A painful waste of time.

Rating: 1/10 (9 May 2007)

There were lots of these movies through the 90s - Groundhog Day, Strange Days, The Truman Show, The Matrix, Pleasantville, Memento and others, using Film as a metaphor for an illusory life. I liked most of them... but found this late arrival relentlessly contrived, pretentious, narcissistic, vacuous, tedious...
It would have been better if they'd just played it all out in front of a big mirror as home entertainment, with loads of breaks for self-congratulation. In fact, most of the time, looking at the screen was like staring cringefully at the hammy acting, lousy direction and terrible script through a two-way mirror. Why did all these sad characters have to rope in a cinema audience to convince themselves how hip and clever they were? I thought Tarantino was the ne plus ultra of pretentious narcissism. This runs him pretty close, without the art.
I guess you'd call this self-conscious tripe 'postmodern'. It's basically a very old genre - as old as the illusion of moving pictures themselves. There are great German Expressionist examples, like Nosferatu - but my all-time favourite is Jacques Rivette's Céline et Julie vont en Bateau (1974). It is not 10, but a thousand times better than this embarrassing dross, and infinitely more engaging, imaginative and playful. See it instead. Please.
Oh... and I liked the Dylan song (and screamed in dismay at the Freewheelin' cover cover). What were you thinking of Bob? What were you on?