Reactions to 'The Other Side of the Wind'

[RayKelly]

Nice tip of the hat from Criterion Daily in their roundup of TOSOTW reviews:

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5949-orson-welles-and-the-other-side-of-the-wind

"For more on The Other Side of the Wind, let me recommend the reviews by Leonardo Goi (Film Stage), Craig Hubert (Hyperallergic), and Ray Kelly, who maintains the essential resource Wellesnet. Kelly also puts in a good word for Ryan Suffern’s documentary A Final Cut for Orson: 40 Years in the Making, “a thirty-eight-minute hidden gem, which expertly chronicles precisely how behind the scenes artisans combed through 1,083 reels of negative and film elements, carefully piecing together the movie in a painstaking effort to honor Welles’s artistic vision.”

[Roger Ryan]

Very cool. There's a hilarious first (only, as of this posting) comment to the Criterion Daily article calling Welles a "half-assed loafer" during the last 15 years of his life; an undisciplined mess who inadvertently made four or five masterpieces!

[leamanc]

Nice tip of the hat from Criterion Daily in their roundup of TOSOTW reviews:

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5949-orson-welles-and-the-other-side-of-the-wind

"For more on The Other Side of the Wind, let me recommend the reviews by Leonardo Goi (Film Stage), Craig Hubert (Hyperallergic), and Ray Kelly, who maintains the essential resource Wellesnet. Kelly also puts in a good word for Ryan Suffern’s documentary A Final Cut for Orson: 40 Years in the Making, “a thirty-eight-minute hidden gem, which expertly chronicles precisely how behind the scenes artisans combed through 1,083 reels of negative and film elements, carefully piecing together the movie in a painstaking effort to honor Welles’s artistic vision.”

How nice for Criterion to acknowledge that Wellesnet is indeed essential!

[leamanc]

Very cool. There's a hilarious first (only, as of this posting) comment to the Criterion Daily article calling Welles a "half-assed loafer" during the last 15 years of his life; an undisciplined mess who inadvertently made four or five masterpieces!

Ugh, the old “fear of completion” canard.

[Wellesnet]

From yesterday's New York Film Festival screening.
Martin Scorsese: ‘The Other Side of the Wind’ took me on a ride:
http://www.wellesnet.com/martin-scorses ... side-wind/

"It's remarkable, just remarkable. ... I was totally surprised by what I saw. It was in turn exhilarating and so distressing ... Someone you love, to see them going through that agony, that pain -- and ... still holding on to the creative lifeline to the very, very end."

[RayKelly]

Michael J, Casey of The Boulder Weekly reviewed TOSOTW, They'll Love Me When I'm Dead and A Final Cut for Orson, all shown at Telluride.

"Blissfully and, somewhat surprisingly, The Other Side of the Wind is nothing short of a masterpiece. Dense in content, melancholic in tone and downright demonic at times, Wind is a confrontational film, as funny as it is perverse. Welles must have known it was to be his last film because he put every last idea he had into it. Like his best work, Wind demands multiple viewings, bolstered by They’ll Love Me and A Final Cut. Both docs will be released on Netflix, along with Wind on Nov. 2."

Read the full review at https://www.boulderweekly.com/entertainment/one-last-toast-wunderkind/

[Honest Iago]

Two interesting reviews:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-other- ... lm-review/

https://www.slashfilm.com/the-other-sid ... view-nyff/

[RayKelly]

Two interesting reviews:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-other- ... lm-review/
https://www.slashfilm.com/the-other-sid ... view-nyff/

A few factual errors in the Slash review: "With so much footage left un-shot " and "Welles never managed to film Hannaford’s actual death scene. We’re told about it, rather than shown, so it never feels entirely real."

[leamanc]

Thanks for sharing those, Iago. I really enjoyed the CBS piece.

I’ve never cared much for Slashfilm, but I gave it a read anyway. Right off the bat, they complain about how the film is “pieced together” from too many different shots in different formats...as if that wasn’t Orson’s intention in the first place. And then later on, there’s moaning about how closely it follows his intentions.

Overall, I think a lot of the hand-wringing about realizing Orson’s vision in many TOSOTW reviews is missing something fundamental. They don’t seem to understand the roles of director and editor.

