Well I'm watching this... up to episode 2 now... but what is it?! I love Alicia and Adria. This is why I started to watch it. But now I'm just annoyed and bored of the show. Entertainment is meant to be entertaining. But I feel like I'm just wasting time watching.

IRMA VEP is a documentary series exploring the dark magic of filmmaking. No, not really, but it wants to be. The industry is going to love the series because it loves admiring itself in a mirror. Most viewers will scratch their heads wondering what it is about. I wonder if Alicia Vikander took this project because she was unsettled with her meteoric rise in the industry and she was questioning what she wanted in her future as an artist. As usual, she is the best thing about the series. I can’t help wondering if Kristen Stewart accepted her minuscule role in the series for the same reasons. Two performers who could have the pick of their next project. If you are at all captivated by the industry, you may hang in there for the whole series, seeing if it can land on its feet. If you are there only to be entertained, I doubt you’ll hang in there or be very disappointed you abdicated your time. I rate the series, on Alicia alone, a 7 (good) out of 10, but, otherwise it is a 5 (meh). [Existential Experiment]

Up until about episode 6 of this eight parter I was really enjoying this. Not least the Ouroboros of the story itself. The miniseries is based on a movie by Olivier Assayas (the miniseries' director). In it the central character is an actress in a series made by a director obsessed by a movie he made earlier with a woman who later became his wife, based on a classic 1915 silent French film Les Vampyres. Clips from that film are used in the series and feature (you guessed it) Assayas' ex-wife. I think I like the silent film (which we see snippets of in the series) almost as much as the series itself. And I didn't realize until I started looking into it that those snippets appear to be restored snippets of the actual 1916 film. At the centre of Irma Vep, Alicia Vikander gives a fascinating enigmatic performance. But... as the series moves towards its end it starts to take itself more and more seriously as a heavy-handed Statement About The Nature of Film-making, with magic realist elements. I don't feel it 'earned' that attempt at heft. I felt it was more successful when it was merely a stylish but rather soap opera-ish peek behind the scenes of a certain kind of European film-making.

I'm not sure why this is so highly rated. It is DULL

A lovely chaos, highly recommended.