Some things I liked some I did not.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

As a hardcore 70s film buff I really wanted to like this 7.8 rated film by a master, Orson Welles. Unfortunately, there is really nothing here, it's just a complex editing job that initially seems interesting but in the end is tedious. You can sort of listen to the narration and be intrigued, and the editing was painstakingly handled, but again, there is nothing much going on here. I consider this simply a curiosity for 70s film fans or Orson Wells completists. For everyone else, move along.

Known in France as 'Truths and Lies'; 'F for Fake' is far from serving as a traditional documentary. Made in 1974, the film is a blend of quick time, dreamlike French New Wave attention-deficit editing. Remind me of Jean Luc Godard and René Clair who used editing to alternately build and deconstruct. It was very surreal, yet somewhat annoying. The whole overused of dated freeze frame was irritating. Despite that, I did like the breaking the fourth wall style filmmaking, with a flair of very questionable information journalism by an unreliable narrator. Welles's rambling is spell-bounding. I like that Welles also draws parallels between the main subject and his own brush with early notoriety. Orson Welles does wonders as the voice of God for this film. I also, kinda dig the fictional movie re-enactments with him, using film noir styles. All of the smoke and mirrors, work for this film, very well. Even if some of them, were cut with odd unrelated footage such as opening staring/airport scene. I guess, Orson Welles just wanted showcase how hot his companion, Oja Kodar, was with the endless amounts of butt shots and nudity. Welles even filmed a trailer that lasted for nine minutes and featured several shots of a topless Kodar. The trailer was rejected by the US distributors to no surprised. I think, Welles went a little overboard with the whole 'trophy wife' concept. In truth, her presence in the film wasn't really needed, as she has nothing to do with the main stories. While, her scenes are somewhat pointless. It's still somewhat fit with the theme of the film. So, it's really hard to say, if this movie was documentary at all. It really broke the standards mode of what is documentary with. For me, it felt more like a participatory docufiction. It's clear by the recent events that happen during production that is impossible for original director François Reichenbach to make an observational type film about fame art forger, painter Elmyr de Hory. So, he first hired B-movie cinematographer Gary Graver to help finish the film. While, he did contributes all footage filmed in the U.S., his work was very choppy. His interviews with Hory and Irving barely explain, anything about the guy, such as Elymr de Hory's jail-time and his open homosexuality. What we are left with is an incomplete picture of de Hory, a complex, but highly enigmatic man unable to shed his outlaw persona, whose notions of morality conformed to the exigencies he believed, that helps with his survival. Sadly, we will never truly know, who the real guy is, as he commit suicide, shortly in 2 years after this movie wrap. Fearing that no audience member, would take the film's seriously. Reichenbach then hired fame director Orson Welles to edit the documentary to include Elmyr de Hory's biographer Clifford Irving, who was revealed to be a forger himself, when his fame Howard Hughes "autobiography" came out to be, a hoax. It soon become aware to Welles, with the circumstances of the production, he can instead, turn the documentary into a meditation on the nature of fakery particularly with regards to authorship and authenticity within the three main media of art: writing, illustration and filmmaking. Without spoiling the movie, too much, I have to say, this performative documentary was very exceptional for its thought provoking subject. You really don't know, what to believe. It's hard to know, what's real and what's not, with this film and whether, does it ultimately, even matters. After all, Welles reflects on this in-film, so well. He suggest that maybe authenticity isn't important to art, because everything will finally wear away by time. No matter, if it's fake or not. It doesn't matter all that much, in the long scheme. In many ways, that was the perfect way to end the film. However, it wasn't. In short, I guess, Orson Welles wanted to troll his audience, a little more, by adding 17 more minutes to the runtime, to show how fake, this movie can get. In the end, he wanted the final laugh. Overall: For a long time the film was Welles' final film, until the posthumous release of 'The Other Side of the Wind' in 2015. In a way, it's should had been. It was a wonderful entertaining film. Remind me, so much of 2010's documentary, 'Exit through the Gift Shop' with its questionable confusing artist style. Highly recommended. It really deserves to be in the Criterion Collection, big time.

A documentary about fraud and fakery, which focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger.Clifford Irving is something of a legend, and definitely belongs in this film for his work as author of a fraudulent Howard Hughes authorized biography. This film purports that Irving and deHory both worked their schemes from the same tiny island, and yet were in no way connected.Sadly, De Hory would commit suicide a few years after the release of Welles' film, on hearing that Spain had agreed to turn him over to the French authorities."F for Fake" faced widespread popular rejection. Critical reaction ranged from praise to confusion and hostility, with many finding the work to be self-indulgent and/or incoherent. "F for Fake" has grown somewhat in stature over the years as cinephiles revere almost anything the notorious filmmaker made.The question remains: how much of this film itself is true or just one big hoax?

What is art? What appeals to our senses and informs our worldview? What doesn't? What is considered forgery and how does that relate to artistry? Is there a link and if so, which is more legitimate? These questions and more are what Orson Welles attempts to illuminate in his irrevocable final finished film F for Fake (1973). It's a movie without equal and goes right into the heart and soul of the self-described charlatan of the stage and screen.This film is not a story, nor is it a documentary; it is an essay film, considered the first of its kind. F for Fake is a supposedly true film about falsity that examines the value of forgery to find deeper artistic meanings. It begins with Welles arriving at a train station doing magic tricks for kids, attention drawn on actress Oja Kodar. He makes a promise to the audience, "For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact." F for Fake is part autobiography of iconoclast Orson Welles who made a name for himself directing, producing and acting in "The Best Movie Ever Made," Citizen Kane (1941) (perhaps you've heard of it). Yet the film also encapsulates the life's work of Elmyr de Hory, arguably the most infamous art forger to ever live. Over his 71-year lifespan, de Hory had sold over a thousand forgeries to art galleries all around the world. His exploits are chronicled not only in F for Fake but the book Fake by Clifford Irving. As if things weren't strewn enough, the film also expands on Irving who served a prison sentence for attempting to publish an unauthorized "official" biography on billionaire recluse Howard Hughes.Hughes and Pablo Picasso are also in the mix but the film avoids clutter by throwing away a linear narrative in favor of stream of consciousness rumination. The editing jumps playfully from subject to subject while Welles makes the occasional on camera remark. He toys with the presumption of reality and scoffs at the pomposity of words like "art" and "experts". His main subject de Hory shares Welles desire to pull the wall over people's eyes and show that the emperor has no clothes but does so while asserting he had never had the passion to become a true artist. His exchanges with Welles and Irving remind me of the film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) when Michael Caine's character admits, "As a younger man I was a sculptor, a painter, and a musician. There was just one problem: I wasn't very good…I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that I had taste and style, but not talent." Yet all the people exposed in F for Fake do have enormous talent even if that talent is limited to creating fakes and forgeries. de Hory paints a Picasso within minutes then signs it with Welles's signature. Welles produced the "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast which caused a public panic and Irving produced fake letters and recorded hours of fake "interviews" with Howard Hughes. Did they do these things for recognition? Perhaps cash; de Hory does explain he got more money from fakes than his own original works. Likewise Orson Welles explains that the first time he joined a travelling theater show professionally he pretended to be a huge Broadway star to make it in.F for Fake is Welles's "Finnegans Wake" and I dare not try to analyze it anymore. I leave you with a quote from the film that I think captures the point of the film succinctly: "Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much."http://theyservepopcorninhell.blogspot.com