Rage

RAGE is certainly not a movie for everyone. I could see how it would make some people very angry, and I am sure many people walked out of this. However, being an actor myself, watching these performances in their most intimate and raw presentation was nothing short of brilliant. Sure, there are a few flaws, but the truth behind the film is good acting can and SHOULD stand alone. All you really need is a great actor, and a camera pointed at them. It's a series of monologues given by some of the best actors out there. The performances that stood out to me most were: Judi Dench of course, John Lequizamo (who gives perhaps his best performance here), Bob Balaban (who is both hilarious and heartbreaking), Dianne Weist (who can do no wrong), Riz Ahmed (who I didn't know before this and hope to see again), and finally the best of all Adriana Barraza! You should rent/buy this movie just for her monologue about desiring to be invisible. Its a strange little film. But also a brilliant one.

The blue screens combine well with the characters lipstick colours , the performances at some points are really good but halfway through this movie i just couldn't wait for it to finish. I actually watched it on fast forward. For one thing you cant have a movie on people just talking in front of the camera. Its just hard to believe that this were done by a teenager. And those questions that coming straight from a fashion experts mouth were really hard to buy. Coming from the same person that made "Orlando" i was deeply disappointed since i was expecting much more. The aesthetic result is quite good but nothing more than that. This is one of my favourite worst movies ever. This is a film experiment but it just doenst work. Leave it for film schools or even museums but i wouldn't recommend this as entertainment

Sally Potter takes chances. There are so many unique aspects of this film that reviewing it is difficult. The major aspects of the film include the very au courant 'rage' of blogging as a means of communication, the 'rage' to stay young and in fashion (that almost daily changing series of fads of what is in and what is out), the 'rage' of focusing everyone's attention on celebrity antics including drugs and death, the 'rage' to buy everything (if you don't own it and it looks like it is going to be popular then buy it), the 'rage' of climbing into the media world, be it film, fashion, television searching for that promised 15 minutes of fame, the 'rage' of PR, minding the selling promotion of a product without concern of its value, the 'rage' of creating new fragrances with a special name for fame, and the 'rage' for maintaining a wealthy or famous class and a poor or service class. Potter manages to take us through all of these phases with brilliant writing, fascinating character studies, experimental lighting and photography, and one of the best uses of color fields ever on film.

The premise is simple yet strong. A blogger named Michelangelo follows the backstage proceedings of a New York Fashion Show: we never see him, we see only his daily blog entry and the images of the interviewees through his cellphone camera - the individuals all are part of the hyped fashion show cum ramp walk of fashionista Merlin (Simon Abkarian) who designed the clothes, Miss Roth (Dianne Wiest) who owns the company, Mona Carvell (Judi Dench) the fashion critic who writes for the media coverage, Otto (Jakob Cedergren) who works managing PR, Mr. White (Bob Balaban) who directs the show until he is replaced by the overeducated image builder Dwight Angel (Patrick J. Adams), Frank (Steve Buscemi) a hard nosed photographer who has spent better time on the war fronts in the Middle East taking 'meaningful pictures', financier Tiny Diamonds (Eddie Izzard) who buys everything he wants including his bodyguard Jed (John Leguizamo), models Minx (Jude Law in drag) and Lettuce Leaf (Lily Cole), pizza delivery boy transformed in to model Vijay (Riz Ahmed), and Anita de Los Angeles (Adriana Barraza) the seamstress who simply wants to remain invisible. Two deaths occur - one car accident and one shooting - and that brings in Detective Homer (David Oyelowo) who investigates while displaying his own brand of Shakespeare to the blogger's cellphone camera.

All of this complex story happens in the form of interviews - each star is dressed in well designed clothes and each poses in front of various colored screens. The ending of the interview brings the whole experience together. Potter's immaculate and imaginative script gives each one of these gifted actors room to shine in a one person act. It just simply works and never for a moment does it become dull. Sally Potter gave us 'Orlando', 'Yes', 'The Man Who Cried', and 'The Tango Lesson'. She is one of the most imaginative and skilled writer/director units in the business.

Grady Harp

I understand why it was created for phone viewers.. good idea but poorly executed

in classical Chinese painting, what gets left out of the composition is of crucial importance. potter's "rage" omits quite a few of the compositional elements we take for granted as essential in modern cinema - a bold move in a world dominated by Hollywood tropes and CGI. "rage" isn't what i'd call an experimental film, it's a film produced with an acute awareness of cinema as a super-saturated medium, in which the audience already knows all there is to be known. there are no new stories to be told; no killings which haven't been shown, no motivation which remains unexplored, no new formulas. but this literate, knowledgeable and sophisticated modern audience produces a space which can be activated by leaving things out, rather than putting things in. potter knows that all she needs to do is map out a bare structure, with sumptuous color and first rate actors, and all the rest of the work can be played out of the expectations we all bring to bear on the cinema experience. "rage" is a who-done-it, with andy warhol's "screen test" film series operating in the background, dressed with a kind of glossy-magazine-photoshopped look in which everyone's irises are a suspiciously similar sci-fi hue, and with a nice little twist in the end which implicates us, the passive viewers. i thought one of the most surprising things about the movie was the palpable "rage" expressed in other reviews on this site. we react like addicts when the sugar-candy experience of having everything laid out for our adrenal stimulation is withheld. this isn't a movie about the fashion industry, its about the modern obsession with surface, with effects, and its background theme is intensely political. it's characters are ciphers for the main players in the infotainment infiltrated everyday world, the businessmen, the celebrities, the wannabes, the innocents, the jaded old-hands, the haves and the have-nots. for those who were disappointed by this work, who weren't fascinated by watching, up close, great actors working, i sincerely hope michael bay's next SFX blockbusta isn't too far away. . .