Rubber (2010) Reviews

• Why is this such a great film?

  georgemcgilvray2015-05-30

  No reason. Why do people hate this film? No reason. Why do people love this film? No reason. Why did they make this film? No reason. Why did we all watch this film? No reason. Why do we want to watch this film again? No reason. Why haven't they make a sequel? No reason. Why would we watch that sequel if it was made? No reason. Why is the tyre called Robert? Watch until the very end of the film to find out...

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• Deep Tread Indeed in this Particular Tire

  jd7myers-12011-03-06

  It was a rainy Sunday and I went looking for cheese, but found a savory meal. Frankly, I was hoping to kill off a few brain cells in the mindless fun of watching a movie about a killer tire. Expecting something along the lines of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, I wanted to drown myself in delicious B-movie goodness. This coming from the man that cannot change the channel when my remote calls up images of Joan Collins being eaten by giant ants in Empire of the Ants. Yet soon I realized that this film was so much more than horror spoof or a silly gimmick film. The movie opens with a desert road randomly strewn with simple wooden parsonage chairs facing in all directions. Next a car appears and begins deliberately swerving into the chairs, breaking each one of them, until it comes to a halt. At that point, a sheriff emerges (from out of the trunk?!) and knocks on the driver door where he is handed a full glass of water. The sheriff breaks the fourth wall and begins addressing the audience by speaking of the "no reason" principle of famous movies like E.T., Love Story and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This narration immediately reminded me of the criminologist from Rocky Horror Picture Show, and I suddenly did not know what to expect from this movie. I honestly think the less said about this film the better. Suffice it to say that Rubber is one part B-movie schlock, one part David Lynch, and one part Hitchcock. (Did I just actually go there?) On my first watching of the movie, I appreciated its style. The camera angles, the homage to Psycho, the riveting and unnerving sound track were somehow quite effective in producing suspense. Quite remarkable when the serial tire is a generic tire! Juxtaposed against this atmospheric cinematography was a very healthy dose of absurdity and dark humor. This makes for an extremely interesting viewing experience, where the audience switches abruptly from anticipation to laughter to abject confusion. The sheriff tells us that there is "no reason" for this film. What a deceit! Because there is a reason for virtually everything – from the opening scene of the destruction of chairs, to the irony of a Nascar race, to the well placed remake of the song "Just Don't Want to be Lonely" to (yes!) the turkey. Irony abounds even as our in character heroine proclaims that she cannot read the lines of dialog because they are garbage. The second time I watched this movie, I focused on its true theme. I realized with delight that the movie is about movies and their audiences. Pay very close attention to every scene with the bystanders on the road and you will realize that the killer tire story is not the actual plot at all. Also, on second viewing, you can revel in the brilliant personification of the killer tire (Robert). A tire that learns, sleeps, recreates, dreams, and even has flashbacks to his previous inanimate incarnation on an actual car. Observe the film structure and use of the reflecting glass and incineration scene as key catalysts. You will be amazed at all you missed when first watching this movie. Astonishingly, this became my favorite movie of 2011 so far. Lovers of film should not miss this.

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• Rollin' Rollin' Rollin

  evanston_dad2011-09-02

  "Rubber" may be many things, but one thing it probably isn't is something like anything you've seen before. Whether that's good or bad will have to be decided by the individual viewer. What to make of a movie that opens with a man addressing the camera directly with a soliloquy about the unifying principle of life and movies being that everything happens for no reason, and then sitting down an audience in the middle of the desert to watch the movie within the movie that we're watching before poisoning them all to death? What to make of a movie about a tire that comes to life and uses its telekinetic powers to make people's heads explode? Is this movie a cautionary environmental tale, a sort of revenge-of-the-trash horror film? Is it a deconstruction of the slasher/splatter genre? There are enough references to classic movies (and the film's structure itself is already reflexive) to suggest that "Rubber" is a riff on or homage to something, but what that something is I'm not sure. "Rubber" isn't quite good enough to rise above film-stunt status; you can too often practically hear the people behind the camera congratulating each other on their own cleverness. But it is often quite funny, mostly thanks to Stephen Spinella, as the police officer who serves as both our guide and the chief of police on the trail of the killer tire, and Jack Plotnik, as the chief's geeky right-hand man. If it left me somewhat baffled, it also left me thinking about it for a long time afterward, and even now I think back on certain moments in the film with a chuckle. Grade: B+

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• A horror film about technique and style

