Who's Camus, Anyway?

This is a good movie, at Netflix' Watch Now, that has what seems to be an unwieldy and artistic title; actually, it is The Office makes a Movie at Film School, if you're a fan of The Office. It may as well have been titled "The Movie Project" - if it were a tv show.

During the commission of the big movie, the people on the crew make references to Jean Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Albert Camus, Death in Venice by Tomas Mann, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Coppola, and "the guy who directed The Good, The Bad and The Ugly".

The Office on NBC sometimes gets a bit mindboggling; there is a scene at a restaurant in the middle that is kind of mindboggling. There is a character in this movie who is like Janice from Friends, who functions in a different context, more like that of The Office.

My dad had a copy of Camus' The Plague lying around the house; actually, I think I bought it for cheap at a used bookstore in Boston, myself, 20 years ago; at any rate, I tried reading it and I found it most impenetrable. The book has to do with France and Algiers, and I assume it has something to do with the Battle of Algiers, subjects which are so important to our current events nowadays. The movie "The Battle of Algiers" is at the front page of Netflix' Classics section, I might as well watch it. France is 10% Muslim, many people from Algeria, and Algeria certainly has everything to do with the French national soccer team, Zinedane Zidane's family having originally come across the Mediterreanean. Montreal is the 3rd biggest French speaking city, after Paris and Brazzaville, and the great Mark Messier from Quebec looks similar to Zidane.

I couldn't really read The Plague; nor could I get through all of Dostoievski, but I did read Death in Venice a long time ago, and it was really easy to read, Aleksandr Pushkin is also easy to read. Death in Venice and Pushkin read like comic books, or like tv shows. Since tv shows and movies cost a lot of money, they have to be written so that people actually like them. It is difficult to foist a boring show on the people. I suppose it was different in the olden days, novels are cheap to write and easy to foist.

This movie was made last year.