“Today’s frightful #Rothtober adventure leads us to a rather meta role for Eli. In Don’t Look Up, he has a cameo as a horror director. Whoa.
Not gonna lie. A little disappointed when I realized that those first couple minutes of him were all we were gonna get. Yeah he has really high billing on the movie, and I totally get the marketing reasons behind it. Yup I fell for the ploy, and watched this movie simply because his name was on it. I’ve made worse decisions.
I was unsuccessful in finding a clip of his scene, but I did find this video where he gives some commentary about director Fruit Chan and what made him wanna do the movie. He talks it up with such \m/ enthusiasm, makes me wish I was paying more attention to the viewing. It’s just tough to drop everything when I’m trying to unwind from a long Monday.
I really loved the storyline. A 1920’s filmmaker, Bela Olt (played by Roth) is shooting a film on location about an old gypsy curse. Things get weird, he’es never seen again, and the movie is never completed. Fast forward to present day. Another director tries to film the same movie. Things get really weird. I liked the freaky, but wasn’t too into the characters and their storylines.
There was blood, there were guts, there was film within a film gore, there were flies. Yeah that was different. Lots and lots and lots of flies.
Also, if you’ve ever done the studio tour at Universal, you might recognize the water effects part of the tour.
Oh, and the faux filmmaker’s name was not lost on me. Bela Olt. Bela Lugosi (even though he was an actor, not a director). Acc to IMDB trivia, Arisztid Olt was one of his early stagenames. Yeah, I see what they did there.”