GRAND JURY AWARD WINNER - 2007 CINEVEGAS

“LOOK” (2007)

Starring: Hayes McArthur, Giuseppe Andrews, Miles Dougal, Jamie McShane, Spencer Redford & Rhys Coiro
Written & Directed by Adam Rifkin
Trailer

Polly Staffle Rating: ****

After the world premiere of “LOOK” at the 2007 CineVegas Film Festival, writer and director Adam Rifkin said the idea for his Grand Jury prize winner came to him when he ran a red light and was mailed a ticket.

“When the picture came back, I was making a silly face,” Rifkin said. “I thought it was kind of embarrassing.” That got him to thinking about other places where he is unknowingly photographed. “You walk through a department store, there’s 50 cameras on you,” Rifkin said. “All that footage, that’s coverage. I could cut that into a scene of me shopping. It’d be a boring scene, but that’s what moviemaking is, different shots put together to tell a story.”

Since Americans are reportedly captured as much as 200 times a day by the 30 million surveillance cameras that surround us, a silly face probably isn’t the worst of it. “LOOK” gives us a chance to take a peek at what some of these cameras may possibly be filming. Shot completely from the point of view of cameras in malls, dressing rooms, school parking lots, ATM machines, grocery stores, cop cars, elevators, offices, storage rooms and cell phones, “LOOK” interweaves several storylines that represent a random week in a big city.

The results are simply brilliant. It’s as if Rifkin is sitting behind a master control piecing all the footage together for our dirty voyeuristic eyes. This feels like the real deal. Sure, if it was as simple as Rifkin makes it appear, there would be whole cable channels featuring live surveillance feeds.

The truth is it would actually take a hell of a long time to get the number of funny, sexy, shocking and moving moments that crisscross through the powerful stories that make up Rifkin’s film. Likewise, if the footage was taken from real surveillance cameras, there would be no audio and the video would be in worse condition than we see here. Though Rifkin said he initially toyed with the idea of shooting his film with actual closed-circuit cameras, his final product was shot in HD and degraded in post production.

That’s all part of what makes this film so beautiful. It’s not a true reality film, but it is a genuine representation of it. This isn’t a documentary and it doesn’t pretend to be, but it feels more true to life than the fake ass programs that populate prime time television. Rifkin’s film, like life, is at times quite funny. Other times it is sad. Sometimes the film can move from one emotion to the other in a matter of seconds. Twice I caught myself laughing as a situation was unfolding and then abruptly having to stop my laughter as light hearted turned dead serious. No movie before this has been able to capture that quite like Rifkin does.

Humor isn’t the only way Rifkin toys with our emotions. He has a number of tricks up his sleeve. The character in “LOOK” that I felt the most sympathy for early on, ends up being the biggest creep in the film. Rifkin also opens the film with two women in a dressing room. We watch as the two friends undress, try on outfits and playfully flirt with each other. Then we find out the characters are 15-year-old girls. It’s at this point that every adult male viewer in the audience that hasn’t already felt so, feels like a complete pervert and is probably a little ashamed of themselves.

Rifkin’s screenplay also introduces lots of scenarios that seem a bit predictable at first. Sometimes he gives into our expectations and other times he doesn’t. Rifkin sets us up with a car accident that turns deadly due to road rage early on that ends up being on the set of a John Landis movie. So when real violence erupts a little later, it takes us off guard. Rifkin does this over and over throughout his film. He first gives us fake lesbians in a dressing room and delivers with a real gay couple later. A tense scene in a convenience store doesn’t go the way we thought it would, a nanny cam leaves us hanging and a child predator at the mall seems to always be seconds off from snatching up someone’s kid.

The use of cameras in fighting crime also comes into play with several of the different storylines. One ends up having a happy ending, another leaves us questioning whether justice has actually been served and a third has us completely dumbfounded and scratching our heads.

In addition, the film is highlighted with a hilarious scene, which I’d easily place in my top five favorite cinematic convenience store moments. Giuseppe Andrews plays a clerk at a store and Miles Dougal is his hanger-on buddy. When there are no customers, Andrews pulls out his Casio synthesizer and practices his tunes. In this scene, Andrews sings “Electrocuted” while Dougal runs around the store diving over shelves, knocking things down and causing havoc. My description does not give the scene justice, but trust me, this one moment in the film is good enough to watch the whole movie over and over again.

But in the end, it turned out Rifkin’s entire movie was worth a look or two or three. What makes “LOOK” a great film is the story is just as clever as the “man, why didn’t I think of that survevallience camera point-of-view” gimmick. Rifkin could have made a conventional film and it would have been just as solid. The problem with a lot of the works of filmmakers like Richard Linklater (“Fastfood Nation”), Alejandro González Iñárritu (“Babel”) and Christopher Nolan (“Memento”) is once the novelty of their concept has worn off, the story itself just isn’t that powerful on its own. Rifkin’s film doesn’t have that problem at all.

Unless you plan on buying an apartment complex and placing cameras in every unit, “LOOK” is probably the closest you’ll come to taking an uncensored peek into the lives of others. But instead of being bored watching people cook macaroni and cheese, sitting at their computer or watching television for hours, Rifkin gives us just the juicy parts, making his film well worth the cost of admission. More than that, Rifkin leaves us with a thing or two to contemplate about privacy, technology and justice, while upping our paranoia of big brother watching our every move.

- CCF, July 2007

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