  Da-Ant2011-01-21

  "The film you are about to see is an homage to 'no reason', that most powerful element of style." This is the manifesto that opens Rubber, delivered directly to the audience in a breaking of the fourth wall that is somewhat like taking a pound of dynamite to a pane of glass. Rubber is a "horror" film about a black rubber car tyre that kills people by making their heads explode. With telepathy. And when I say "horror" I do of course mean "side-splittingly funny, pitch black, absurdist comedy." The opening scenes of Rubber are a deliberate assault on the separation between the audience and the film. Normally the opening sequence of a film seeks to bring you into the world of the film; the audience is encouraged to step through the silver screen and forget about the real world for the duration of the story. Rubber perverts these expectations. The film comes crashing through the screen, into the world of the audience. It reminds us at every turn that we are watching a film, and indeed that the very act of our watching is what makes the film happen. There are actually two plot lines at work in Rubber. The first concerns a murderous inanimate object , an innocent but spirited young woman on the run from some troubled element of her past, and the county sheriff on the trail of the vulcanised psychopath. This is ostensibly the core thread of the movie, but we soon see that this action only serves as a literal distraction for the audience, who exist in the film, embodied as actual participants, though ones who remain clearly and distinctly removed from the action, watching events at a distance through field glasses. This distraction covers the real story, that of the sheriff, who is in fact the antagonist of the story, attempting to kill off the audience (through the manoeuvrings of his toady, The Accountant) so that the film can end and he can go home. The movie within the movie begins with a sequence that could have come straight from Leone's scrapbook. A man lies face down in a desert. Slowly, he rises, and shakes himself off. He staggers along, and falls. He rises again, and continues to stagger on, through the endless desert. Except that the "man" in question is a rubber tyre (Roger, according to the credits). This is the brilliance of Rubber; that it can appropriate the cinematic language that we are so familiar with, and apply it to situations that cannot be anything but utterly absurd. Other scenes lift from a variety of sources, including a sequence that takes place in what is clearly the Bates hotel from the original Psycho. For a film that claims to be dedicated to meaninglessness, it is ironic that not a single frame is without a clear purpose. Every shot serves to either ensconce us in the impossible world of a rubber tyre who murders people, or tear us forcibly out of it, as we return repeatedly to the plight of the poor audience, stranded in the desert with no food, and prey to depredations of a murderous cast member, or possibly character. It's never clear whether the antagonist is an actor who wants to stop playing his role, or a character in a story who wants the story itself to end; the latter appeals, if only for its deeply apocalyptic subtext. When the film ends, where does the character go?). Even the choice of the supposed villain must have taken a great deal of thought. It's such an elegant choice; an object capable of locomotion, but without moving parts to cutely animate. Something that has an element of menace (after all, a tyre, attached to a vehicle, can do a lot of damage), but is also innately ridiculous. An object that can fulfill the emotive needs of the film yet has remarkably little capacity to emote. Consider that all this thing can do is roll forward, roll backwards, fall over, stand up, and vibrate its sides. That's a sum total of five things you can ask your star to do for you on screen. As a film-making challenge alone, that's a spectacular feat to undertake. I could go on for days about the tiniest of "seemingly irrelevant but incredibly well thought out" details that litter the film. That Rubber invites such complex readings is a testament to the subtlety that underlies the simple brilliance of the film itself. Whatever you may think about the subtext and meaning of this supposedly meaningless film, it doesn't really matter if Rubber "means" anything or not, because whatever else it may be, the film is absolutely hilarious. We are talking literal "tears of laughter" funny here. Quentin Dupieux provides us with excellent cinematography, full of lingering establishing shots and vivid, often deliberately off-frame close-ups, and the cast all turn in magnificent performances, especially Jack Plotnick, who demonstrates the ability to carry a scene from laugh out loud funny to deeply uncomfortable in a matter of seconds. The script is tightly written, and the humour builds on itself in layers, rising from the initial "WTF?" moments of nervous laughter to the farcical crescendo of the closing scenes, where every element of the film collides in a scene that, if nothing else, will mean that I'll never look at tricycles the same way again. I could continue to pick at Rubber, pulling out detail after detail, examining each one in turn to find new facets, new thoughts and revelations. None of that really matters though; what you need to know is that Rubber is the strangest, funniest, and most dazzlingly original film you will see this year, and considering that Scott Pilgrim vs The World just came out, that's one hell of an achievement. Originally from http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=9032

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• I expected it to be more fun.

  Matt_Layden2011-01-29

  A movie about a killer tire sounds like the most ridiculous concept next to someone creating a human centipede. Yet, these two concepts did in fact make it onto film and both of them failed to meet their absurdly high expectations. The film is a homage to 'no reason', as we are told at the beginning and when a film is created for no reason, you know you are in trouble. The film opens with a character talking directly to the viewer by breaking the fourth wall. He states the the film has no purpose, so he is actually preparing you for the most useless film you'll ever see. Unless of course you've been one of the special few who have seen The Room. As interesting as this may be, it's also a drawback. Why would someone think that to interest an audience, you need to tell them from the beginning that everything has no purpose what so ever. It makes the audience feel like they are wasting their time. Rubber wasted my time. I don't know why the prospect of a killer tire that makes your head explode sounded good to me, but it did. I thought I was in for a ridiculously cheesy good time. I got something else entirely. A boring, redundant film that has no fun factor. The audience is actually a part of the film, represented by a few people who actually watch the events unfold and make comments. Again, an interesting concept that never materializes. I give the film credit for looking great, it never felt like a cheap film to me. They get creative when shooting scenes with the tire, they make the killer tire really seem to have a mind of it's own. They actually give it a name in the credits, Robert. All this creativity is wasted though on a script that bores the hell out of the viewer. They were on a mission to make a film with no purpose, good job they achieved it.

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