Here you have it folks, this movie is IT. If you wanted to see the TIFF but couldn't, this is the one you should catch when you get a chance.
What is this movie? Let me try to explain:
1) This is a movie about the love of cinema. Realize how fitting this is, because the entire audience at a festival film screening likely suffer from this "magnificent" obsession with movies.
2) This is a biography of Jerry Harvey, the man who made Z Channel what it was, a crazy cinema-obsessive that lived to enjoy good film.
3) This is a documentary about Z Channel, the 24-hour a day film festival in your living room. The first pay-TV station focussed on delivering movies of high quality to viewers for a monthly fee.
4) This is a recipe for how to make a fantastic film festival. Clips from landmark movies are interspersed throughout, there are constant references to the best films of the time, and interviews with great directors.
5) Quentin Tarantino is a crazy freak, and we are blessed in that we have him to make movies for us.
Yes, this is several movies in one. You can take it on a lot of different levels. Now I will attempt to explain...
Jerry Harvey was more than a bit crazy. A manic-depressive, he became addicted to movies at an early age. By the time he joined Z Channel, he had probably seen more movies than most people even knew existed. He wasn't stuck on any particular genre, he knew a good movie when he saw one, regardless of what it was about. There was a telling line from an interview with him, and it went kind of like this: (seriously paraphrasing)
Q: "Do you ever think there might be more to life than watching movies?"
A: "Uh... what do you mean? I don't understand the question."
A solid portion of this movie is about the movies he rescued. He would show movies that critics had panned, or that nobody had really watched, he would take movies that had been slaughtered by bad editing and get the original "directors cut" (long before that term became commonplace) and show it. Uncut, uninterrupted, as the director intended, the way a good movie deserves to be shown. People would then rave about this great movie they saw on Z Channel. This would take good movies from obscurity to high-profile award ceremonies. A good example would be the movie that was edited from 5.25 hours down to 2 hours or so, and the same critic called the shortened version "the worst film in history", while the long version was "one of the top 5 films this decade".
A good 10 minutes is spend on Heavens Gate alone. Incredible things about fantastic cinema are continuously revealed in this movie, things about famous movies that you should know and might be amazed to find out if you don't already know. I was personally stunned.
Which brings me to my next point. I truly believe that when TIFF organizers saw this movie, they saw it for the festival recipe that it is. And formed this years TIFF using that recipe. Which is why we had Heavens Gate (full version) and Final Cut (the making of documentary for Heavens Gate) on the roster this year. It really looks like someone tried to gather all the movies mentioned in this movie together and present them in the TIFF this year. Which is why I am going to name this "documentary" as the Film-of-the-Fest. Perhaps not the best movie shows this year, but this movie does "represent" the festival in its entirety. It's like the cornerstone that the rest of the fest is built on.
Or, of course, I could be on crack. Such a thing is known to happen from time to time. 8 )
Posted by Task at September 19, 2004 02:22 PM