD has some fine special features also
Disc 1 contains the film with optional audio commentary by Oja Codar and Gary Carver. There is also an introduction by Peter Bogdanovich and a 9 minute trailer.
Disc 2 contains a biography of de Hory, an 88 minute film about Orson Welles' unfinished projects, a 60 minutes interview with Clifford Irving, and a 1972 telephone press conference with Howard Hughes exposing Irving's fraudulent biography.
The DVD also contains some fine liner notes with more information.
This is a film I recommend.
A man who loved movie making
I agree with most of the above but for me the best part of this excellent package is the "One Man Band" (Known in Europe as "The Lost Films Of Orson Welles".
It's an 88 minute look at a person truly in love with the art of movie making and I found it very touching and remarkable.
As an additional surprise some of the scraps of home shot movie included the finest acting I've seen from Welles. They also showed an acting range I had not realised he was capable of and hearing his offscreen direction of Oja was fascinating.
In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, director Wes Anderson takes his familiar stable of actors on a field trip to a fantasy aquarium, complete with stop-motion, candy-striped crabs and rainbow seahorses. And though Anderson does expand his horizons in terms of retro-special effects and a whimsical use of color, fans will otherwise find themselves in well-charted waters. As The Life Aquatic opens, Zissou (Bill Murray), a self-involved, Jacques Cousteau-like filmmaker, has just released a documentary depicting the death of his best friend Esteban, who was eaten by some sort of sea creature--possibly a jaguar shark. Zissou’s troubles also include his waning popularity with the public, and a nemesis (Jeff Goldblum) who hogs up all the grant money. Hope arrives in the... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Wes Anderson DVD Release Date: Released the 10 May 2005 Usually ships in 6 to 11 days
List Price: $32.99 Your Price: $24.99YOU SAVE $8!
Buy it
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.98 Your Price: $8.98YOU SAVE $6!
Buy it
For a knock-out combination of timeless entertainment and vintage studio history, you can't do much better than The Warner Brothers Gangsters Collection. In the 1930s and '40s, Paramount specialized in glossy comedies, MGM popularized lavish musicals, Universal produced signature horror classics, and Fox scored hits with sophisticated dramas. But it was Warner Bros. that generated controversy--if not always box-office profits--with so-called "social problem" films, and that meant gangsters. When viewed in their pre- and post-Prohibition context and in chronological order (Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, 1931; The Petrified Forest, 1936; Angels With Dirty Faces, 1938; The Roaring Twenties, 1939; White Heat, 1949), these six films... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): James Cagney - Humphrey Bogart - Edward G. Robinson DVD Release Date: Released the 25 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $68.92 Your Price: $55.14YOU SAVE $13.78!
Buy it
Walker (Lee Marvin) strides through Los Angeles with the steel-eyed stare of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and best friend, who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist, Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he survive the shooting or return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream? The question is left in the air in John Boorman's modern film noir, a brutal revenge thriller based on Richard Stark's novel The Hunter (remade by Brian Helgeland as Payback), set in the impersonal concrete and steel canyons of Los Angeles and eerily empty cells of Alcatraz. Walker kills without remorse, guided by shadowy "informant" Keenan Wynn, whose own agenda is carefully concealed, and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lee Marvin - Angie Dickinson Director(s): John Boorman DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.97 Your Price: $14.98YOU SAVE $4.99!
Buy it
Film noir is such a rich cinematic zone that second-tier specimens compel nearly as much fascination as the classics. At a glance, Volume 2 of Warner Bros.' (ever-expanding, we hope) Film Noir Collection is a distinct step down from Volume 1--inevitable when you've launched your series with five landmark titles, including three outright noir masterpieces (The Asphalt Jungle, Gun Crazy, Out of the Past). But linger beyond that first glance, because the second set is a flavorful mix of sleazoid iconography (two vehicles for B-movie bad boy Lawrence Tierney), an offbeat outing for a major director (Fritz Lang in his Howard Hughes RKO period), Poverty Row production circumstances that encourage aggressively peculiar, verging-on-radical filmmaking (the... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Claire Trevor DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $49.92 Your Price: $39.94YOU SAVE $9.98!
Buy it
