Rag Tale

This is a shame. Great cast (why aren't these people on our screens all the time?), completely wasted. The direction in this movie is the worst I've ever had the misfortune to see - the camera is constantly moving, often rotating round so actors are at angles, or zooming. Combined with extremely quick editing, it makes it difficult to tell which actor is which, let alone what their facial expressions are. This would be excusable perhaps if an inexperienced director tried it for one scene, but it's the entire movie. I suppose the attempt is to convey the pressure and fast pace of a newsroom: instead, it conveyed to me a headache (a good director would allow the actors to do some of the conveying emotion: the direction more or less screams look at me in every scene, to the extent the participant I was most aware of was the camera).

Putting aside the direction, the improvised script does not produce a comedy. The cast do a good job of conveying some relationships between the group, some amusing, but really asking them to improvise a script of one liners in a few weeks was always insane and this really could have used a decent scriptwriter. The audience I was in laughed twice. The original concept isn't bad, the cast try hard and are good, but the director never gives them the chance to salvage this. Avoid.

As a newspaper journalist myself, seeing this film was almost a duty. By the end of it, I wished that I enjoyed a different vocation.

The script is unremarkable, slightly below average with all of the clichés surrounding journalism pandered to. The plot is almost non-existent, it was difficult to fathom what the film was actually about other than ticking the boxes on how the man in the street views journalists.

What really grated, and which actually gave me a headache, was the way the film was shot. Jaunty angles and quick-cut editing abound. This made the remake of 'Rollerball' look sedate by comparison. One can only assume that the editor or director has recently been dumped by someone with photo-sensitive epilepsy.

Jennifer Jason Lee, Malcolm McDowell, Kerry Fox - what were you thinking of? A terrible, terrible movie. Avoid at all costs.

There is hardly a shot in this film that lasts longer than 2 seconds. MTV style plus plus. A formal choice made to stress the hectic and crazy world of tabloid journalism. The cast is good, but when people get so much visually fragmented and reduced to mere short visual and aural stimuli it's difficult to care at all for them. Foul language is omnipresent and the ending is ludicrous. At least some of the film is funny as absurd headlines for tomorrow's edition of the "Rag" are discussed and a battle for power and control between the chief editor and management breaks out. A big headache is more likely what you take home from this experience than insight, concernment or merely a good time. Textbook example of style over substance.

This movie can only be viewed as some sort of "what not to do when shooting a movie". The constant cutting and shifting leaves one feeling physically ill. I watched this movie with another person and we both experienced the same symptoms. A headache, strained eyes and eventually a strong urge to throw up.

The pity was that this movie was kinda promising. There is probably a big market out there for a satire of this kind demonstrating the type of spin that goes into publishing a red-top. However the director doesn't seem to want to do that and the end product is a 100 minute music video.

The acting was also pretty dire, having wondered "whatever happened to Jennifer Jason Leigh" for the first few minutes of this movie, I soon realised why i hadn't missed her.

The final nail in the coffin though had to be the resolution. Absolutely awful, I have never seen such and obvious attempt at a directorial get out of jail card.

I felt ill after 5 minutes.

I have no idea if the storyline is good or not.

What genius decided to use that cool-jerky-docu-style camera work for the entire movie ????

I have homemovies that are easier to view than this.

The opening scene in the office was a little amusing and I wondered whether the character would brazen it out when he received the call from his boss.

It's a pity really because based on the opening scene(s) I would have viewed the entire movie.