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I had a recent spectator experience with The Perfect Witness (2007) because the NetFlix computer recommendation engine suggested I watch this film. Apparently, at some point, I told it how much I liked Michael Haneke's, Benny's Video. I don't know about you, but this parallel being drawn provoked in me a maelstrom of emotion and excitement over Thomas C. Dunn's film and made the allocation of my time toward it virtually impossible to refuse. Just this kind of recommendation from the NetFlix computer intelligence, for me, had the aesthetic/moral movie bar set to level so high that, upon reflection, it represented something pretty much unaccomplished in every film produced in the year 2007.
Having prefaced my response to the film that way, I'm going to proceed in knocking this picture down as poorly executed and banal; and I really hate to do that because I think our boy, Wes Bentley, happens to be not only one of the most interesting young faces in contemporary cinema, but also one its most overlooked and underrated screenacting talents in the US. I'm more than moderately concerned that the poor guy's going to miss the fame ship if he keeps fiddling around with first time movie directors like this.
The Perfect Witness is about Micky (Wes Bentley), who, about thirty, still lives with Mom ("You're not drinkin' again area ya's?"), but he's a "filmmaker" or at the very least some kind of street-level voyeur with a pension for shooting would-be Johns in the seedy back alleys of Philadelphia with his DVX 100B. Out there, doing his private investigator-like drills, Micky "inadvertently" video-tapes a brutal murder on a hapless early-twenty-ish coed with his hand held camcorder. Baring the notion in mind that snuff and movies as cultural currency can be his equated with his ticket out of the white urban ghetto (and not to the debts of his unwitting friends and relatives who put up the money for his atrocious films), Micky approaches the assailant, James LeMac (Mark Borkowski: also takes a writing credit) or "Mac the Knife" whichever- and blackmails the killer into making a documentary about his murder impulses, holding this found footage over the attacker with threats of the police.
The problem with this movie is not that no interesting ideas exist because they do. While both the writing and direction are amateurish, that alone doesn't make a film bad. It's that these guys commit a rather poor assumption that what they are presenting is shocking in the context of a culture in which just about any person in the free world with access to a private computer can log-on to the web and catch the veracity of the action of a beheading on their little Mac or PC. No film relies on shock value alone any more (unless of course, ironically, it's a film about torture on animals) and therefore cinematic images of violence (real or fake) have less and less cultural capital with each year that passes. Also, we've got this astounding actor-talent in the lead all styled-up, real hip guy: his two inch beard and skull cap with the little bill on it, backwards, just like the dork from high school who craved after the potential services of my primary love interest same guy who just now calls himself a "poet."
Spare me. "I'm an artist," "I'm a filmmaker." Okay. Please do, carry on with that shtick, Cronnie. Seems to have bought you a lot of expensive 35mm stock. And go ahead, you can wear all the accrutements of a "creative" but don't expect us top respond to you, to follow your below average character through your two hour movie while you take down Wes Bentley's career. Why don't we just let history speak to the merits of what you do, filmmaker guy. My guess is history will eventually have say something about that like, probably that's in not is good as you think it is. And yeah, odds are you'll be laying the blame on your dear ole ma, end up like our man Micky here in The Perfect Witness; hooked on smack and covered in your buddy's blood with a video camera in your hand. Great.


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