Granted, had Orson been able to finish it, he would have likely edited it himself. But it’s completely reasonable for an editor to take the reins and cut a film that matches the director’s intent. Despite Orson’s past being littered with hatchet jobs at the hands of other editors, it can work. The 1998 cut of Touch of Evil is a great example.

[Wellesnet]

Negative review by Steve Kopina of Unseen Films for THEY'LL LOVE ME WHEN I'M DEAD:

"...as much as I think THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is a mess, I liked it better than this making of. Sure the OTHER SIDE is all over the place, but there kind of is a through line. You can tell that Welles was going for. On the other hand Neville is equally all over the place, but in the end you don't know what he is trying to say. Yes, he is telling the story of the film, but at the same time he throws in all sorts of other things that kind of come to the fore before being cast aside- notions like did Welles not want to finish some projects, his inability not to sabotage himself, why Welles hate the Euro-cinema he was sending up, his relationship with Peter Bogdanovich and others are brought up and abandoned. Frankly I came out of the film feeling like I knew less about the film and Welles than I did before."

http://www.unseenfilms.net/2018/09/thoughts-on-why-i-really-dont-like.html

[Wellesnet]

Following the New York Film Festival and a month after its Venice debut, Rotten Tomatoes scores THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND at 89 percent on its Tomatometer with an average rating of 7.7/10 based on 18 reviews with 16 fresh and 2 rotten.

It is far too soon to judge THEY'LL LOVE ME WHEN I'M DEAD. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 80 percent on its Tomatometer with an average rating of 6.6/10. However, that is based on just 5 reviews with 4 fresh and 1 rotten. (TLMWID has not been reviewed yet by those Rotten Tomatoes considers to be top critics.)

[RayKelly]

From Jon-Carlos Evans/Black Nerd Problems:

"Modern audiences may find certain aspects of the film problematic as certain social facets of the 70’s now come as dangerously dated and politically incorrect. Usage of the word f****t, the oversexualization of an Amerindian character who never speaks, and irresponsible white men behaving in said fashion, come off as reminders of just how far society (though not that far, honestly) has come since the original production dates of the film. When taken into context of the cinematic form, both in content and technical achievement, however, the film is every bit as groundbreaking as Citizen Kane. If Welles would have been able to complete the film as planned in the 70’s, it would live amongst his classics Lady from Shanghai, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Trial, et al. as a masterclass in cinematic form." (8/3/10)

http://blacknerdproblems.com/the-other-side-of-the-wind-review/

[RayKelly]

The Wrap on possible award season contenders:

The Other Side of the Wind
Is the boldest movie of 2018 one that was shot by Orson Welles more than 40 years ago? Yeah, maybe. Partly the portrait of a director in free fall, partly a Michelangelo Antonioni imitation, the film — painstakingly pieced together from Welles’ footage and notes on Netflix’s dime — is weird and audacious and oddly touching.

https://www.thewrap.com/a-star-is-born-is-a-legit-oscar-contender-and-heres-what-else-is/

[RayKelly]

We knew that Joseph McBride felt that the finished The Other Side of the Wind "exceeds even my high expectations," now we know what the film's other consultant, Jonathan Rosenbaum, thought. The former Chicago Reader critic gave the movie FIVE STARS in an all-too-brief review on Letterboxd. https://letterboxd.com/jrosenbaum2002/film/the-other-side-of-the-wind/
He called the movie "scary, elusive, easy to misunderstand, and radical."

McBride has written extensively on the movie for the November issue of Sight & Sound. We can only hope a lengthier commentary is in the offing from Rosenbaum.

[jrosenbaum2002]

Thanks, Ray. I've written a 3500-word article about the film that will appear in a collection of mine coming out next May (CINEMATIC ENCOUNTERS 2: PORTRAITS AND POLEMICS; the companion volume to this, CINEMATIC ENCOUNTERS: INTERVIEWS AND DIALOGUES, which opens with my 1972 interview with Welles about his HEART OF DARKNESS project, will be published this November by the same press, University of Illinois). This piece grew out of a weekend's conversation with Oja Kodar early last July about the film at the Villa Welles in Croatia. I'm sorry to say that Film Comment wasn't even interested in reading it, but a Spanish translation will be appearing in the November issue of Caiman Cuadernos de Cine, and a French translation will be in the Spring 2019 issue of Trafic.