Eye for Itself

Rating: Null/10 (14 April 2006)

Sometimes the world throws a snowball so perfectly it both amazes and depresses me.
Imagine a story of an extreme threat, delivered through the visual media, with all sorts of personal triumphs woven into it. Suppose you gather groups of people by the millions to overtly support your enterprise, wrapped in gloss and foreshadowing. Suppose you decide to make it humorless and obvious; and to make it whole and logical not because it is those things but because your confidence makes its seem so.
Well, you'd have what this film has built itself against. But you'd also have what this film is.
Will we never learn? Do the brothers suppose they aren't paving the way for simplistic munchkin politics? If you want a subversive film, go to Greenaway.
Yet, I can admire how this thing is put together. It is highly cinematic visually even though most of the thing is talking. But even that is tricky because the talker is behind a mask, so we largely invent the images in our own minds, prompted from time to time with inserted visions.
The first half is the Count of Agatha Cristie, where we are presented with an old fashioned detective story except presented from the criminal's perspective. Serial killings are ticked off and we want to know why. Though we follow the killer, our inquiries are handled by the on screen detective.
This is followed by an "Oldboy" segment, a radical shift, perhaps equally well done. And then we shift into "Irreversible" mode as we slide into the sappy movieland happy ending. Fireworks.
Along the way, we are pounded with self-reference to video media: our heroine and her pal work in TeeVee. The central Valerie character is a filmmaker who incidentally creates the film we are watching indirectly by writing it on toilet paper and passing it as if behind a mask.
Our hero is motivated by a certain old movie. Until the very end, we only see our political nemesis on a huge video screen, as his millions of victims do.
This IS worth watching, but only for the way it is constructed. Generate your political philosophies the old fashioned way, okay?
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.