La última pelÃcula arrives at the Toronto International Film Festival under special circumstances. Mark Peranson, one of the film’s two directors (the other being the Filipino Raya Martin), is also the editor-in-chief of local film magazine Cinema Scope. He belongs to a rarefied sphere of critics-cum-filmmakers that consists of him, Paul Schrader, and (I guess) most of the French New Wave. As you might expect from the editor-in-chief of such a niche publication, La última pelÃcula has almost zero commercial prospects. The biggest name to be found on the project is Alex Ross Perry, whose The Color Wheel made a stir in Brooklyn and nowhere else.
Perry plays a fiction version of himself, a filmmaker who travels to Mexico for the end of the Mayan calendar to make the last film (in the technical celluloid-based sense of the word) at the end of the world, or something. Perry’s fictional (or not?) persona is kind of like Ray from Girls, but more annoying. He has an inflated opinion of himself and fails to see that his own pretensions are hardly any better than those of the tacky New Age American tourists waiting for the apocalypse below a Mayan pyramid. Despite (or because of) Perry’s very, uh, particular presence, Peranson and Martin have made a very funny movie. The target of their satire is very specific (films that dare to find meaning in the end of cinema), but it’ll earn fans among the more fest’s cooler, hipper members.
La última pelÃcula screens for the public at 9:30pm on Tuesday, September 10 at Jackman Hall and on Thursday, September 12 at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
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Alan Jones writes about film for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @alanjonesxxxv.
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