DVD Review - Rubber
If that sounds ridiculous to you, then that's because it is ridiculous. The premise of this movie is ridiculous. The characters are ridiculous. It's absolutely absurdist cinema.
Recent filmmakers have dabbled in absurdist cinema like Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg and Charlie Kaufman, but their films always had a point. This movie has no point and it delights in such. We're told at the top that often movies will have one or two important elements that occur or exist for no reason. For this movie, that's true of almost every element.
Writer-director Quentin Dupieux plays with this concept by using metacommentary. As was the case with Wes Craven's recent Scream movie or with Monte Hellman's Road to Nowhere, this movie embraces the idea of a movie-within-a-movie. We watch as a car tire rolls around as if it were alive, learn that it has supernatural powers, and then become a killing machine. Then we watch, as a group of spectators watch the tire as if it were in a movie because for them it is a movie.
They watch this horror that the tire creates, only to become victims of horror themselves. In that, Dupieux is able to spoof the horror genre. At the same time, he's able to satirize the filmmaking process as well as the film viewing process. Dupieux's sense of humor is wicked and brilliant. For a B-movie and possibly a Z-movie, Rubber is hilariously bizarre and perfectly strange.
Jack Plotnick who plays the Accountant in this movie is also hilariously bizarre. He absolutely fits in this darkly ridiculous show. Not since Albert Lamorisse's The Red Balloon have I seen something so fantastic about an inanimate object come to life. It's fantastic in part because it's done without the use of computer-generated effects.
Five Stars out of Five.
Rated R for some violent images and language.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 22 mins.
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