And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (2003)
(On Cable TV, June 2022) As much as the past decade’s boom in streaming services has been a boon for cinephiles, part of me wonders about the aftermath of such business model experimentation, especially when the services have every intention of locking up their own productions. No physical editions, no licensing agreements with other platforms or broadcast, and no way other than a subscription to see the films. (Or piracy, which becomes far more justifiable.) What if there’s a genuine work of art (or entertainment) locked away behind a subscription? What if the services shut down? As evidence of how these fears are not unjustified, I offer films like And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, a slick medium-budget effort developed and broadcast by HBO two decades ago. The HBO filmography is a case in point for my questions: it’s large, and it’s almost entirely locked up within HBO. There are a few DVDs and a few foreign-language licensing deals (all hail French-Canadian TV!) but these movies run the real risk of being buried forever. Have you heard about And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself? What if I told you that it stars such notables as Antonio Banderas (as Villa), Alan Arkin, Jim Broadbent, Colm Feore, Kyle Chandler and Saul Rubinek? What if I promised you explosive sequences of the Mexican Civil War? What if I lured you in with a credible portrayal of the 1910s cinema industry and the kernel that eventually led to modern Hollywood action movies? It’s a surprisingly interesting film – although it may take film nerds to love that opening sequence drawing back from a vintage silent film scene to its HD making-of in one seamless shot capped off by “Fort Lee, NJ: Movie Capital of the World.” Similar care goes to the way it integrates historical fact: The portrayal of Villa is often sympathetic but ultimately not sugar-coated – And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself overtly acknowledges that he was a murderous revolutionary. It makes for a really interesting film – especially if you happen to have missed it the first time around and didn’t know about its existence. How many films will be buried behind a subscription, unable to breathe and find their audience? How many films will be unfairly forgotten behind those gates?