Failed Experiment
4 July 2016
I've nothing against experimental movie-making. But here technique overwhelms everything else, leaving us with cinematic chaos and maybe a headache. All the rapid- fire jump cuts, color changes, and camera angles add up to an anti-movie mess. It looks like somebody's self-indulgence run wild. To me technique should enhance story, not overwhelm it. Or, in some cases, it might get us to see a familiar theme in a new way. But since there's no real story here, just a sequence of chaotic events, there's ironically no real conflict, just a two-hour waste of film and viewer attention. To be fair, I guess there is a message, something about the media creating a faux reality that sucks people into its seductive realm. That's certainly a worthy, if not novel, theme, especially in our fraught day and age. But unfortunately this movie mess overwhelms the idea without either enhancing it or seeing it in a new way. Too bad.

(In passing—Most folks think of Mallory and Mickey as modern day Bonnie and Clyde. Nevertheless, B&C's main purpose was robbing banks, not killing people, a-la M&M. To me, the apt comparison is with the less well-known, teenagers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. After killing her parents and a baby, their murder spree spread across Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958, and appears motivated by little more than a perverted joy of killing, a-la M&M!)
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