Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Boring

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Early film history geeks will get the most out of this mockumentary. Forgotten Silver (1995) follows the misadventures of fictional film genius Colin McKenzie, who managed to pioneer sound film, color film, aviation, "Candid Camera" style shenanigans, and the feature film, only to never get his due.The presence of real archivists and historians complete the illusion that what we are watching is legit. The footage of the films are less convincing, much too mannered even by the heightened standards of the 1910s and 1920s. Much of the biography is hilarious too, underlined by a wry sense of silly humor, almost Forrest Gump like in the intersections of fiction and fact, like the changes the Soviet Union censors wanted to make to McKenzie's biblical epic or how he invented the close-up because of his infatuation with an actress.Still, my fellow film history nerds will get a big chuckle out of this!

A mockumentary about a New Zealand filmmaker from the silent era being rediscovered. I actually hesitate to call this a "mockumentary" because it's more clever than funny. There are a few low-key gags (mostly centered around a hack vaudevillian named "Stan the Man") but they're not really that amusing. Still, it is a clever production, and Peter Jackson (along with co-director Costa Botes) has an admirable commitment to authenticity. The films are aged beautifully and could definitely pass as forgotten relics. I don't know if cameos from Harvey Weinstein and Sam Neill add all that much verisimilitude, but I could certainly see Leonard Maltin being involved in a documentary like this. I did wonder if there might be a sort of New Zealand inferiority complex at play here, with Jackson and company (consciously or not) wanting to invent a cinematic Kiwi legend of their own. It's a fun little movie that looks like it was fun to make.

At this stage of his career, Peter Jackson was making strikingly original pictures, but they were mainly novelty pictures. Meet the Feebles: came up with the idea of taking muppets, and having them swear and do vulgar things. Bad Taste is superlative exploitation horror-comedy that claims to be the "grossest thing you'll ever see." Braindead was also horror comedy, and Forgotten Silver is a mockumentary about a lost New Zealand film pioneer.Like the best mockumentaries (This is Spinal Tap), this absolutely relies on its facade of being real: to air in this, Jackson has recruited some impressive real-life movie figures, like Harvey Weinstein, Leonard Maltin and Sam Neill. As a testament to how well it puts up this facade, a couple of reviews on this site tell of people who saw it and for years thought it was real.The persistent joke in this film is that a filmmaker would have remained entirely unknown until the making of this documentary, yet have secretly beaten every other film innovator to their discoveries: in the course of his life inventing the camera, the first feature film, the first film with a cast of thousands... i won't spoil the rest for you, but its great fun.The other persistant joke is for locals (and the rest of us can have a good giggle too) that it was a New Zealander doing all this. Sends up the obsession over lost films and filmmakers, as well as the entire of film history, no less. Yet it also taps into the excitement of invention, and the excitement of film discovery.You'll get the most out of this if you know a little film history yourself, and know the real eras certain things were invented and who invented them - in which case you'll get an extra joy out of this, yet this knowledge is not necessary: Jackson slips in the dates of the actual innovations, like the first talkies and the first sound films, so you don't need to bring anything to the movie to enjoy it.

Spoilers herein.In 1988, Peter Greenaway made a little film called `Death in the Seine.' Filmmakers have long played with notions of created reality, but this was a clever take: real people drowned in the Seine during a period that by political accidents was erased from the calendar. But we have the reports of the coroner for these anonymous people. By `showing' them, Greenaway was reinvesting their lives with reality. An amazing idea, made sweeter by having the `corpses' obviously be alive.In 1994, film enthusiast Peter Jackson did much the same thing with `Heavenly Creatures.' He took a real story about a famous but now forgotten case and turned it into an essay on constructed film reality. In his case, this involved Orson Welles and an ersatz Camelot named Borovnia (borrow nvia).To judge from that film, he took the matter seriously. To judge from this one, he took it personally. The `creatures' weren't the girls, instead the fictitious beings they animated. The next year he made this film with himself as the animator. In both cases, he plays with the nature of writing. He references Welles, of course, and `Picnic at Hanging Rock,' of course. But most of all he plays under the kiwi skin with all sorts of inside jokes to exploit the national foible.But there's enough for the rest of us, especially if you love movies. He says this is just a joke, and he may even believe it. But there's plenty of intelligent foolery here: just in the `Salome' section. This is a recreation using exclusively modern idioms. This is post- 'Battleship Potemkin' and more obviously post- `Godfather.'It is as if we were given a Shakespeare play that mentioned watergate. The one really big goof is Harvey Weinstein (combined with industry shill Leonard Maltin). They could as easily have been talking about `Lord of the Rings:' huge marvelous cities in New Zealand, stock that steals 2000 eggs, deliberate pies in the face, and even the soap opera about our poor sojourner. Rings or films, it is all magic.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.