Why to watch Orson Welles's final film - and why not to

We shoujld be grateful to Nettflix for bringing us the finished version of Orson Welles's final movie, The Other Side of the Wind, which remained incomplete when he died in 1985 - leaving behind about 100 hours of footage, shot in various formats (some full screen 35mm, some square forma - maybe Super8?, some b/w, some color) - with a few edited segments, many notes, but far from coherent. He never was able to get full backing that would have enabled him to complete the film within a set time-frame and budget - typical of his late films, which were always hanging on by a threat and filmed over a too-long span of time - and the footage sat in various vaults and warehouses in Europe until a few years ago. The job of putting this together was heroic, with many obstacles - including transfer from celluloid to digital - but the team has at least created a reasonably coherent 2-hour film. But is it any good? I would say it's a curiosity worth watching because of what it shows us about Welles, but conceptually the film is a huge ego trip that's willfully disorienting and deliberately obscure. In brief, the movie tells the story of an aging director celebrating his 70th bd with a crowd of acolytes, hangers-on, and a host of media invited into the house director (played by John Huston, clearly meant to be a stand-in for OW) to document the celebration and to screen a cut of his latest film project - a film within the film. The evening comes to a tragic end - which we learn of at the outset; much as we might (or might not) love OW, there's nothing lovable about the overbearing, gruff character at the center of this film, much less about his swarm of parasites and acolytes and exes. That said, on the plus side this film is like an anthology of OW's innovative and groundbreaking directorial style or styles: The unusual shooting angles, many from the ground up, that we know from Citizen Kane, the strange effect of bright illumination in dark rooms and spaces that we've seen in Chimes at Midnight, the quick cuts in the editing - assuming the editors of this final version emulated OW's technique in the scenes he'd completed - so that the camera never lingers on any one character or moment, which recalls the above-mentioned films and also Mr. Arkadin. This directorial abundance is worth watching, even studying, as least for a while, though eventually most will agree that all this technique is in service to no good end. The "film within a film" is dreadful (maybe it's supposed to be?), a near-pornographic film that looks like a bad music video from the 90s (so maybe OW was ahead of his time once again, but it's a time well forgotten); the screenplay at times impenetrable. It's no wonder he could get no financial backing for this film as it had flop written all over it - which makes us wonder about the director's blathering about the decline of taste and the ever-lower standards of the movie biz. So, yeah, it's worth seeing for technique alone and for historical value, but I doubt anyone will want to rank this among other Welles classics. Sometimes, an artist's days are done.