Lost in London is an Interesting Experiment
Lost in London is exactly an interesting experiment. Released on January 19th 2017, the experiment was that Woody Harrelson would attempt to shoot a film, live, in one continuous take, in real-time, playing in theaters across the world. The plot is rather simple, Woody Harrelson is having an incredibly bad night after a tabloid publication releases pictures of him with three female strippers, his wife (Eleanor Matsuura) leaves him and takes his children. We follow Woody Harrelson on the streets of London as he suffers an existential crisis and everything seems to be going wrong with him.
The experiment is a nice novelty — the one take is very well-done, and you can tell it has been meticulously rehearsed. There are times where the camera shakes too much and you can tell the flaws of live entertaiment are taking its toll to the camera. Still, it’s quite impressive the way Harrelson directs the take and it’s even more impressive that the whole thing was shot in real-time. The film’s best sequence involves Harrelson entering a cab and breaking an ashtray — which ends with him being chased by the police in a playground. The scene lasts about 10–15 minutes and had me laughing so hard that I almost stopped breathing. Woody Harrelson is absolutely fantastic playing himself, and the banter he has with supporting characters such as a fictionnalized “Wes Anderson is my Best Friend” version of Owen Wilson is hilarious. The extended scene involving Wilson and Harrelson in a bar is really good, due to the ability of both actors to riff themselves and their own movie careers. Woody Harrelson, in particular, is very harsh on his movie career as people continuously mock him and his behavior, which makes the movie even more hilarious.
While it’s a nice experiment, and the film does have a couple of great sequences, the movie is way too long and has a couple of problems that make the live experience quite problematic (if you will). The final scene is supposed to take place during the morning, but since it’s shot continuously, it’s at night. In my opinion, they should’ve ended with Woody Harrelson in a holding cell after speaking to Willie Nelson. It would’ve been much more impactful — as he’s trying to get back to his kids for them to see Harry Potter, but what if he can’t get back? The film also has a plethora of repetitive dialogue with overlong dialogue scenes. The sequence in which Harrelson gets booked and interrogated by the same person is really long and terribly unfunny, same with the worst sequence of the film, when Harrelson and a woman hide from the police in the bathroom. The film is relatively fast-paced, even though, sometimes, comedic sequences overstay their welcome with repetitive dialogue, until they go in the club’s bathroom, the film slows the fuck down and dies along with it, until Harrelson boards the cab and the film gets back on board.
There are times where you laugh out loud uncontrollably, and there are times where you don’t laugh at all and say, in your mind, “just wrap it up”, which makes Lost in London nothing more than an interesting experiment. Yes, it has great performances and an interesting spin on a rather simple story, but I’m afraid I can’t really call it a movie — it’s unintentionally experimental. On the point of view of technicality, the film succeeds tremendously. The story is where the movie becomes quite rocky. See it, only to see how Woody Harrelson pulled off an almost impossible filmmaking feat.
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