Rage
Rage
| 24 September 2009 (USA)
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A schoolboy uses his cellphone camera to shoot intimate interviews with people working at a New York fashion house and secretly posts them on the internet. Result: a bitterly funny expose of an industry in crisis, during a week in which an accident on the runway becomes a murder investigation, and denial leads to devastation.

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Reviews
ignominia-1

well not the worst movie I have seen but certainly a disappointing one given the cast and the director. The movie had the structure and intimacy of a play which would have been alright if it had explored deeper into the characters' intentions and the meaning of their actions. As it were they were predictable and cliché-y: the superficial billionaire, the jealousy ridden transvestite; the vulnerable baby faced model; the over the top "artiste" designer; the cold critic; the body guard (who had too much time to talk to the camera to be doing his job) etc. The story is unclear on what really happens to the two models though we know we should mourn but over what? Suicide, murder accident? We see repeated shots of the characters with cliché gestures of sorrow but we cannot share in the tragedy as we don't know what happened. We are led to believe that the blogger has incited a mayhem of protest but would people -young people we are told- protest so vehemently against some stupid fashion's show? Which gets rerun after the first corpse is not even buried? I don't buy that. The format should have yielded amazing performances as in THINGS YOU CAN TELL JUST BY LOOKING AT HER by Rodrigo Garcia where the actors are stripped bare in front of a close up camera, but in RAGE they chose to follow preset tracks giving little more than prefab personae and that flatness is what kills the movie. Save for Dame Dench who is always superb; Dianne Weist's smile and voice as sweet as honey and Adriana Barraza who steals the movie as Anita de Los Angeles, the only believable and truly sympathetic character in the story. I was disappointed by Buscemi and Leguizamo who can do better acting (Buscemi is excellent as a grieving father in The Messenger) and by Izzard whose straight acting does not convince me - I love his cross dressing comedy routines and he should stick to them. Law is well hidden under wigs and make up and though I was reminded of him (his amazing eyes, beautifully enhanced by make up) mid movie I did not realize it was actually him. Still his Minx was just a caricature of a shallow diva who wants to grab and hold our attention, nothing more. The vivid color backgrounds made for interesting optical tricks when complementary colors clashed and glowed almost hurt the eye, but were insufficient to keep one interested. It's a pity that Potter's failed to go beyond color and costumes for I loved Orlando, her aesthetic was formidable in that movie and Virginia Woolf's story well adapted to her eye for rich costume imagery.

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marinostattaris

The blue screens combine well with the characters lipstick colours , the performances at some points are really good but halfway through this movie i just couldn't wait for it to finish. I actually watched it on fast forward. For one thing you cant have a movie on people just talking in front of the camera. Its just hard to believe that this were done by a teenager. And those questions that coming straight from a fashion experts mouth were really hard to buy. Coming from the same person that made "Orlando" i was deeply disappointed since i was expecting much more. The aesthetic result is quite good but nothing more than that. This is one of my favourite worst movies ever. This is a film experiment but it just doenst work. Leave it for film schools or even museums but i wouldn't recommend this as entertainment

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countryguitar

This was billed as something groundbreaking and exciting. Live Premiere, London's BFI/Southbank linking up with screens in cinemas all over the place, big name cast, new type of genre. As we sat, we waited, we watched and we waited some more. This is 99 minutes of absolutely mind numbingly boring schlock. Interviews set to a blue/red/green screen. Not a single line has any meaning, is well acted or engaging. Big names such as Judi Dench, Jude Law, Dianne Wiest and Eddie Izzard appear almost as if they have been held hostage and forced to read garbage from an autocue to secure their release. Apparently writer/director Sally Potter's film is about how 'fashion wrecks lives' and she aims to expose the shallow world of fashion in a lighthearted way (it's billed as a comedy). In reality, we are treated to one pathetic interview after another, no outside shots, no story, plot, nothing. The reviews are consistently bad, and as one reviewer wrote on the IMDb "one of the dullest and most purposeless movies I've ever seen in my entire life". The audience in my cinema agreed, they began to walk out in such numbers, that at one point I began to wonder if this was some kind of hoax and we were being filmed as part of an experiment about the staying power of a cinema-goers. Rage shows how ugly and downright wrong it is to allow the production, fiancé and distribution of 'anything goes' cinema.

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hans_germany

I don't post here often, in fact this is my very first comment, and wish it was a better film I felt I could say something about...Please, if you feel differently, explain it too me. This has been my first exposure to Sally Potters work.In Rage, we see a host of characters involved in a fashion show, being interviewed by and speaking with a student working on a school project. Throughout his seven days with the fashion designer, the models, the investor, the marketing consultants, the company owner, the pizza delivery guy, and others, several deaths occur, an investigation is launched, and public opinion is formed and voiced. Stylistically, we see see talking heads, declaring their thoughts and describing their own and others' actions.In my view, the film tries to be a bunch of things, but fails at most of them, miserably. First and foremost, it lacks a plot. Stuff happens, but there is no discernible character development (with a couple of exceptions, rounding up), no new or challenging views on topics we should care about, no discussion on why bad stuff happens to good people, or why people end up as bad people. This is notable, as films as Babel even Crash, and TV fare as The West Wing have taught us that issues have more than one side. Rage fails at that for the most part, focusing on illustrating that the fashion industry is bad, the media industry is bad, marketing folks anyways, and that those poor kids in China and on the runway that suffer. The film seems to work through a laundry list of things you ought to get upset about, had you not heard of them before and discussed them with your friends 10 years ago.Secondly, I straight out blame lack of directing skills for a set of inconsistent, seemingly badly enacted characters. Frank (Buscemi), Mona Carvell (Dench) and Miss Roth (Wiest) come across as at least as semi-credible, non-farcical, at times even multi-layered, or torn. Contrast this with Homer (Oyelowo), Merlin (Abkarian) and (don't shoot me) Minx (Law) - shallow monologues, farcical as far as I could tell, or plain out unbelievable and embarrassing. Either way, I dare say, could be fine. But please, don't mix! Help me understand if the film tries to be funny, or if we see an actor's most horrid performance to date. Ideally, help me understand this without the help of a pamphlet as required reading.Thirdly, try to maintain a shred of plausibility in the set-up. A kid with a cell phone camera being asked by Otto to please, not leak information, again? Diamonds trying to strike a behind-the-scenes deal, talking to said camera? Anita, doing the same, asking for anonymity? Cut that kid off, throw him out, sulk, but do not do what we see on screen! It renders the story implausible, as this asks the viewer to follow along with the cheap-looking declarative approach, no matter what. This in turn allows the makers of the film to skirt the hard work of story-telling - creating a believable universe of topics, characters and contexts.We saw the film as part of the Berlinale competition program. It did receive applause, especially Jude Law and Dianne West, but it also received applause when the words "last day" appeared on screen, and several people, possibly those more critical of what they saw, left mid-film. We wondered if Tilda Swinton is too good a friend of Potter to not invite her to this festival.3 stars, for Wiest, Dench, Buscemi, and 1 laugh/half hour.

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