Boring... and pretentious

Rating: 1/10 (9 April 2005)

Wow.
Double wow.
"Closer", the inexplicably ridiculous movie about four people who resemble humans but act like perfunctory robots attempting to pass themselves off as humans is, not to put too fine a point on it, a steaming pile of fecal matter.
Where do films like these come from? Similar to Gus Van Sant's incompetent film "Elephant", "Closer" embodies two of the worst qualities a film can possess- it was both boring and pretentious. It was boring because every single character had no emotional, physical, or psychological development, no sense of "character", whether it is good character or bad character, and absolutely no consistency in any regard; pretentious because the characters in this film acted like no human being I have ever met. They acted like characters written by snooty drama students who thought they were bringing "real" relationships and "real" drama to the screen, but were too snooty to ever know what a "real" relationship or a "real" drama might be. Even worse, they acted like characters written by VIRGIN, snooty drama students, who thought they were bringing "real" sex to the screen. But who in fact knew nothing about sex or relationships or love or humanity, and whose own heavy-handed effort to understand such a complicated, wonderful and sometimes indecipherable thing were further illustrated by such a sloppy, poorly written script. Were it not for the fact that I thought I was going to get to see Natalie Portman naked I would have turned the movie off after the first ten minutes.
Oh.
Oh! And let us not forget the time-line. Holy Hell! As if this movie weren't bad enough. As if this screenplay wasn't dreadfully written. As if the direction wasn't shoddy, the acting sub par, and the premise utterly laughable. There is the time-line. Just to make a bad movie worse, this director, Mike Nichols, goes off and messes with the time-line as if he wanted the entire film to be totally incomprehensible and entirely ludicrous. I mean, one minute Alice is with Dan and life is good. The next minute we've jumped a year ahead and Dan has dumped Alice for Anna and Larry is copulating with Anna. The next minute it's four years ahead: Alice and Dan are back together, and have been for four years (albeit they're having a discussion they should have and would have had, were they not robots pretending to be humans, the first year they got back together), and Larry is back with Alice. Wheew! This goes on through the entire movie. Every ten minutes or so, Nichols, would randomly jump ahead in the characters lives a year or two, even four, therein completely obliterating any respectable amount of coherency he may have had if he had simply stuck to a tight, cohesive time-line. Reminded me of the movie "49 Grams"; another film that looked as if it had been edited by an insensitive butcher.
Do not see this film. It is not worth your time. Instead, see something like "Love Actually", which is "actually" rather good. For more rants and reviews and writings, visit www.kevacho.com