People are going to beat their chests and wail about how truly awful this film is. However, that wouldn’t be entirely fair. This film is going to suffer from the weight of expectations based on marketing, past incarnations and a delayed release that only further increased anticipation of its promised brilliance.
The film isn’t awful. It’s just average. Average with a generous helping of condescension, showing how out of touch director Baz Luhrmann has gotten with his target demographic. Despite its huge budget and big name stars, the film repeatedly falls short of what it is trying to achieve. It’s pretty to look at, and it strings together the story, but the acting talents of the cast are dismally wasted as they are strangled and stifled under Luhrmann’s heavy handed direction and the bizzarely literal and spelt-out script. Continue reading
In America for a period just over a decade a series of devilish prank calls were made to grocery stores and fast food restaurants where the caller manipulated workers into varying levels of sexual humiliation, under the guise of an authority figure – managers or police usually. The hoax came to an end in 2004 with arguably the most serious of the cases wherein a young female McDonald’s worker was accused of theft, detained in the office, strip searched and eventually sexually assaulted, all entirely by the power of manipulation and the manager complying without question to the requests of the “police man” on the phone. Compliance is based on this situation, and it is a subtle, powerful, beautiful and utterly uncomfortable and compelling film.
Elizabeth Flux
H D Thompson
hezzabeth
Mike Stuchbery
Adam vanLangenberg
