I just rented Henry Fool and Fay Grim, and will watch the latter tomorrow after classes, but I can give you a simple answer in the form of a question: Why would you not just watch Henry Fool first? It's a very good film.
I wanna be a pirate!
I watched Fay Grim today and while there is a decent story re-cap to get viewers up-to-date, there are enough things left out that will take away from the film's enjoyability. Trust me when I say you'll want that enjoyability with you when you watch Fay Grim. It is a highly disappointing follow-up to Henry Fool, though it does have some great moments.
I wanna be a pirate!
I watched Fay Grim without having seen Henry Fool first. Actually, I still haven't seen Henry Fool (I promise I'll get around to it), but I definetly enjoyed Fay Grim a lot.
shareEhhhh..... not nearly as much as you'd enjoy Henry Fool, i think. I mean they are rather surprisingly different movies.
--I want to live in a bathysphere.
You'll be asking yourself, why such fuss over one guy? If you watch Henry Fool, you'll be introduced to the character that sets Fay Grim off. In that way, you'll too be set off because Henry Fool is an affecting character.
T_
Fay Grim is FUNNIER than Henry Fool (the plot is absurd, the acting is ARCH, and the dutch angles let you know you can't trust anything).
But Henry Fool is a "better film" in that it holds up better to repeated viewings , and is less absurd. But if you're looking for laughs, it's MUCH funnier.
A lesson I learned from Fay Grim is to read the IMDb pages on an unfamiliar movie before getting it from Netflix. I was expecting a straight espionage thriller, and was really turned off by Parker Posey's acting like a silent film star throughout. I kept trying to remember what I'd seen her in before because surely she wasn't this awful as an actress. There are 80+ titles on her IMDb page, many of which I enjoyed, but I couldn't figure out why she was so disappointing here. To find out, I'll have to get Henry Fool.
A major disappointment in Fay Grim was that we never got a glimpse of the action in the kid's viewing device, not even of the writing on the wall on which the plot turns. Oh, well.