tadpole-596-918256 Review of Losing Ground

Losing Ground (1982)

No, it's definitely NOT true that this flick features . . .

[5/10 · 24 January 2018]

. . . a five-minute static shot of a camera's lens cap. It's pretty hard to fathom how this vicious rumor seen on other web sites got started, since none of the two or three LOSING GROUND scenes that would fit this description stretch out longer than a minute. Such things as people, pools, and paintings are centered on the screen for at least half the running time of LOSING GROUND, meaning that shots of random green shrubbery or stationary highway guardrails make up 50% of LOSING GROUND at most. The end credits for this film indicate that it was some sort of student project produced with guilty rich people's grant money, and that it was made in two separate batches. While the "philosophy professor" chick is not synched to the picture when she says "Lie-berry" and mispronounces the names of all the major philosophers during the "First Week" batch, she clearly has a dialogue coach for the second batch of film, saying "library" and other three-syllable words with the best of them. Though her typewriter, rotary-dial phone, and this flick's cheap beat box score prove it to be an effort from the early 1980s, it's WAY ahead of its time. Had its Gay Elements been stressed slightly more, it would have swamped MOONLIGHT for the "Best Picture" Oscar if it had been released in 2017.