tek's rating: ¼

Pompo: The Cinéphile (not rated)
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First of all I want to say that Pompo is not really the main character of this movie. That would be Gene Fini. Wikipedia says that Pompo's full name is Joelle Davidovich Pomponett, but I'm pretty sure in movie her name was spelled Joel D. Pomponette. (I'd have to watch again to be 100% sure her last name had an 'e' at the end, but I think it did. I'm definitely sure her first name was just spelled 'Joel'.) Of course that doesn't matter, but I just don't like inconsistencies, I guess. Anyway... Pompo is a movie producer in the fictional city of Nyallywood. She makes B-movies, and assigns her assistant, Gene, to edit the trailer for her latest movie. After that, she writes a new movie called "Meister", which stars 'the greatest actor in the world', Martin Braddock, who hasn't made a film in ten years. It also stars a much younger actress named Natalie Woodward (Wikipedia says it's spelled 'Nathalie', but I don't remember seeing an 'h' in the movie's spelling), who has never done any acting, despite going on many auditions. Pompo gets Natalie to move in with another, more famous actress, Mystia, and start going with her to acting lessons. Pompo also assigns Gene to direct the new movie, which would be his first, and it puts a lot of pressure on him. (He already looked like he didn't get much sleep, and he gets even less now that he's a director.) There aren't a lot of other characters either in "Meister" or in "Pompo the Cinephile" itself. We sometimes see Gene ask advice from Pompo's grandfather, a legendary producer whose last name is Peterzen, which is also the name of the studio where Pompo and Gene work. And there's a young banker and former classmate of Gene's named Alan Gardner, who becomes important later in the film.

Well, we get to see a lot of Gene working on directing "Meister", slowly becoming more confident in his abilities and learning to rely on ideas from other people in the cast and crew. And eventually we see a lot of Gene editing the movie after the shooting is completed... but then he decides another scene is needed, which causes some trouble with financing. I'm not sure what else to say without spoiling too much, but I will say I found the movie ("Pompo", that is) rather unrealistic in various ways. I'm not sure how accurate the actual filmmaking aspects are (notwithstanding Gene's fantasies of cutting film during the editing process), and I very much doubt the way they finally obtain the extra financing they need would ever work in the real world. Still, it was a fun movie, surely more so than a totally realistic depiction of moviemaking would have been. And I really liked all the characters. Pompo especially is quite vivacious. I did find it a bit odd that some of the characters, mainly Pompo, Gene, and Natalie looked like kids or teenagers, when I got the feeling they were meant to be adults. (There was another director in the movie who looked more like an adult, but was still quite short.) But that's not really important. I think it was at least a sort of interesting stylistic choice... in the case of Gene and Natalie, I could say it might be meant to represent their inexperience, but Pompo looks even younger than they do, and she's far more experienced. But maybe they really are as young as they look. I know Pompo is supposed to be a prodigy. Anyway... yeah, it's just a fun and interesting movie about making movies, with the story of Braddock's character (a famous orchestra conductor) in "Meister" maybe slightly paralleling Gene's own journey of self-discovery as an artist. It does kind of seem like there's a message about how much you have to sacrifice of yourself to create great art, and I wasn't really comfortable with that message. I think it was kind of excessive. But mostly I liked the movie.


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