Available on DVD, Blu-Ray and EST 11th April 2011
PRE-ORDER @AMAZON
Somewhere in the online morass, Rubber has been described as Roger Corman meets David Lynch. Is such a bizarre marriage possible? It certainly is if you accept the idea that, in his 50s and 60s golden era, Corman was producing classic Americana, whereas Lynch lifts Americana like a child lifts a rock, to see what nasty things are lurking beneath.
Likewise, Rubber peers at the very nature of movies and our ability to accept, for the purposes of an easy 90 minutes of entertainment, some pretty wayward propositions. In Rubber, this question is explicit. Indeed, a character breaks the fourth wall almost immediately to question the audience on their habit of letting movies wash over their eyes without first switching their brains on. The audience within the movie itself, watching the action from a hillside with binoculars and offering a running commentary like a Greek chorus, keep this idea of cinema as artifice at the forefront of the viewers mind throughout.
So much mainstream cinema these days is chewing gum, designed to keep the eyes moving without offering any real satisfaction. We are asked to accept the ludicrious, superhuman carnage of action movies, the weird linear never-changing narratives of romantic comedies – in which the gay best friend always spots a narcisistically exact copy of himself across the wedding reception dance floor before the titles roll – and the sometimes brain melting illogic of most horror movies without a second thought, so well adjusted are we to the familiar plot devices and story arcs of Hollywood.
Rubber examines all this by offering the world a character whose very existence forces the viewer to make a leap into the surreal and thus question all films in the same way. When your protagonist is an animated rubber tyre with an unexplained grudge against the world and the psychic ability to literally blow minds, it becomes impossible to lose yourself in the film in the same way you might with a more ‘realistic’ drama. That’s not to say that this isn’t a movie that engages, because it is, it just engages you a totally different way and turns corners when your not expecting it to.
The car crash mix of surreal cinema and exploitation style works, creating a film that defies easy classification.
