Director: Mitsuo Yanagimachi
The brains of film geeks everywhere will be working overtime while watching Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s clever work concerning the chaos involved in the production of a student film at a university in Tokyo. During the making of the piece, titled The Bored Murderer, students fight, fall in love and discuss life and film in a series of intriguing scenes that call to mind many other films to which this work is paying homage. Within the first five minutes, audiences may already be thinking (as is noted in the dialogue) of Altman’s The Player, Welles’s Touch of Evil and Truffaut’s Day for Night. While this film is nowhere near as good as the previous works and it’s a bit hard to keep some of the large cast of characters straight since they’re all introduced far too quickly, it’s fun in its own way and plays better if you’re familiar not only with cinema but Camus as well. One annoying aspect is the horrible translation of the subtitles—film buffs will instantly grow weary at the misspellings of some of the cinematic references but then again, spellings aside, since it is a foreign film, Who’s Camus Anyway may warrant two viewings since those busy reading the fast dialogue the first time around may wish to check it out again to see the homage to the numerous movies they may have missed the first time around.
