User Reviews

This is a movie about making a movie, a genre that goes back many decades. As such, I found it entertaining, funny, and particularly original. It is, I admit, somewhat confusing for a couple of reasons. The first is that the 'movie' which the characters are in the process of making is really an inconsequential bit of slightly offensive fluff. The second is that there is a sort of double-vision blurring of characters, cast, and reality going on here.

We live in an age when just about anybody can make a movie and sometimes it seems as if everybody is doing just that. Halley (the character) seems to think that she can simply copy and paste a short dramatic segment of her life onto a big screen and it will become a film. It's interesting that even when she comes to her senses and tries to soberly pitch her ideas she's got nothing more than a song and dance….. literally.

This movie, "He's Way More Famous Than You", does have a plot however. It's "A Star is Born" for the 21st Century with Halley Feiffer never quite realizing that she has actually been cast as Norman Maine. Jesse Eisenberg plays Esther Blodgett off camera. The movie has a sober beginning and an alcohol induced haze of a middle. It could have ended on an up-beat, 'well, who knows where this will lead' note, but wouldn't it be hard to not assume that the real ending must be the actual existence of the movie itself. There's even an appendix where we see yet another movie that shows where this one might have gone, but didn't: darkly lit dramatic vomiting, incest, intergenerational angst, and suicide. (Is it a spoiler to reveal a plot line not followed? i.e. Rosebud isn't a dead baby)

I will admit that the overlap of fiction and reality in this film can be disorienting. Only a few of us outsiders will ever really know where one begins and the other ends. But isn't that all about the world we live in? Isn't it ironic that the very first, very nasty IMDb review of this film spends half it's time panning Jesse Eisenberg not for his performance here but rather for his participation in another film. Nobody wants to see Liberace and what's-his-name kissing, but Michael Douglas and Matt Damon? I'll pay for that(well maybe not). Last night I went up to my alma mater (Juilliard didn't even have a drama department when I attended) and saw a production of Twelfth Night. The character Sir Toby Belch was ably played by a student named Ryan Spahn. In that context his private life was of little consequence. But I doubt it would be possible to make this film, with Michael Urie directing, and not take it into account. On film we find him playing himself and someone else at the same time and that someone else is desperate to have a part in a movie playing someone else who is actually playing himself in this movie too. Or is he? Wait! Am I talking about Twelfth Night? I'm getting confused here, but in an entertaining way.