Director: Woody Allen
Zelig is one of those ultra-clever concepts for a film that just falls flat for me on execution. A mockumentary about a famous man of the 1920s and 30s, Zelig reworks old photographs to add Allen's absurd visage. It also uses new camera footage, made to look like it's from that era, to construct this fictional portrait.
In a world where Forrest Gump made this sort of digital re-imagining commonplace, Zelig's technical feats don't really compare. Apart from that, the movie is highly inventive, lampooning the nature of mass media at the time, old films, newsreels, etc. But many of the jokes fall flat, and the story held no interest to me. Woody Allen films are great - if you don't like one, there's only forty more to choose from.
A lot of people in philosophy these days like to use Zelig as an example of a view about the self--that who you are is situationally-determined, rather than there being some core autonomous self that carries through different situations in the world.
ReplyDeleteSo I kind of love Zelig for that central concept, but I agree that, as a film, it falls pretty flat.