La última película

March, 2015 · Knoxville Museum of Art · 2:00 p.m.

Inspired by Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie (1971) and by L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller’s The American Dreamer (1971), La última película is a difficult film to summarize fairly. Real-life writer-director Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Philip) stars as a sardonic and absurdly over-confident filmmaker who travels to Mexico with a small crew, intent on using the world’s last remaining reels of film stock to shoot an apocalyptic spectacle. They arrive in late 2012, just in time to join the throngs of tourists, true believers, and hawkers of trinkets who gathered at Mayan ruins to welcome the end of the world. There’s much drinking and improvised rambling in the style of Hopper at his most egomaniacal and paranoid, and all of it is captured on an assortment of cameras: 16mm, Super 8, hi- and standard-def DV, iPhones.

La última película is like one of those carnivalesque postmodern novels of the 1970s. It’s chaotic, idea-packed, and, at times, a juvenile pastiche. Perry’s character would be at home in a Christopher Guest mockumentary, the object of our loving derision, but he also serves as an ironic narrator, a sly reminder that the filmmakers are in on the joke. “There’s a real, infectious affection for filmmakers like Hopper here,” writes Noel Murray at The Dissolve, “as Martin and Peranson call back, more than a little forlornly, to the free-spirited cinema of an increasingly remote past.”