Monday 25 March 2013

Rubber (2010)


I honestly couldn't wait to see Rubber after watching the trailer. I was sold a B-movie style, tongue in cheek film about a sentient tyre named Robert who went around murdering people with his psychic powers. That is not what I got.

Rubber, being a French film by Quentin Dupieux, is a very different film that the one you're sold by the trailer, and I suspect that's completely intentional. What Rubber actually is, is a very heavy-handed critique of both the Hollywood movie industry and the entirety of the audience it caters to.

We open with a very not-subtle introduction where the audience (both the one sat on the sofa and the one actually in the film) being told that in every classic film there's an element of "no reason". They're being introduced to a film they've been invited to watch from somewhere in the desert about a tyre that goes around murdering people. They're sat up on a mountaintop, binoculars in hand as everyone in the surrounding area acts out the real movie around them. Of course, this being a critque of the average movie-goer, it doesn't end well for them or for the representatives of the industry with all of them eventually choking on the same bland, low standard poison in the end.

Rubber's a film of two sides. On the first, the critique of the movie industry and the audience is nothing new if you're into slightly artsy and very pretentious films like myself but it still works and is relatively entertaining as you figure out the quite transparent imagery in real time. On the other, I feel robbed that I didn't get much of a film about a tyre that's come to life and taken to murdering people with a mounted effort by the police force to stop it.

I got an okay film that was a lot more pretentious than I thought. I didn't get the film the trailer showed me. And I most certainly didn't get the film I wanted to see.

But I guess that's how I'm supposed to feel. Or something.

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