YMMV / The Other Side of the Wind

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• Genius Bonus: Despite being a satirical movie about cinephilia and uncritical adulation of older films, a lot of the jokes and references depend on a good knowledge of arcane film history. A good example is the scene where Hannaford is blowing the candles, and one of them makes a joke about a car crash of Murnau and Dean, which refers to the fact that both Murnau and Dean died in car crashes before the premiere of their final films and they both died fairly young, adding in a dose of Dramatic Irony given that Hannaford's death under similar circumstances is given away in the opening narration. The scene is also lit in a way that evokes Murnau's German Expressionism.
  Who Murnau is, I don't remember. Let me see, Murnau and Dean, the vaudeville act.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The film's first 25 minutes or so is deadly slow and introduces a bunch of characters. Only a few of them continue till the end, and it isn't until the party sequence begins that the movie really picks up.
• Values Resonance: When the film was in production throughout the 1970s, Hollywood's decadent nature was still just the subject of myth among much of the general public, with the film industry still maintaining a glamorous façade that allowed it to seem like this land of milk and honey for aspiring talent. In light of the Me Too movement that started just a year before the film's eventual release, however, it comes off as one of the first (albeit heavily belated) truly honest looks into what Hollywood is actually like; a decadent, parasitic entity that leeches off of young stars for personal gain and gradually causes its biggest names to rot away both physically and mentally.

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