Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Jackson Booth-Millard I found this semi-factual film listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, it had average ratings by the critics, but I was always going to watch it, especially it starring and being directed by Orson Welles (Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai, Touch of Evil). Basically actor and director Orson Welles hosts and narrates this free-form documentary which focuses on fraud, illusion, forgery, trickery and fakery. It is essentially questioning what is real and what is not, which can be found everywhere, including in the worlds of entertainment magic, non- fiction writing art paintings, with scammers and con artists. The first half of the film starts like any standard factual look at specific people involved in these acts of fakery, including author Clifford Irving who faked a biography of Howard Hughes and Elmyr de Hory who became one of the 20th century's great art forgers. The second half of the film uses Welles himself and Oja Kodar, credited as The Girl, in an acted scenario about life modelling, or something, really it is his own version of an illusion. With appearances and "interviews" by The Third Man's Joseph Cotten, Clifford Irving and The Manchurian Candidate's Laurence Harvey. You cannot complain about the direction or charm or Welles, but to be completely honest, I found this film rather odd and I don't know if I can totally place it in the genre it supposed to be, but perhaps that is the point, that you question whether all elements of what you are watching is true or false, it is certainly an intriguing documentary. Worth watching!

blanche-2 "F for Fake" is a documentary by Orson Welles, who thought this movie had commercial prospects. Welles had a tough time in his filmmaking life, especially once he went to Europe. He knew art, he knew creativity, he didn't know business. The saddest thing about the book Barbara Leaming wrote about Welles is toward the end, when he has dinner with Steven Spielberg in the hope that Spielberg would help him find a distributor for his latest film. But all Spielberg wanted to do was talk about Citizen Kane. Leaming's recounting of her phone call with Welles is heartbreaking -- a great artist with nowhere to go with his art. Today, had he lived, his films would be widely accepted. His later ones were too out there for American audiences, and I don't think that Steven Spielberg, even if he had tried, could have gotten him a distributor.F for Fake has unusual editing that we wouldn't see again for another 10 years, and that is the remarkable thing about it. It's very ahead of its time. The documentary is about fakes, mainly two big ones: Elmyr de Hory, who could replicate the great art masters such as Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, etc., and actually sold these works to museums; and the con man extraordinare, Clifford Irving, who wrote a book about de Hory and then wrote a bio of Howard Hughes, based on interviews and meetings with him, none of which had ever taken place.There's a free-wheeling, improvised feeling to this documentary. For me, it ran a bit long and was a little too disjointed. Welles' beautiful girlfriend in his last years, Oja Kodar, is showcased in one story at the end of the film. Welles is a wonderful narrator and guide.Part of Welles' problem, in my humble opinion, is that he hated structure, rebelled against the confines and demands of the studios, and yet needed the discipline in order to finish anything. People say that he couldn't finish anything. He would run out of money and steam. I don't think it's that he didn't want to finish his films. I think he was a rebel with a cause. The cause was filmmaking. The business side? Couldn't handle it.

Framescourer First of all, it needs to be said that F For Fake is an entertaining film as quick witted as it is briskly edited and strongly featuring Orson Welles on superb form. The bulk of the film concerns the art forger Elmyr de Hory in a separate documentary made for the BBC in 1970 by François Reichnbach. But Welles' overdubbed introduction, his re- worked edition of Reichenbach's work and the tumbling, fragmented overlaid additions including those of his girlfriend Oja Kodar and the hagiographically soft-focused Chartres cathedral turn this into an extended solipsism of what counts as 'real'. The art 'forgeries', driven by the market might not have been forged by the artist but by the dealer - and of course, works that have been on gallery walls for years are now the art anyway. The most famous artist of them all, Pablo Picasso, is quoted as denying his own work with 'even the real Picasso can make a fake Picasso' before the film dissolves into a dubious narrative about how Oja duped the artist into producing an entire period of his own work that retrospectively he couldn't claim. All the while, Welles brings up moments in his career in his steady, articulate, confiding drawl, reminding us that he started as famous and everything declined from there - the same trajectory of fame as that 'enjoyed' by the builders of Chartres cathedral, a totem of civilisation whose provenance is entirely irrelevant. The whole film is quick, colourful, sexy and fun and rendered even more so by the light but cultured jazz touch of Michel Legrand. 7/10

Lee Eisenberg Orson Welles's final completed movie deals with fakery, and in particular with two of the most notorious forgers of the twentieth century. "F is for Fakes" (also called "F for Fake") is not really a movie or documentary as much as a look at how we interpret art, and what we WANT to interpret about anything that is essentially fake. Welles proudly calls himself a charlatan while performing magic tricks and coming up with all sorts of ways to play with the audience. I personally had never heard of Elmyr de Hory until watching this, but Welles turns him into a very interesting person.All in all, the director known as a boy genius had a fine end to his career. Welles created a truly mind-bending look at the concept of art. The fact that the movie came out around the time that Clifford Irving's scandal broke (he wrote a forged biography of Howard Hughes) certainly adds to the documentary's quality. Can there truly be any more definite reality left in the world?