Friday, December 21, 2007

Take a Look


From filmstalker, The trailer for Look uses a very inventive and everyday piece of equipment, the surveillance camera, to reveal a group of stories from the secrets of American life.

According to the film blurb, thirty million surveillance cameras now produce more than four billion hours of footage every week with the average person being filmed some two hundred times a day, and that's in the United States alone. Look uses this medium to reveal a group of interweaving storylines.

Adam Rifkin's Look has been gathering some praise for the inventive way it tells five separate stories. Using the points of view of surveillance cameras he follows several storylines in a random week, in a random city, storylines which connect and pass each other, and are all caught on camera. Someone is watching.

From the blurb:

A high school English teacher tries his best to be a decent husband; a department store floor manager uses the warehouse for more than just storage; a Mini-Mart clerk has big dreams; a lawyer struggles with a sexual dilemma; and two sociopaths thrive on ruining the lives of random strangers.
Not only is this an inventive piece of drama, but it also looks set to remind you that you're being watched continuously, and if someone could piece together the footage or even had the time to watch, what would they see? What would they see of your private life, a life that you thought was lived without anyone seeing?

You can see the trailer over at Apple Trailers [Quicktime:iPod:L].

This does look like it has the potential to be very strong, particularly with the way it could make you think about your own privacy and just who is looking, and how often.

However it also needs to be carefully cut, and the footage worked hard on to make it look like it's a secret camera and not a film camera trying to look like a secret camera - something that I've seen in films before and has often given the wrong effect. From the word so far though, it's done that well.

Look at it here

3 comments:

DKC said...

I was intrigued until the bit about "I'm your mother's friend Joe" and hearing the Mom saying her little girl was sitting right there...And the other implied kid sexual abuse line.

That kind of stuff is too close to my nightmares as a parent.

Julie said...

My development teacher was talking about this film in class, and yeah, there's a whole child predator story.

Octopunk said...

At least it's clear they get the girl back; if he says "she made the whole thing up" at least she's alive. But yeah, too creepy.

I'm also not so taken in by the shocking discovery of all the surveillance. You can see where the cameras are, you know? In the big dark globes, behind the mirror, etc. I've never actually seen a camera in a dressing room, either. And they're not generally wired for sound.

I'm not saying the number of cameras isn't strange or interesting, but if you think about it, the answer to "who's watching?" all those hours and hours of footage is almost always "nobody."

Malevolent

 2018  ***1/2 It's 1986 for some reason, and a team of paranormal investigators are making a big name for themselves all over Scotland. ...