2009 Review #34: Look (Straight to DVD)

Look

Rated R

(strong sexual content, nudity, pervasive language, some violence and brief drug use)

1 hour 38 minutes
Storyline:
Americans are captured on surveillance cameras at least 170 times a day mostly without their knowledge. This produces millions of hours of footage revealing the nature of those hidden secrets.

Critics Grade:

D+
My Grade:
C

A bit of a disclaimer: the events in this movie are NOT real. These are characters played by actors, there is not one single real aspect of this film. Technically speaking, you can't get audio through most surveillance cameras because from I understand...it's against the law (but yes I may very well be wrong on that). Also I highly doubt if these were real people, that they would ever consent to the film maker showing this video...considering all that happens. But they had to make a movie out of this, so in this movies world, you can get audio, and I'm not a picky person on a films believability anyway. But anyway, yes, this is a scripted film it has a film director putting it all together. What this movie is, is a film told only through various security cameras and it follows the lives of a handful of people having pretty a pretty cruddy week. Their lives intersect at times.

The concept is actually pretty cool, that's what got me to watch the movie in the first place. In the end, the movie comes off way to gimmicky and a lot of it does not feel very authentic. The actors at times tried way to hard to act "natural" and out of their acting element. What this did though, was make it obvious that they were acting...over acting at times actually. For me that took away from the realism this film was obviously trying to showcase. I get the point of the movie...that we are being watched everywhere we go by big brother. That our lives aren't as private or personal as we make ourselves believe. I thought that was a cool point. I just wish they used more skilled unknown actors who can play off authenticity better.

There isn't a real major storyline. Like I said, it just follows the week of several characters who are either cheating on their spouses; who are being tormented by co-workers; who are spying on their nanny, etc. Other than that, there isn't a whole of story or much character development. You can't really expect that from a movie like this though, so that's OK. The idea of this story was to show us that we are never alone even if we are literally by ourselves...make sense?

There seemed to be a lot of camera in bathroom and fitting rooms...again, illegal in our world, but OK in this films world. Ha, just thought it was kind of funny. The opening scene took place in a changing room and was really, really awkward...it was of two girls getting naked and chatting away as they tried on clothes and then started doing fake sexual things. Creepy and weird. This whole movie was creepy and weird. It definitely had a few tense moments, especially with the serial killer characters. It some cool moments, some entertaining moments, some sad moments, but overall this was just an alright movie for me. Not one I'd ever buy or watch again...but it wasn't terrible. Just a fairly average movie that could have been so much better and so much more effective.

...but that's just me folks.