Article: Disaster Artistry - Living In Oblivion

Creating art is hard. With that in mind, filmmaking is perhaps one of the most complicated artistic enterprises. Crafting a motion picture is an absolute ball-busting endeavour, often fuelled by chaos, with little fanfare upon completion. At the end of every Filmcast podcast episode, host David Chen remarks that, whether you enjoyed the main review or not, at the end of the day, it’s pretty impressive that a film was made. He’s not wrong. Media creation has become more accessible, but coming up with a feature film from scratch with a full cast and crew that appeals to an audience? There are still a lot of dreamers who pretend it’s easier than it is.

The film Living in Oblivion expertly depicts the frenzied bedlam of low-budget filmmaking. Steve Buscemi plays Nick, a long-haired, wide-eyed director who seems a hair's breadth away from a full-on manic episode. Such is independent filmmaking. As the low-budget project begins to crumble around him, Nick struggles with maintaining on-set equilibrium. The production is riddled with dilemmas that could hamstring a production. Nick valiantly fights to preserve his sanity against a creative world focused on losing the plot, both literally and figuratively.

Tom DiCillo, a filmmaker who studied alongside Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee, is the brainchild behind Living in Oblivion. While Jarmusch and Lee are household names among the dwellings of typical cinephiles, DiCillo had a quieter career. It’s not hard to see why, when DiCillo described making a film as “one of the most tedious, boring, painful experiences, and that just when something goes right.” This became the origin of Living in Oblivion, capturing the madness and anxiety of making a film. This is perhaps what makes the film so enjoyable. While many other fictional “filmmaking” movies have an air of notable smugness (are we surprised when they do so well at awards season?), Living in Oblivion captures the worst fears of making a movie, and does so with a charming, offbeat wit, smart direction and stellar performances. One must wonder if DiCillo dislikes the process because he knows how to nail it.

Living in Oblivion accurately pinpoints the calamitous pain of creating with no money. Its opening segment has two crew members debating the freshness of some milk that has been sitting outside for a week. The innocuous conversation kickstarts a series of predicaments that gradually increase in importance, while Nick tries to capture the emotional resonance of a pivotal scene. The scene in question involves an emotional conversation between mother and daughter, played by Nicole (Catherine Keener) and Cora (Rica Martens). Nick envisions one elegant long take drifting between the actors. The reality is very different. The sequence gets spoiled by various mishaps occurring around him. Lights get blown. Boom mics drop into shot. The shot itself falls out of focus. These events lead to both actresses fumbling lines that came to them so well at the beginning. Nick slowly loses his placidness with each slip-up, then suddenly, due to a small gesture of reassurance from Cora, Nicole finds the emotional crux in the scene. The crew are spellbound as the two actresses hit the scene straight out of the park…Only for everyone to realise that nothing was recorded because the cinematographer, Wolf (Dermot Mulroney), was puking his guts out in the bathroom. His illness? Caused by the week-old milk he put in his coffee. DiCillo’s film captures how easily tiny drops of misfortune swell into disastrous calamities on a no-money production.

If Nick isn't dealing with vomiting cinematographers, then he's contending with self-centred leading men. Living in Oblivion's second segment has brash lead actor Chad stumble into proceedings. The intention of Chad? To hog every bit of the limelight at the expense of everyone else. Chad is wildly obnoxious, creatively reckless, and a stunningly accurate representation of the types of creatives who litter the lower end of the humanities. The female crew adore him, but unknown to them, Chad sleeps with co-lead actress Nicole, who bluntly cools things down before they go to work. In retaliation, Chad begins to suggest a series of useless improvisation ideas to Nick. These are not only designed to diminish Nicole's on-screen presence but also inflate Chad's ego.  Quite simply, the guy is an ignorant prig, played wonderfully by James LeGros. Chad's character was assumed to be based on Brad Pitt, who DiCillo had worked with on his troubled debut Johnny Suede (1991). However, DiCillo squashed those rumours, stating an emergency junket for the film Legends of the Fall (1994) stopped Pitt from taking up the role of Chad. While it’s easy to see why people see Chad as a send-up of the future A-lister, LeGros’ performance is more of a composite of spiteful clowns who invade creative projects and make it all about themselves.

Hell is other people. And filmmaking is something that usually pulls in quite a few people for a product to exist. Living in Oblivion enjoys pointing out that while the film should be the end goal for everything, the quirks and agendas which lie in the recesses of each crew member will gladly hamper that objective. Steve Buscemi has stated that Nick is one of his favourite roles, and that’s understandable. In a career full of memorable performances, this hapless indie director is a role Buscemi shares an affinity with as a performer and director. Seen here as often bemused, bewildered or sarcastic, this is the actor at his best. He revels in a role that has him constantly frustrated by those around him. Be it Wolf’s ego and fraternising, which stops the cinematographer from framing the damn film, or Nicole’s bleakly insecure acting. The performer's anxiety is only being accelerated by the needless gossipy chirps which she hears off set. If you’ve ever tried to put on a production of any sort, none of this should surprise you. What makes the film so entertaining is how keenly observed DiCillo captures everything.  It’s funny because you’ve been there.

