Let’s face it, fellow film bloggers, we don’t have many readers who don’t have film blogs of their own. The world of cinephilia is quite cannibalistic, and we need each other to survive. However, we don’t just feed on ourselves. We also are part of an extended food chain that includes filmmakers, many of whom nowadays are also or were once cinephiles themselves. These filmmakers like to borrow, pay homage and reference movies of the past more than they like to advance the craft forward with distinct and/or innovative style. But admit it, you sometimes like the movie references, at least if you like the movie being referenced. And maybe sometimes your judgment is a little clouded by all those obscure bits that you feel cool for having gotten.

Paul Soter’s Watching the Detectives looks like yet another movie that only us cinephiles are made to enjoy, which is unfortunate since many of us are too pretentious to admit that we’d enjoy just any movie about a fellow movie geek working at a video store and commenting on the merits of City of Lost Children and the faults of Casino (see Clip 1) to our customers — aren’t most of us just like video store employees who own computers and can (sometimes) write well? Watching the Detectives could be something of a light companion piece to Michel Gondry’s upcoming Be Kind Rewind; both films should in theory have little relevance to people unfamiliar with their references to movie-geek favorites. But are there enough of us movie geeks out there to make these films worth their effort?

Well, I guess almost everyone loves movies in some way. Cinephiles may appreciate a film like Watching the Detectives or Be Kind Rewind more because he or she gets all the references, but if there are enough mainstream references there’s a chance for wider appeal. However, these films feel to me even more like cinematic circle jerks than do movies about making movies. I realized recently that except for in rare cases, movies about the film business or about filmmaking are not all that interesting to people who don’t care much about movies. I noticed this when I introduced somebody to Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which apparently isn’t as funny to a non-cinephile. Could it be that most movies about filmmaking receive favorable reviews only because film critics get them better? I certainly believe that Living in Oblivion is a bad movie that received too much acclaim, probably because its subject matter hit close to the interests of the critics.

I guess there are plenty of movies about filmmaking that don’t get good reviews, and there are a lot of movies about filmmaking that are actually great films in their own right, so maybe none of what I’m claiming is true. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for me to tell. I can’t watch a trailer like the one for Watching the Detectives without having a subjective reaction to the movie reference stuff. Would I want to see it if I weren’t a movie geek? I can’t see what else is appealing about it, except that I kind of like that flaky, free-spirited shtick Lucy Liu already did in Lucky Number Slevin, so there’s that. But wait, is that just more movie-reference-type appeal?