BEFORE: Nicolas Cage carries over from "Snake Eyes" - same lead actor, different crime.
THE PLOT: A private investigator is hired to discover if a "snuff film" is authentic or not.
AFTER: Allow me to explain the back-story on this. Back before the internet and "Tosh.0" and "Web Soup", we used to have these things called "snuff films", they were allegedly filmed accounts of people being tortured and killed, and allegedly they were an underground form of entertainment for those people who got some sick sort of pleasure out of watching these films.
Perhaps I should back up further - we used to have this medium called "film", where people would take this thin plastic-like substance and thread it into a camera and expose it to light, where it would capture an image of the thing before it. Then it would go to a lab for three days, and then you would get it back and look at it, and realize what was wrong with it and that you had to start over again. Then you had to sit down with a sharp blade and cut the tiny images together in some sort of pleasing or arbitrary fashion, in order to assemble some kind of coherent point from a series of images.
Once you got everything the way you wanted it, people would then gather in dark rooms called "theaters" (if you got lucky) and your film would then get threaded through another machine called a "projector", which would push light through the image and make the image appear very large on a wall where people could see it and (again, if you were lucky) enjoy it.
But every industry has its rebels, those people who just have to swim upstream, so somewhere along the way the idea that movies were made for people to enjoy got all twisted around, and then it came to pass that we got art films, slasher films, chainsaw killer films, explicit pornography, and people pretending to kill each other for real on film. To some this no doubt lit up their fear, excitement and reproductive impulses at the same time, creating some kind of super-cocktail of adrenaline-based responses. I can think of no other reason.
However, except for documentaries like "Mondo Cane", the existence of snuff films was believed to be the stuff of urban legend - even this film can't decide for sure if the film-within-a-film is for reals or not. First it is, then it isn't, then upon further review it probably is. Then all hell breaks loose. But it's important to keep in mind that there's only ONE character in the film who even cares about the answer to that question, and we're not even 100% sure why. What difference does it make if the film was real or staged? Her husband probably got off by watching it, regardless of whether it was real or not, so why should it matter to her? Isn't the fact that he got his jollies because of it more important?
I mean, take child pornography. Not literally, like don't go out and buy it, but let's use it as an example. If a man has a stash of child porn that he enjoys looking at, isn't THAT the problem? I mean, the magazines could feature 18-year old models that look much younger, which would make them sort of legal, but it's not the images themselves that matter, it's what they represent on the market to the people who are looking at them.
So, in the end, I question whether the detective in this film even should have taken the case. I think he should have said to the perv's wife, "What does it matter? This film could be real, it could be staged, but either way, your husband was a very sick man." Since the gist of the film is that our hero can't walk into the shady world of underground films without it really affecting him, probably the best idea would have been to not make that journey at all.
You know what scares me? (No, not torture porn...) It's the fact that an entire industry, the film industry, has completely changed in the last decade. I was kidding before about explaining what film is, but the truth of the matter is that film as a medium is nearly dead. Movies are doing fine, but film is on life support - "digital killed the cinema star". Since I learned to shoot on film, edit on film, and send films to festivals, I could wake up one day and find myself irrelevant. If I wanted to go out tomorrow and shoot a film of my own, I wouldn't know where to start. I'd probably have to go back to school.
Think about the industries that have vanished, or nearly disappeared, since the advent of the digital age. Newspapers, book stores, record stores. Oh, a few good ones are still hanging on, but for how much longer? Everything now is a download or a torrent, or being sent by Dropbox or Vimeo, or by high-speed internet straight to someone's tablet. It's as if the construction industry changed overnight and said, "We won't be using bricks any more to make buildings." And instead you'd be living in some kind of transparent bubble that somehow stays in one place and holds all of your belongings and you don't understand how it stays floating in one place.
I think I know how horse-dealers felt when the automobile was invented, or how train engineers felt when planes started making cross-country trips. And that means I'm feeling more like a dinosaur every day...
Also starring James Gandolfini (last seen in "Zero Dark Thirty"), Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "U-Turn"), Peter Stormare (last seen in "Windtalkers"), Catherine Keener (last seen in "Cyrus"), Anthony Heald, Chris Bauer, Myra Carter, Amy Morton, Norman Reedus.
RATING: 5 out of 10 cash withdrawals
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