One thing after another goes wrong on the set of a low budget movie in this film about filmmaking starring Steve Buscemi as the frustrated director at the heart of the tale. From the premise alone, 'Living in Oblivion' might sound like a rather straightforward comedy, but it is actually far from it with a narrative full of twists and turns and some effective cinematic touches, such as all the 'reality' scenes appearing in black and white with only the film-within in colour during the first section of the movie. Writer-director Tom DiCillo's script is hardly airtight with some aspects of the film not really making sense in light of the twists, but in general the twists work very well to further the film's ultimate portrait of how difficult it is to film one particular type of sequence in a credible manner. Also impressive is the attention given to the thoughts and feelings of almost all of the cast and crew characters, each of whom have their own ideas of how to improve the movie they are working on, with Buscemi madly juggling every opinion in a somewhat futile attempt to keep everyone working and happy. James Le Gros tends to get a lot of praise here for his portrait of the comically super-arrogant leading man in Buscemi's film, however, Catherine Keener is just as effective in an early career turn; same goes for Peter Dinklage and his annoyance over being stereotyped.
Review of Living in Oblivion
