Mike Figgis's bona fide experimental feature: shot in digital video, in real time, with four separate cameras shooting simultaneous single-takes, an hour and a half in duration (no need, with digital video, to reload the camera), and then the screen divided into quadrants so that we see all four images side by side, and the sound from each quadrant faded in and out as desired. There are periodic welling-ups of Mahler on the soundtrack, and there are periodic earthquakes. Sometimes, even apart from the quakes, the cameras will co-ordinate with one another (e.g., a different person in each quadrant talking on a cellphone at the same time), and sometimes more than one camera will be shooting on the same location from different angles. All in all, it makes a bad ad for the new technology: four pallid, jaundiced, ugly images at once (though the reduced size may minimize the lower quality), and a lot of queasy-making effects of twisting, turning, spinning cameras pulling in opposite directions. It makes a good ad, in reverse, for the old-fashioned virtues of classical composition and editing. The story, if it matters, is a behind-the-scenes-in-Hollywood thing, and at one point an aspiring filmmaker pitches an idea identical to that of the present movie: "Montage has created a false reality." One hates to agree with the production head who judges it to be "pretentious crap." Salma Hayek, Stellan Skarsgard, Saffron Burrows, Jeanne Tripplehorn. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd
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