Time Code
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Movie Reviews of Time Code
Movie Review: Interesting...
Summary: 3 Stars
Mike Figgis' experimental foray into digital media is a film shot completely in real time and played out over a screen divided into quarters. You watch four small screens all at once and while inventive, it's more than a little gimmicky. It does have a great cast though, including Selma Hayek and Stellan Skarsgård. If you've ever seen the Polish art films of Zbig Rybczynski, this will remind you of them.Movie Review: Diffrent Format
Summary: 3 Stars
Its a simply dialog and easy to catch up. Feels like a amateur movie.-Movie Review: Innovative, but more of an experiment than a movie
Summary: 2 Stars
"Time Code" was directed by Mike Figgis, best known for "Leaving Las Vegas." I'm not a fan of his work, but was intrigued by the concept of this movie - it was filmed in one 90-minute take and is told via four cameras shown in different quadrants of the screen. The movie was filmed 15 different times over a period of a few weeks, with the 15th take being the theatrical release. The story (such as it is) concerns 20+ people in Los Angeles who are connected in one way or another to a small indie film studio. The soundtrack is emphasized in certain quadrants at any given time to show you where to direct your attention. I was concerned that the movie would be difficult to follow, especially on a TV, but it was actually fairly easy to watch it and understand what was transpiring. The technique is innovative and daring, and one cannot help but admire its audacity. It was also interesting seeing how the different stories overlapped. However, there are simply too many weak points for the movie to ultimately succeed. First, the acting and script was largely improvised, and it shows. Selma Hayek has one of the largest roles, and she is simply not up to the challenge. Holly Hunter also comes off poorly with her tentative stuttering character. Second, the plot (which was loosely structured by Figgis) is not very interesting. If this same script was shot in a conventional manner, it would not be worth the price of admission. Third, the concept of the four quadrants is interesting, but most of the time little is happening in any given quadrant. For example, the upper left quadrant, features mostly Jeanne Tripplehorn and she spends a huge portion of the movie sitting in the backseat of a limo or pacing the sidewalk in front of the studio. It just isn't very entertaining.
The DVD includes several interesting features. For example, the full first take of the movie is included. Also, you can remix the soundtrack to hear what is going on in the other quadrants. Overall, I have mixed feelings about "Timecode." I'm glad I saw it and hope that other directors will be inspired by its unusual and daring techniques. However, it was ultimately boring and pretentious.
Movie Review: An innovative experiment wasted by a mundane plot
Summary: 2 Stars
I greatly admired the technical feats in this bold experiment in film narrative, but at the end of it all, it feels like a wondrous opportunity wasted. It is obvious that a tremendous amount of time and care was spent to engineer and choreograph the simultaneous and interweaving real-time stories with the four cameras, so it's deeply disappointing that such little attention was given to the actual story. The main problem with the story is that it is so prosaic, not to mention its dearth of creativity as exhibited by its use of an earthquake not once but FOUR times! The story's conventionalism frustrated me because it begs the question of why it needs to be told with such an unusual narrative technique. I can only assume that Figgis included the more pointless and tangential threads in the story in order to justify the four concurrent screens, but Robert Altman has been effective in depicting the multifariousness and random nature of human existence for decades without needing to abandon conventional cinematic methods. No, I think the only way to do this experiment justice is to have integrated into the story the concept of telling it in such an unusual fashion, perhaps not unlike the concept film the Russian songstress was pitching to Red Mullet near the end of the film. This resulting movie may have indeed been "pretentious", but at least it would not have been aimless and pointless. Stellen Skarsgard's Alex's charge that the songstress' pitch was "pretentious" is an obvious sign that Figgis had more ambitious plans in mind but laziness clearly prevailed, and Figgis attempts to pass his film off by deconstructing the pitched concept film to the point that it becomes the film that we are actually seeing on the screen. And this deconstruction is not only cheap, but bizarre as well, because deconstruction should only be applied to well-worn ideas and not avant-garde ones, because otherwise, avant-garde would never get beyond the artist's imagination and into the production stage. But most importantly, I would rather see a contrived and pretentious concept film that sparks conversation rather than an exercise in self-congratulatory cleverness.Movie Review: An extra star for novelty
Summary: 2 Stars
As Dr. Malcolm from "Jurassic Park" would say, Figgis was so excited that he *could* make a movie this way that he didn't stop to think whether he *should*. For one thing, if it's possible to shoehorn a meaningful story into two hours of real-time (and the dismal John Badham thriller "Nick of Time" strongly suggests that it isn't), Figgis didn't figure out how. This is one stupefyingly dull movie! To make things worse, the jazz-loving director calls upon the sort-of-all-star-cast to improvise the dialogue for him. If all the actors had the talent of Holly Hunter or Stellan Skarsgard (who predictably provide the few good moments here), it might have had a remote chance of working. But when you have performers with as little going for them as Jeanne Tripplehorn and Salma Hayek clumsily pretending to be lesbian lovers, the result is painfully embarrassing. And while I enjoyed having to work at monitoring the different streams of visual information, there was so little payoff at the end that I felt foolish for having bothered.