The surRealist Review: Rubber
Editor’s note: I’m very happy to welcome Grymm from our affiliate site, Voodoo Walrus, to Geek Life! Grymm will be bringing us a new, semi-regular A&E feature called “The surRealist Review,” wherein he talks about movies he loved, hated, or just watched out of sheer boredom. I personally hope that you will all enjoy this new feature as much as I will! -Tiarra
So there’s this movie. Its available for streaming right now on Netflix. Its called ‘Rubber’ and technically it’s considered to be a foreign film. In it a rubber tire, not unlike one would find on a beaten old car, being used as a swing, or abandoned on the roadside comes to life and starts exploding things with psychic powers. All summaries of the film claim that the tire is named “Robert.”
I watched this movie yesterday morning. Now I feel the need to write about it.
SPOILERS AHEAD. If you have any interest in seeing this movie, do not read ahead. Go check it out. Don’t read any summaries, don’t Wikipedia it, just go watch it. Because it’s something that I think needs to be seen cold.
This movie… it falls all too easily into a middle ground category in my mind that’s basically in a kind of limbo. It’s a movie I watched, that held my interest, that I enjoyed, but once its all over and done with, I can’t say if it was a good movie. It’s very Indie, and meta, and random, and almost avant garde. And all those are terms that I actually hate because they’re all used far too much these days, and the people using them rarely even know what they’re supposed to mean. Myself included. But I will say this much: this was one of the very, very, VERY few times that a movie actually surprised me in the way it handled its plot. Right from the start, no less, by seemingly breaking the fourth wall wide fucking open and then immediately justifying it and twisting it all up.
Let’s put it this way: the entire movie is about a man who is seemingly clinically and aggressively insane; a man who gathers an audience of people to watch a sentient tire roll around and blow things up with its psychic power. Be those things bottles, cans, crows, rabbits, or human heads. It murders its way around an entire town and fawns over a woman who managed to elude its murderous rampage. While this happens, the insane man masquerades as a police sheriff, has almost the entire audience poisoned for no reason, and bewilders the officers under him by suggesting that they’re all in a movie and tries to prove it by having them shoot bloody bullet holes in him — and reasons that because they don’t hurt and he’s not dead, that means it’s all a movie. Then backpedals when he’s told that the entire audience isn’t dead and that the show must go on.
The movie makes a point of riffing itself in some parts and points out its celebration of things happening without justifiable reason. And that’s kinda what gets me. It almost seems too… full of itself maybe? Too self-congratulatory when you really look at it maybe? But at the same time, that’s just the afterthought. While watching it, I just couldn’t help but laugh my ass off at parts of it.
You wanna hear something that might get me lynched? I watched ‘Inception’ for the first time ever a couple weeks back. I ended up fast forwarding through some parts of it and even turned it off about halfway through because it just felt so long that I needed a break. Some parts just weren’t terribly interesting. Mainly the action scenes which dragged on and did nothing for the overall plot. Loved the concept, just not the execution so much. Then a few hours later I finished it. Yet ‘Rubber’ kept me interested the entire time because I had no idea where they were headed with the damn thing. It felt familiar and yet like something completely new.
Is a great movie? No. Is it a great little self-indulgent piece of psuedo revenge exploitation homage-ness? Yes. Yes it is. Also, there’s an actor in it by the name of Wings Hauser. Name sounds familiar. Not sure why though. All I know is that its a fucking awesome name.
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