Videovista have my review of Quentin Dupieux’s postmodern exploitation film Rubber. A film that features a sentient tyre, exploding heads and a cinema audience that is force-fed poisoned turkey after spending a night alone in the desert while a tyre sits in a motel room watching TV.
While I’m not convinced that the film is entirely successful in what it sets out to do (the joke ultimately fails to sustain the film despite its short running time), this is still a hugely imaginative and ambitious piece of film-making that is unlike anything you will see in the cinema or on DVD this year:
By confronting us with the absurdity of audiences speculating about the emotional lives of apes and tires, Philibert and Dupieux are drawing our attention to the inherent absurdity of the cinematic medium: Why do we care about the characters in films? They do not exist! They are not real!
My review also points out a number of similarities between Rubber and Nicolas Philibert’s ape-based documentary Nenette (2010), which I wrote about on this very blog.
Ruthless Culture 
I thought that a very interesting review. The marketing of Rubber doesn’t even mention the metacommentary elements, which suggests to me that there’ll be a fair few confused and pissed off genre fans watching it wondering what the hell’s going on.
Even if it doesn’t quite hang together in the end it’s a brave attempt and genuinely original. Very cool. I’m quite keen to check it out now.
It is extraordinary how some films are intentionally mismarketed. I saw a low key horror film recently called Carriers. It was markted as a zombie movie. It’s actually more of a drama about four twentysomethings forced to make increasingly terrible moral choices to survive a pandemic. The movie hasn’t a single supernatural element. Zombie horror fans apparently didn’t take to it, and why should they? Those who might have taken to it probably never looked at it because the overlap between its natural audience and generic zombie movies’ natural audience isn’t that huge.
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