Lists of movies within movies are fairly common on the internet, enough that I now realize I need to finally see Bowfinger simply because I’ve counted about a million list makers in love with something titled “Chubby Rain.” And the lists are likely to keep on coming thanks to this week’s hot release, Tropic Thunder, which actually features two movies within (the Vietnam War film “Tropic Thunder” and the festival-winning making-of documentary “Rain of Madness”), as well as the upcoming How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which has spawned a popular fake movie trailer for an NC-17 film titled “Mother Theresa: The Making of a Saint” (previewed above). Yet until someone makes a Wikipedia page for “List of Fictional Films,” these blogged and forumed lists are necessary to keep us movie fans remembering those non-existent movies we wish existed.
Narrowing down to ten seemed to be difficult — fictional films have been at least nominally been created for tons of films about filmmaking, otherwise reflexive films, sketch comedies, spoofs, etc. — until I realized that a lot of these films within films are appropriately nominal or trailer- or clip-sized gags and would in reality be terrible (imagine actually watching the entirety of“Asses of Fire” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut). Even “Je Vous Présente Paméla” (”Meet Pamela”) from Day for Night and the sci-fi film being made in 8½would probably be major disappointments in actuality if you expected from them the work of Truffaut and Fellini, respectively.
So, I went mostly with fictional films that would probably be bad, but would at least be amusingly bad — though I purposefully avoided fictional porns, including those from Boogie Nightsand The Big Lebowski, of which there are literally thousands:
Daniel Stamm’s A Necessary Death is sure to be one of the most talked about films at SXSW this year. At least I hope it is, because I’m dying to have a discussion or two about it. Here’s my endorsement, first, so that I might influence someone to see the film and in turn have someone to chat with about it: Anyone who considers him or herself a fan of non-fiction cinema needs to see A Necessary Death.
I should point out, of course, that this is not exactly a documentary itself. It is a narrative feature structured like a documentary (I hate to call serious faux docs mockumentaries, so I won’t), but it was indeed written and it was indeed cast and it was indeed acted out. But if you love non-fiction and hate fiction, don’t let that keep you from A Necessary Death. An actual documentary couldn’t say as much about the genre as this film does. …Read more
