It's no "Forgotten Silver"

Rating: Null/10 (2 February 2004)

Hey, I thought Peter Jackson was a witty, hip, edgy film-maker. "Forgotten Silver," is Jackson's spoof documentary of a forgotten (fictional) luminary of New Zealand film-making, Colin MacKenzie. In this movie, a distraught MacKenzie retreats to the hinterlands of New Zealand to make (by himself) a full-scale reproduction of biblical Jerusalem for a film he dreams of making, "Salome." In "Forgotten Silver," this comes off as a delightfully wicked joke, but in "The Lord of the Rings," Jackson's production of a lost world in the New Zealand wilderness has gone terribly wrong, his mischievous creativity drowned in a flood of money and technology. He was able to make hilarious biting satires on a shoe-string budget with "Meet the Feebles" and "Dead Alive," and even in the better funded "The Frighteners," but the need to appeal to a mass audience has, apparently, isolated him from his earlier, risk-taking stance. I, for one, want the old Peter Jackson back; edgy, delightfully wicked and irreverent. Stephen R. Cann