Last night, Ren and I headed to Cambridge for a showing of "Me & Orson Welles."

Now this is a movie that I've been waiting for over a year to come out - ever since I found out that Linklater was in the process of directing it. As a big enough fan of Orson Welles as I am, I started to get worried about my ability to watch this film with an objective eye. On one hand, I could be so in love with the man, himself - that all the movie's flaws would go unseen and I would champion the film on its subject matter alone (let's call this the Peter Bogdanovich approach). The other extreme would be to be so much of a fan of Orson Welles that I would become overly critical of any venture into caricature or historical error (the Beatrice Welles approach).

I ended up going halfway (thank God). The film was a solid OK. One of those movies that is about as good as I thought it was going to be but not as good as I was hoping it'd be. A great film about theatre, but with the Orson spice, my hope was that it'd blow me out of the theatre.

Despite this, every time Christian McKay was on the screen, the movie was pitch perfect and there's a good 5-10 minute sequence in the middle of the film that just shows the audience just how worthy the man was of his reputation. Sure, he had an ego, but it was completely justified. McKay plays it with such a playful confidence, that you forget that you're not watching a first-hand documentary, if only for a minute.

Concerning Zach Efron: he's not a bad actor. Not by a long shot. I just wished they gave the kid something to do other than recite cheesy romantic lines and make cutesy references to the late 1930's.

A major blow is the falsified caricature that's always unfairly put on Orson Welles. But it's interesting, this caricature didn't come out of the performance of Welles (as it usually does in films like RKO281 and Cradle will Rock) but rather from all of the other characters talking about him. From the get-go, Claire Danes paints him for the audience as "arrogant, ill-tempered, very brilliant, and no one disagrees with him" and as soon as she did it, the Welles character felt anchored down for the rest of the movie.

All in all, I'm giving this film a 7 out of 10 - but be aware, if it wasn't for Christian McKay, it would be a 5/10. I'll stay out of the historical errors and anachronistic winks to the audience, because if I started on that, I'll never be able to shut up.

Tonight is the midnight showing of this unwieldy behemoth, "Avatar." Apparently, I'm about to see the next revolution of cinema which will finally make independent film irrelevant.

Oh damn, I think I just rolled my eyes so much, they fell to the floor and disappeared under the couch.

See everyone tomorrow!

Have thoughts on the comic? Send an email!