Time Code

Bomb Rating: 

Frankly, this is the kind of idea high school teachers whack their students on the head with a ruler for. It's stupid. It's annoying.

Mike ("Leaving Las Vegas") Figgis doesn't make movies -- he films ideas. In his last film, he had this vague notion about a modern Adam and Eve parable, so he made audiences around the world suffer through "The Loss of Sexual Innocence." Before that he mixed casual sex and interracial relationships with the insufferable "One Night Stand." Before that, he made one of the most overrated pieces of crap in history, "Leaving Las Vegas."

Now Figgis takes four digital cameras out and tries this notion of splitting the screen up into four sections and telling the same story from four different views. Frankly, this is the kind of idea high school teachers whack their students on the head with a ruler for. It's stupid. It's annoying.

What's even worse is that Figgis doesn't have the slightest idea how to tell a story. The true measure of whether or not this film is any good is whether or not the audience would be willing to sit through it were it shot with but one camera. The answer is an unequivocal: "Are you out of your mind?" It's about a movie producer (Stellan Skarsgard) and the breakup of his marriage to Saffron Burrows. The reason for this is that he's screwing Salma Hayek. Salma is involved in a relationship with Jeanne Tripplehorn.

Anyway, describing this is pointless. One quarter of the screen is taken up with Tripplehorn sitting in her car for ninety minutes. The only remotely interesting moment is when a female director pitches an idea to Stellan's film company. It's basically a slightly altered version of "Time Code." Skarsgard laughs and says, "That's the most pretentious thing I've ever heard." I thought this was mildly and interestingly self-reflexive until the end, when Skarsgard gets what's coming to him, which is what anybody who dares think Figgis "pretentious" should get. Unfortunately, this would leave him alone on the Earth.

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