Today I watched a film by the name of "The Wolf of Wall Street". This was produced in 2013 and is what can be considered a reflexive film is the way that it narrates itself itself in informing the audience that you are watching a film of what is actually happening in itself.
the movie itself has, at least in my opinion, a fairly deep and intricate story line. A short synopses of how it unfolds is that a young man starts off from a lower middle class standing in life and goes to Wall street to become a stock broker. after that and several ups and downs of working for others, he ends up forming his own company with some of his more...less reputable friends, and which leads to many shady, though profitable dealings in the stock market. Ultimately though his backdoor dealings and shady operations catch up with him and his many conspirators.
to me, what calls attention to itself in this film is the nature in which his once small business quickly spirals up to mega proportions and then quickly out of control. the ride in which it takes you on is very packed with what seem to be insignificant events which end up being much larger than they appear early on.
In regards to the actor buster Keiting in his film Sherlock Jr., I feel the reason for his popularity as an actor and why people liked hims oo much was due to his style of comedy. which was very much along the lines of exaggerating his actions and doing unorthodox methods of solving problems that people found very amusing.
Over the last few days of watching 3 seperate films that are all of reflexive neature, it becomes verp appearent that they all handle them in quite different ways overall. In the film "the Purple rose of Cairo" it takes reflexiveness in the form of a film becoming sentient and melding into the "real world" which in itself is a film.
The "sherlock Jr." film to an almost dream approach to this particular genre. To me, its as if the main character's "spirit" went and melded in with the world of a movie that in a certain light went hand and hand with his real world problems, but was able to fulfill his ambitions in the movie as to wher ein his life he was not at the time.
Lastly, you have "the wolf of Wall Street", which is a much newer film than the previous 2, but still relates in to the others in being reflexive in how it narrates. Instead of the film just following the lead actor as most normal films would, it tries to push you a step back from the world of the movie by giving it a sort of...meta-narration, such as "I thought everything would be fine, but I soon would find out it was all going horribly wrong" and then continue on with the actions in the film, but having broke them up into different time segments.
the point to take away here is, that there is no best or common way in making a reflexive film. the only real constant between all three, is that each and every one pulls their audience out away from the movie, making them think of the concept of a film within a film.
