Cinema

I consider going to the cinema one of my favourite past times. Perhaps because I am pretty anti-social and enjoy being able to sit next to someone and acceptably not say anything for two hours. Also because there are some pretty great films out there.

So, as I already (albeit occasionally) review the books I read, I thought I might try out scribbling down my thoughts on films I see at the cinema.

Last night I went to see Chatroom by director Hideo Nakata.
Probably the worst film I have seen in a long time. No doubt in my bottom 5 of all time. Made even more frustrating by the fact I was planning on going to The King's Speech but was persuaded otherwise at the last minute...that will have to wait for another Sunday.
The basic plot is of 5 'Chelsea Teens!' who meet in a chatroom and share their life-weary woes. A the age of 15.
The physical depiction of the chatroom was an interesting idea; having never used a chatroom I can't really comment on how accurately it portrayed the experience but it was certainly an interesting idea. The film started with uninteresting teenage vocabulary ridden dialogue between the characters - fair enough, I thought, as it is, after all, trying to depict how the youth of today interact with one another....but it didn't move on from that. The whole time I kept waiting for some 'real', interesting, and well contrsructed twist or turn in the plot. I honestly thought the writer had deliberately made it mundane in order to make the twist all the more shocking and punchy when it finally came crashing in. Unfortunately it just never did...
Other parts of the film were just as boring and cliched. For example our depressed young friend, Jim, who the main character, William, is trying to manipulate towards suicide: the roots of his depression stem from the day his father left one afternoon next to the penguin enclosure at the local zoo. Cue the most hideously cliched flashback of having the best day of his life: in the sunshine with his dad and the penguins, having one last slow-motion hug, with nauseating emotional strings in the background, before his father wanders away never to be seen again. It made me frown at the screen. I really hoped it was supposed to be tongue in cheek, but I fear that was not the intention.
I didn't connect at all with any of the characters, they were all really superficially and lazily characterised.
The main character William, for example, has some sort of history of self harm and depression, although it's never really clear what that exactly is. He gets off on making other people commit suicide online and let him watch through his 'powers of persuasion'...Not that we witness anything mighty convincing in the film. There is poorly disguised jealousy of his brother, with his mother's best selling novels all being based on his successful, polite, more handsome older brother Ripley. His mother, brother and father incidentally have no personality of their own at all.

It's not so much that I found any particular piece of the film unbelievable but just entirely boring. Even with a plot involving suicide and manipulation, mental illness....
The plot idea was a really interesting one, but the characters let it down. With a little more work it has the potential to actually be quite interesting. But at the end of the day, with all the teeny-bloggers some how managing to track each other down in real life and grab the gun just before William jumps in front of a moving train is a little too shite for me. Sorry, couldn't really put it in any other way.

I would rate this film a generous 1/10.

Roll on next weekend.