Rubber (2010)

At the beginning of Rubber, Lt. Chad (Stephen Spinella), holds forth a discourse on how in movies things often happen for "no reason". Chad providers a number of examples for this, ranging from the true but unimportant ('why is E.T. brown?'), too the farcically false ('In The Pianist, why is he running around like a bum when he's so good at the piano?').  "No reason" is a theme that runs throughout this movie, not least in its application to why the film was made. The trailer for this one is what made me interested, its sheer bizarreness, its Dadaism. Its promise of knowing satire however falls short as all too many of its observations are on an eight grade level (so I suspect I'd have kind of loved this in middle school).

The movie does score for audacity of concept, as it concerns an abandoned rubber tire named Robert and his pursuit of love, not to mention his ability to telekineticly blow stuff up (with a favorite being human heads). It's not suppose to make sense, which might have made it cool, but for the fact that it didn't.

The beginning of the film introduces us to a group of spectators in the (presumably California) desert, who have gather to watch our story, which they observe through binoculars. The whole enterprise has been produced by Lt. Chad as some sort of... con? Mad exercise? Anyway through the aid of his accountant (Jack Plotnick), Lt. Chad manages to kill all but one of the spectators via poisoned turkey. The remaining viewer (Wings Hauser), a wheel chair bound Vietnam vet sort, posses an unexpected difficulty for the Lieutenant as he had not thought out how the movie would end. Because of this Chad's fellow police officers, and the other characters in the film are unable to realize that they are just actors, and must continue to play their parts as long as 'the movie' is being watched.

There is little or nothing too the characters in this film, their odd and mostly one note, and generally can't act. Aside from maybe Robert the only one in the film worth watching is Spinella's Lt. Chad. Stephen Spinella is a Tony winning actor, he has a compelling screen presence even as he hams it up, what he's doing in this movie however is a mystery. Rubber is a French production (which might explain a lot) and features the model Roxane Mesquida as Robert's potential love interest, she is unimpressive (as an actress, physically kind of impressive, like a more sleek but less funny Aubrey Plaza). Rubber just doesn't work, its simultaneously too juvenile and too film school; it might have done better had it just concentrated on being one of the two.

Grade: Poor