Rage

2009
4.7| 1h38m| en
Details

A schoolboy uses his cellphone camera to shoot intimate interviews with people working at a New York fashion house and secretly posts them on the internet. Result: a bitterly funny expose of an industry in crisis, during a week in which an accident on the runway becomes a murder investigation, and denial leads to devastation.

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Reviews

VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.
Pluskylang Great Film overall
Voxitype Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.
gradyharp Sally Potter takes chances. There are so many unique aspects of this film that reviewing it is difficult. The major aspects of the film include the very au courant 'rage' of blogging as a means of communication, the 'rage' to stay young and in fashion (that almost daily changing series of fads of what is in and what is out), the 'rage' of focusing everyone's attention on celebrity antics including drugs and death, the 'rage' to buy everything (if you don't own it and it looks like it is going to be popular then buy it), the 'rage' of climbing into the media world, be it film, fashion, television searching for that promised 15 minutes of fame, the 'rage' of PR, minding the selling promotion of a product without concern of its value, the 'rage' of creating new fragrances with a special name for fame, and the 'rage' for maintaining a wealthy or famous class and a poor or service class. Potter manages to take us through all of these phases with brilliant writing, fascinating character studies, experimental lighting and photography, and one of the best uses of color fields ever on film. The premise is simple yet strong. A blogger named Michelangelo follows the backstage proceedings of a New York Fashion Show: we never see him, we see only his daily blog entry and the images of the interviewees through his cellphone camera - the individuals all are part of the hyped fashion show cum ramp walk of fashionista Merlin (Simon Abkarian) who designed the clothes, Miss Roth (Dianne Wiest) who owns the company, Mona Carvell (Judi Dench) the fashion critic who writes for the media coverage, Otto (Jakob Cedergren) who works managing PR, Mr. White (Bob Balaban) who directs the show until he is replaced by the overeducated image builder Dwight Angel (Patrick J. Adams), Frank (Steve Buscemi) a hard nosed photographer who has spent better time on the war fronts in the Middle East taking 'meaningful pictures', financier Tiny Diamonds (Eddie Izzard) who buys everything he wants including his bodyguard Jed (John Leguizamo), models Minx (Jude Law in drag) and Lettuce Leaf (Lily Cole), pizza delivery boy transformed in to model Vijay (Riz Ahmed), and Anita de Los Angeles (Adriana Barraza) the seamstress who simply wants to remain invisible. Two deaths occur - one car accident and one shooting - and that brings in Detective Homer (David Oyelowo) who investigates while displaying his own brand of Shakespeare to the blogger's cellphone camera. All of this complex story happens in the form of interviews - each star is dressed in well designed clothes and each poses in front of various colored screens. The ending of the interview brings the whole experience together. Potter's immaculate and imaginative script gives each one of these gifted actors room to shine in a one person act. It just simply works and never for a moment does it become dull. Sally Potter gave us 'Orlando', 'Yes', 'The Man Who Cried', and 'The Tango Lesson'. She is one of the most imaginative and skilled writer/director units in the business. Grady Harp
ignominia-1 well not the worst movie I have seen but certainly a disappointing one given the cast and the director. The movie had the structure and intimacy of a play which would have been alright if it had explored deeper into the characters' intentions and the meaning of their actions. As it were they were predictable and cliché-y: the superficial billionaire, the jealousy ridden transvestite; the vulnerable baby faced model; the over the top "artiste" designer; the cold critic; the body guard (who had too much time to talk to the camera to be doing his job) etc. The story is unclear on what really happens to the two models though we know we should mourn but over what? Suicide, murder accident? We see repeated shots of the characters with cliché gestures of sorrow but we cannot share in the tragedy as we don't know what happened. We are led to believe that the blogger has incited a mayhem of protest but would people -young people we are told- protest so vehemently against some stupid fashion's show? Which gets rerun after the first corpse is not even buried? I don't buy that. The format should have yielded amazing performances as in THINGS YOU CAN TELL JUST BY LOOKING AT HER by Rodrigo Garcia where the actors are stripped bare in front of a close up camera, but in RAGE they chose to follow preset tracks giving little more than prefab personae and that flatness is what kills the movie. Save for Dame Dench who is always superb; Dianne Weist's smile and voice as sweet as honey and Adriana Barraza who steals the movie as Anita de Los Angeles, the only believable and truly sympathetic character in the story. I was disappointed by Buscemi and Leguizamo who can do better acting (Buscemi is excellent as a grieving father in The Messenger) and by Izzard whose straight acting does not convince me - I love his cross dressing comedy routines and he should stick to them. Law is well hidden under wigs and make up and though I was reminded of him (his amazing eyes, beautifully enhanced by make up) mid movie I did not realize it was actually him. Still his Minx was just a caricature of a shallow diva who wants to grab and hold our attention, nothing more. The vivid color backgrounds made for interesting optical tricks when complementary colors clashed and glowed almost hurt the eye, but were insufficient to keep one interested. It's a pity that Potter's failed to go beyond color and costumes for I loved Orlando, her aesthetic was formidable in that movie and Virginia Woolf's story well adapted to her eye for rich costume imagery.
marinostattaris The blue screens combine well with the characters lipstick colours , the performances at some points are really good but halfway through this movie i just couldn't wait for it to finish. I actually watched it on fast forward. For one thing you cant have a movie on people just talking in front of the camera. Its just hard to believe that this were done by a teenager. And those questions that coming straight from a fashion experts mouth were really hard to buy. Coming from the same person that made "Orlando" i was deeply disappointed since i was expecting much more. The aesthetic result is quite good but nothing more than that. This is one of my favourite worst movies ever. This is a film experiment but it just doenst work. Leave it for film schools or even museums but i wouldn't recommend this as entertainment
benjiworkshard I greatly enjoyed this film and have no idea why all of the IMDb reviewers seemed so bitterly scorned by this production. I found so much of this movie to be funny, sad, or at least entertaining. I thought the writing felt honest and sharp, and i found the acting to be superb, because IT FELT LIKE I WAS WATCHING REAL HUMAN BEINGS. Everyone else who commented seemed to have a problem with the performances but i thought they felt authentic. I think we could probably all agree that some people working in the fashion industry might on occasion behave in a way that is a little over dramatic. So when the characters in this film are portrayed behaving in an overly dramatic way, as many of them are, it makes complete sense to me. I thought this was a really unique (I'm saying this because I haven't seen any other movie shot with only actors sitting infront of blue screens) way to tell a story and I was really glad I picked it up. A fellow reviewer complained that Rage was plot-less, but it felt as ambiguous as something a teenager might put together but still had cohesive elements strong enough to leave you, or at least me, with a sense of what transpired off camera, which I believe was the aim of the director. I mean, so it is rather beyond the scope of possibility that some teenage black kid got to interview all of these people, repeatedly, and did so while they were not trying to be interviewed. But I think the statement that, "Rage shows how ugly and downright wrong it is to allow the production, fiancé and distribution of 'anything goes' cinema," is a horrible and self indulgent criticism of a artistic work you didn't like. There are a lot of things down right wrong in this world; creative expression typically isn't one of them. And also that isn't how you spell finance.