Mister Lonely (2007/Genius/IFC DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: B- Extras: C- Film: C
Harmonie Korine
is a director trying to still find his way.
After the cult film Gummo
(1997) which people still talk about, he made Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), one of the few Dogme ’95 works that was
totally a stunt. After trying everything
from TV episodes to Music Video, Korine has finally made his first full-length
feature film on film. Ten years after
his debut, we have Mister Lonely, an
attempt to look at celebrity and the desire to be someone.
The film
begins with an impersonator of Michael Jackson in his surgery/face mask era
(Diego Luna of Milk and Frida) going around impersonating him,
hoping to pick up money for his “talent” and he talks about why he wants to
become someone else. The film opens with
the Bobby Vinton’s 1964 classic hit used as the title song, but the film is
miles away from David Lynch’s Blue
Velvet in originality and when the underrated Samantha Morton shows up as a
Marilyn Monroe impersonator, the film collapses into a second rate version of
Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance (1985)
also dealing with Monroe and celebrity.
The film
is also too self-impressed, thinks anything it does is funny and interesting
and eventually becomes a run-on of slow motion moments, clichés and when he
starts throwing in any other celebrity impersonator he can come up with
(Charlie Chaplin, Madonna, Buckwheat, James Dean, The Three Stooges, Abraham
Lincoln and Little Red Riding Hood), it then tries to ape Marcel Carne’s Children Of Paradise. Too bad his film makes a desert of it!
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image comes from a combination of shooting in
35mm and 16mm film, brought together in a Super 35mm film frame. The film’s only advantage, it has a solid
cinematographer in Director of Photography Marcel Zyskind, whose impressive
work includes Code 46, 9 Songs and A Mighty Heart. Too bad this
transfer is a little softer than it ought to be. The Dolby Digital 5.1 has some good ambient
surround usage in a film that is dialogue-based with subtle uses of music. Extras include a making of featurette and
deleted scenes.
- Nicholas Sheffo