As a film about a production going awry, Living in Oblivion strikes a perfect tonal balance. It manages to be both laugh-out-loud funny and painfully honest about the multitude of predicaments that fall upon Nick's production. To top things off, DiCillo even wraps much of the film in dream sequences. Filtering the indie film world through the subconscious mind of those who live it is an amusing nod to the liberal use of dream logic as a crutch in movies. DiCillo uses a unique conceit on dream logic, with the film narrative fragmenting into the dreams of those who inhabit the world. Dreams are a well-used cinematic trope, and here it becomes a subversive fuel which drives each person on set in one way or another. DiCillo plays this all out Run Lola Run style. Amusingly, the final act is one of a dream sequence being shot. This segment is the movie Nick is trying to make. What came before it? Anxiety nightmares of what could have happened? Future apprehensions of what may happen? DiCillo never lets us in fully. The film that Nick is making? The audience is never given a full description. Nevertheless, Living in Oblivion understands the filmmaking process so well that it does not matter. You only need to know that the crew is so tied to what's being made that you are invested.

We don’t know how good we have it now. Filmmaking is so ubiquitous that influencers are shilling guides to how easy it is to make a film on your own, without a crew. You can bring something together in about a month and probably find an audience soon after. Living in Oblivion is a smart, witty reminder that filmmaking, at one point, is more like herding cats. Creating art is hard, and for many, filmmaking is still an endeavour for the ultra-loopy. But to paraphrase David Chen, as I did earlier, it’s pretty impressive to make a cinematic project that all comes together. It seems it’s even more satisfying when said project is about the absolute madness of filmmaking.

Living In Oblivion can currently be found on YouTube

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Review: The Adventurers

Year: 1995

Director: Ringo Lam

Screenplay: Ringo Lam, Yip Kong-yam, Sandy Shaw

Starring: Andy Lau, Paul Chun, Rosamund Kwan

Synopsis is here

I went into Ringo Lam’s The Adventurers blind, obtaining the screener disc early without the time to do any due diligence. I had little idea as to what I was about to watch. I did view the trailer beforehand. A confounding, bite-sized chunk of schizophrenic tone switching. That's not particularly surprising for a film from the Far East. But it was no real help in providing much detail to what I was about to watch. Amusingly, after digesting the movie, I felt that the trailer was note-perfect. The Adventurers is a film that is all over the place. Yet, as the trailer suggests, it is also heaps of fun. Something that can’t be taken too seriously. Even with the film's notable geopolitics, it's too busy chasing plot strands like a dog discovering its tail. The film begins as a rather standard revenge plot, before turning into something unexpectedly melodramatic. In addition to this, the film itself is a medley of neo-noir aesthetics, Hong Kong action and soap opera-style drama. It’s not the best drop of Hong Kong cinema in the cinematic ocean. It is, however, a film that takes chances and feels fresh because of the creative choices made by the filmmakers.

The Adventurers’ title may sound like a forgotten 80s off-brand Amblin offering, but don’t let that fool you. Ringo Lam’s film doesn’t hold that sentimentality until later in the plot. At the start, The Adventurers is a blunt vengeance tale. It’s a calculated quest for Air Force Pilot Wai Lok-yan (Andy Lau), who hatches a plot to assassinate a former Arms dealer-now billionaire, Ray Lui (Paul Chun), who brutally murdered his parents when Yan was still a child. When the plan fails, Ray’s mistress, Mona (Rosamund Kwan), helps the injured Yan before sharing a brief intimate moment. Yan soon flees to the United States, and things take a turn. But to say anything would certainly spoil things.

What follows is a convoluted, action melodrama. One which provides future shocks for texts such as Infernal Affairs (2002), which Lau also stars in. Yan finds himself compromised by an identity he has chosen to embrace. Suddenly, the film skirts between humour, neo-noir aesthetics, sentimental drama and well-designed action. The Adventurers feel schizophrenic in tone. Broad humour sits next to explicit violence. The Adventurers wishes it could be more cynical but feels sanded down to keep its audience onside. The balance always holds a sense of unevenness.

However, you can see from the amount of plate juggling why Lam soon went to America after this movie. The airborne scenes alone seem to have whispers of Top Gun (1986), particularly at the beginning.  You can see the sensibilities and aesthetic that would carry over well across the pond. Despite taking a year to make, the storytelling in The Adventurers is highly economical. It manages to fit a lot of background and plot into its humble running time. In the Blu-Ray extras, Film Critic Gary Bettinson mentions Lam’s love of shooting on location. This trait probably appeals to any producer wanting to avoid expensive set builds. Lam’s bold colour schemes, canted angles and smoke-filled streets are also welcoming. As are the cast that may not have complex roles but deliver some enjoyable performances.

Eureka has provided Hong Kong completists with a good quality Blu-ray. The film's print has had decent transfer and clean-up. While the extras feature two up-to-date interviews. Film critic Gary Bettinson, as mentioned earlier, provides a good overall framing of Lam within the golden age of Hong Kong cinema in his interview. The second interview is with screenwriter Sandy Shaw, one of the three screenwriters on the film. A trailer rounds up a light but entertaining disc.

The Adventurers Blu-Ray is released on 28/04/2025

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