Look

Director: Adam Rifkin
Genre: Drama
Year: 2007

This movie is like that dessert you had all the right ingredients for but either you put too much of it, or too little and by the time you take it out of the oven and bite into it, you are no longer so thrilled. It looks good, but does not quite taste as good as it promises to be. The concept here is ripe, honestly, the paranoia is already out there with all the video cameras installed for ‘our security’. It is not entirely a stretch to think one can put together a whole film consisting only of footage that is already out there and shot. Does that sound like an awesome idea? Hells yes it does. Does it pan out that way? Not exactly.

Look is a film comprised entirely of ‘found footage’, the stories of a handful of people as they go about their lives told entirely through surveillance cameras. At the gas station, at school, at the store, in the parking lot…a ton of work went into making these visuals convincing, which is nice. At the center of the film are a teacher with aspirations, a teenage student with raging hormones, a store manager with no limits, an insurance worker who is the constant butt of practical jokes, a lawyer with a secret, a fame-aspiring gas station clerk and a couple of outlaws on the run. While they might seem haphazardly thrown together into this film, they do come together to make a more cohesive story by the time the film is over.

The concept is arresting at times, which is good…or would have been good if they had taken the extra amount of time and done the detail work that would seal this off. For starters, if the concept of your movie is that all of this is witnessed by the unmanned cameras, the ever seeing eyes…then make it so. Sure, it is understandable that perhaps a security person would be moving the cameras around, zooming them in and out on particular people, but not in the way this film often employs. The fact that they zoom in to a character in order to tell you to pay attention to a particular character is not only against the set rules they established for themselves, it also assumes the audience is not smart enough to follow the plot. Which might explain why so many of their shots are well framed, where in all honesty, a lot of the action would not be so well centered. On the plus side, they do take some effort to make the views of certain cameras look off, blurry, doubled or staticky…which really makes me wish they had finished with the eye for detail that they started with.

If the aforementioned issue seems a bit nit-picky, the fact that the acting falls sub-par most of the time is not. At the very least, give us subjects that can pretend they are not on video and not reciting off a script, which by the way, needed a few more read-throughs before getting the green light. Because this voyeuristic style of film making requires at the absolute minimum, a cast that can pretend to be real. Not to say the acting is terrible all around, there are a few that pull their weight with little stumbles, but in general, you are always reminded this is only a movie.

Then there is the audio issue, which bothers me a bit. Throughout this film there is near perfect audio, which we all know would be impossible given the way the footage is captured, particularly when most of those cameras used are not necessarily outfitted with microphones. Assuming that they were, the audio would realistically be all over the place. While that might make for a schizophrenic film, I also think it would be more realistic, if it had been tweaked just enough to make it understandable, dirty enough to make it real and toss in some subtitles here and there to help the audience out (as an editor’s note sort of deal). As it is, the audio is fine which does make for an easier viewing, so in a sense we can give them that, but once again it contradicts the essential set up of the movie.

So what you have in one hand is a less than stellar cast paired with too-pointed storytelling and on the other hand a really interesting concept, some powerful moments, and of course given the subject, you know there will also be gratuitous nudity and sex. There is enough thrill, humor, eroticism, and drama to keep your interest, though at time it will feel heavily scripted and formulaic. It might give some fodder for conversation but in the end you must weight the two sides and determine yourself if this is a film worth watching. It is not terrible, it is not great, it is something interesting to watch but it will not likely be that memorable film that will come back to you when recommending films to a friend.

Rating:
Notes: Some strong language, quite a bit of nudity and sexual content, some violence and drug use, but also a fair share of funny moments.