THE NINTH IN A FAIRLY REGULAR SERIES OF FORGOTTEN FILMS THAT SHOULD BE REMEMBERED.

After the success of these previous posts I thought we’d take another look at one of those films that could well come in the category of never-remembered-in-the-first-place BUT with this one that’s only true if you’ve never seen it.  For those people who have seen it, it is a film that sticks in the mind long after you have stopped watching it.  It is an independent low-budget comedy, made for peanuts, shot in less than a month and made possible by the actors agreeing not to be paid an it is the ultimate film of just what a ball-ache it is to work in any creative profession.  It’s a great comedy made even better due to three performances of three great actors in the leads.  Ladies and gentlemen I present the case for...

LIVING IN OBLIVION (1995)

Nick Reve is a low-budget film director, in this film all he has to do is shoot three scenes, that’s all.  Just three little scenes.  Once that’s done then what can stop him, what can possibly go wrong?  Well, try everything.  The cast have no chemistry, the camera-man’s lost his good eye, the focus boy is out of focus and the food truck is poisoning the crew.  In  Tom DiCillo’s brilliant realised comedy we see that not everything behind the camera is sometimes harmonious and that when you shove together numerous volatile ego’s sometimes you get more than sparks flying.  This is a film that, if memory serves, my sister, Kath, introduced me too (Big thanks to you, sis!) and it is an hilarious pastiche on what it is like making a low-budget film.  There are so many good moments from the film it’s hard to narrow it down, but the psychotic dwarf in the final part is arguably the biggest highlight (pun intended.)

There are many big comedy films that come out that get a lot of press and do well and yet when you watched them back years later they tend to have lost their sheen because they were very “Of-their-time”, the most famous of these that springs to mind being “Car Wash” but I would also class “The Secret of my Success” as one of those as well.  The great thing about “Living in Oblivion” is that it does have a certain ageless appeal.  I imagine that even now there are people leaving film school who look like Nick Reve, cameramen like Wolf out there who INSIST that every shot should be HAND-HELD and great movie actresses who have ego’s more fragile than the surface of a bubble.  But the movie’s main appeal is in replicating that feeling we all get when we just cannot get a thing to go right in a day.  It is an unknown classic that is favoured by movie geeks everywhere but unknown to the many.  If you see only one movie from 1995 in 2012 or beyond ...See this one!

Enjoy!

As you may or may not know my first novel, FREE AT LAST: A NOVEL by Mike Lambert and Zoe Lambert, is still available to buy on Amazon Kindle.  Many thanks

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaTEaKhXfzM