CINEMANIA (Angela Christlieb, Stephen Kijak, 2003) R

Reviewed: May 18th, 2003

Incompetently made, my recommendation stands strictly as a testament to how riveting and close-to-home I found the subject matter (a documentary look at five New York City cinemaniacs). My main problem is one of comprehensiveness: Jack Angstreich, the most well-adjusted of the five cinemaniacs profiled, is the clear star with the majority of the runtime devoted to him. Which is theoretically fine, since Jack is also the most articulate and easily the least pathetic of the bunch, but either devote the whole damn movie to him or expand outward from the criminally brief eighty minute runtime since the four other maniacs get majorly shafted (two of them are in the movie for what must be under ten minutes a piece) and the whole flick feels severely off-balanced as a result. There's no way directors Christlieb and Kijak are true blue cinephiles themselves since they seemed to have picked their subjects not based on how much they genuinely love the cinema but based on how fucked up their lives are. Case in point is the unemployed nerd who only adores a highly specialized portion of cinema (European film post-WWII up to the French New Wave) and never gets to tell us anything about this movie love since Cinemania concentrates its efforts entirely -- within the already very limited time it spends on him -- on his inept attempts to get a date. Either the filmmakers never posed the right questions to their subjects or they just edited out the answers, but either way it's abundantly clear that this movie's MO from first frame to last is 'I don't care why these people love movies so much, I just care that they are all weird and compulsive.' (None of the five cinemaniacs have jobs, all are single and all of their apartments are pretty disgusting war zones, with one or two of them fearing imminent eviction.)

Thankfully Angstreich does everything he can to subvert Christlieb's and Kijak's glib, unacceptable agenda, clearly doing his best to frequently explain why the cinema is so commanding (two of the film's highlights come when he talks about wanting to make love to Rita Hayworth in black and white and when he discusses how engrossing two characters talking in a European cafe on screen is but how disappointing it was when he actually traveled around Europe, going to cafes and trying to reproduce the thrill in real life). And yet despite Jack's gallant efforts, Cinemania's list of unexplored topics is long: at least a few of the five cinemaniacs seem to be avid readers and I wanted to hear about their struggles trying to balance their time between two art forms (certainly something I grapple with); the question of how being so addicted to cinema affects sexual relationships is glossed over; ditto familial relationships (one of the cinemaniacs says he was more devastated by Audrey Hepburn's death than by any of his relatives' but of course the filmmakers never bother following up on that intriguing comment); thorough explorations of topics such as filmic discrimination (are all these people just easy critics?), video or DVD versus theatrical prints, fear of knowing they're all gonna inevitably die with so many films left unseen or why none of them seem to have ambitions to be professional critics or filmmakers are also virtually nonexistent (meaning occasionally one of the five people might provide a line or two on the topic, but never anything more than that). The fact that Jack -- the most able-to-function-in-real-life of the five -- turns out to be far and away the most fascinating persona, demonstrates just how misguided and corrupt Christlieb's and Kijak's methodology is. I want a properly made, two and a half hour sequel starring baaab, Jeremy and Theo about what it truly means (i.e. not just consequences, but insights) to battle Truffaut's question -- "Is cinema more important than life?" -- on a daily basis.

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