Metacinema is a fascinating, if not particularly well-defined, area of film. For the purposes of our list, at the very least, you can take metacinema to mean a work of film that draws attention to the fact that it is a film. This doesn’t mean simply breaking the fourth wall but rather a film that references and examines its own meaning as a piece of cinema. Acknowledging how, when, and why it was made.
This may sound like a laborious subject to understand or appreciate, and that’s often what turns people away from it, but there are numerous examples of fundamentally metacinematic movies that are anything but tough to watch. These are our picks for the ten most enjoyable metacinematic movies of all time.
Scream
People still debate whether Wes Craven’s postmodern slasher was the rejuvenation of the dying genre or the final nail in its coffin. After Scream’s spot-on satirization of all the genre’s tricks and tradtions, the jig was well and truly up for any screenwriter who wanted to murder a bunch of co-eds without first admitting that all they were doing was copying someone else’s work.
Craven was, by the time he came to Scream, no stranger to metacinema. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare – a movie where the cast of A Nightmare on Elm Street get sucked into a remake of their own movie – still stands as one of the most unique sequels ever made. But, aside from encompassing a whole genre instead of just his own work, Scream is more fondly remembered because it’s… well… a scream.
Last Action Hero
A quarter century before people would even start talking about Danny Devito playing Detective Pikachu, Last Action Hero already made the joke with the actor voicing a talking cartoon detective cat in a live-action world. Action movies in Hollywood were generally becoming more self-aware at that time but Last Action Hero has only seemed more and more groundbreaking the older it becomes.
The plot follows a young action movie fan who finds themselves trapped in a generic Arnold Schwarzenegger sequel, with Schwarzenegger playing both his real self and the streamlined version of his star persona, Jack Slater. Similarly to Scream, it offers running commentary on the conventions of its chosen genre, finding mostly monotony and loneliness as its fundamental themes.
The Cabin In The Woods
Carrying on the odd lineage of satirical metacinematic slasher movies in America, Heather Langekamp – the star of A Nightmare on Elm Street who played the role of herself in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare – was hired in her new role as a special effects makeup coordinator to oversee work on the massively ambitious monster mashup The Cabin in the Woods.
The brainchild of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel alums Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, The Cabin in the Woods was another comedy homage to the conventions of the genre but it delved even deeper into the philosophical rabbit hole. Beyond what the genre reflects of the individual and the community to what it reflects of our spirit.
Inception
Christopher Nolan’s condensed version of a Film 101 class is as self-reflexive, and entertaining, as thrillers ever come. The movie even opens with the main character pitching the story’s central concept to the eventual financial backer of their escapade.
There’s been no shortage of people over the years who couldn’t help but notice how the members of the heist team assembled throughout the film all have positions which reflect those of a film crew. Their missions are, after all, the same: to create an engaging and affecting replication of a dream for a reward. The adventure stopping by some of the major landmarks of Nolan’s creative influences.
Logan Lucky
Steven Soderbergh’s return to feature films from a very short-lived retirement was typical him in every way that it could be. The plot, which revolves around a couple of down-on-their-luck brothers planning to rob a local speedway, is very reminiscent of Soderbergh’s most well-known achievement, Ocean’s Eleven. But the bond between film and maker here is much stronger than just that.
From the very first moments of the film, where John Denver’s “Some Days Are Diamonds” plays us in with the opening line “When you asked how I been here without you”, Soderbergh is speaking directly to the audience. Telling his own story in tandem with his characters’.
Hail, Caesar!
The Coen Brothers salute the they-don’t-make-em-like-that-anymore era with the kind of movie that they don’t really make anymore. The story follows a momentary crisis of faith for Josh Brolin’s studio fixer, Eddie Mannix, in 1950s Hollywood. His doubts over a career move echoing the larger erosion of belief in the power of cinema itself in contemporary times.
Hail, Caesar!, while quite rough around the edges (especially for the Coens), is one of the most accomplished explorations of the notion that cinema itself is a religion. Not just a community of like-minded people but a legitimate, and new, expression of faith. “A truth told not in words but in light.” A weighty idea but wrapped delicately in a breezy screwball period comedy.
All That Jazz
A number of the great cinematic auteurs have offered up, and continue to offer up, semi-autobiographical metacinematic works that reflect their struggles with egoism and the creative process. None are quite as entertaining as Bob Fosse’s, however.
The man behind many of modern dance’s most iconic innovations was also a magnificent film director with All That Jazz serving as his often-overlooked magnum opus. Clearly an allusion to Fosse’s experience of editing the film Lenny while directing the original production of the Broadway musical Chicago, it was his second to last film and won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980.
The Holy Mountain
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s drug-fuelled surrealist voyage into spirituality, commercialism, war, and cinema itself isn’t the kind of thing that you sum up in a sentence. Jodorowsky supposedly underwent a week without sleep under the supervision of a Zen master before beginning production and, when you see the final product, it’s a pretty easy story to believe. The word ‘psychedelic’ doesn’t really do it justice.
Jodorowsky appears himself as the film’s most central figure. Assembling and leading a group of pilgrims – his actors – on a journey to immortality atop ‘the holy mountain’. The barrage of symbolic imagery and scenarios that they’re placed into exemplifying Jodorowsky’s interpretation of pure cinema.
Casino
Martin Scorsese’s true-crime epic is often dismissed as an afterthought of Goodfellas but it’s really one of the most distinct and complex of his films to date. As Robert De Niro’s character strips away the glamor of Las Vegas, and show business itself, he reveals them to the audience as simply mechanisms to take money from patrons in exchange for an illusion. What he calls “selling dreams for cash.”
Aside from the central comparison of Vegas and Hollywood, however, Casino is a movie that constantly revels in the processes and constructions of filmmaking. It tells a sprawling saga but rarely ever in order, constantly slipping and sliding through time with the seemingly-effortless grace and precision that only Scorsese’s long-time editing partner, Thelma Schoonmaker, can give.
The Muppet Movie
The Muppets were, just by their very design, characters that blurred the line between fiction and reality but their first cinematic outing explored films on a philosophical level that even the most devout cineastes ever venture to. Its most enjoyable moments, and profound insights, being found in the original songs from Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher. Specifically, the opening and closing numbers.
It may sound like a stretch but The Muppet Movie continually invites its audience, young or old, to consciously view it as a movie on a structural level. Key turns in the story, for example, only occur because characters in the movie read a copy of the movie’s screenplay in the movie.
Their collective dream to bask in the colored light of a unifying artistic power in Hollywood, which manifests in the movie in the theme of rainbows, drives them through a narrative which they control themselves. Not unlike Jodorowsky’s god-like power in The Holy Mountain but with a lot less LSD and an overall more emboldening message. As the final verse of the film tells us: “Life’s a movie. Write your own ending. Keep believing. Keep pretending”.
