derising

I can only guess at the age and experience of those who, in other reviews of this movie, have dubbed it "the best movie ever". Viewers be forewarned: it isn't, not by a long-shot.

What it is: a comic-genre film - and like most film versions of dark comics, it is enslaved to rain and shadows, candlelight and eyeliner aesthetics, pseudo-intellectualism and faux-poetic moments. It suffers greatly from an unbelievable premise (murderous super bad guys run wild in the streets, doing their will) and mind-numbingly dense dialog.

I watched this movie just recently for the first time - and had to check all the background material on it because I just couldn't believe it was actually shot in the nineties - it is an eighties movie in every way shape and form, hearkening back to the days of the early Cure, Bauhaus, Souxsie and the Banshees, etc.

The acting is flat all around (Brandon Lee spends the entire movie with his chin on his chest, glaring menacingly from underneath his furrowed brow) and what little there is of character is two-dimensional - a comic book view of the world, juvenile and meaningless, trying desperately to be "deep".

If Brandon Lee hadn't died during production, this film would be regarded as nothing more than an amusing goth fantasy - and not the goth cult classic it seems to have become. I guess I understand some people's emotional attachment to it, but back when I was being goth and under the influence of nihilist aesthetics, my friends and I read Baudelaire, Sartre and Dostoevsky. To us, a film like this would be as intellectually an emotionally fulfilling as the popcorn you might eat while watching it.

The "best movie ever"? Sorry. No.

There is literally nothing redeeming about this movie. The writing is bad, flat, unimaginative and obvious. The acting and directing are uninspired, witless, unintentionally comic and it has the feel of having been shot all in one take. The portrayal of T. Capote himself is reduced to a comic mimicking of his gestures and his voice, as if there was nothing else to the man. This film is an insult to viewers who have seen the infinitely more subtle and artistically ambitious "Capote". "Infamous" wallows in its sets, its stars, present only for the sake of their being stars. The dialogs are flat, the transitions blunt and lowbrow, the story is thrown into the viewers face. "Capote" was a film about an artist working on his masterpiece - "In cold Blood", a milestone of American Literature. It shows how deeply the writing of the book affected Capote himself, how it tore him apart and ultimately destroyed him. "Infamous" is a trashy piece of Hollywood fluff about a flamboyant socialite who happens to be writing something.