There are many defining moments in the making of any blog. The original concept. Deciding on a name. Creating the layout. The first post. Getting people to actually read it. Then there are moments like these. Jenzubean and I stumbled across a movie titled ‘Rubber’. Rubber is the story of a sentient killer tyre with telekinetic powers named Robert.
*Two minutes and twenty-four seconds later Hatman is still sitting patiently waiting.*
Bad movie gold right? It starts off with a dirt road littered with chairs. A large black car appears and very carefully navigates the road, taking great care to knock over every chair. Upon coming to a stop a character pops out of the boot and proceeds to deliver a speech about “No reason” by referencing many famous films such as E.T., The Pianist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre to name a few.
We are introduced to the audience who are watching the film from within the film with the use of binoculars. We see Robert come to life, discovering his penchant for crushing things such as scorpions, cans and plastic bottles. However he is thwarted when trying to crush a glass beer bottle. He focuses his energy and shatters the bottle using the power of his ‘mind’. He carries on exploring this ability first by blowing up a very realistic looking bunny (Jenzubean was not impressed I might add) and eventually a crow finally graduating to blowing up the head of a man who ran him over on the road after he spotted a girl driving by who seems to become the object of Robert’s obsession. This leads to a killing spree by Robert culminating in an entire town of headless corpses. During the course of the movie the ‘audience’ get poisoned and the police chief announces that the movie is over only to realise that one member of the ‘audience’ has not been poisoned so the ‘movie’ needs to continue.
By this point in the post you might be wondering why this is posted under the ‘Not-So-Ok Corral’ instead of the regular blog and you may have noticed a fluffy bunny shaped hole where Jenzubean would normally be. The reason for this is that as we watched the movie both of us looked at each other and said ‘I’m not sure if this is really blog material.’ The reason we said this is that the movie is not bad. It is by no means a triumph of film-making either but it seems to be more of a pseudo-philosophical, artsy movie of sorts. It truly is an homage to ‘no reason’ as most of what happens in the movie seems to happen for no reason.
*Hatman picks up a glass of water and pours it on the floor instead of drinking it before continuing*
Suddenly Jenzubean and I were faced by something we never considered when we started, namely finding a movie like rubber which while it seems to offer so much potential as a bad movie but instead is a thought provoking gem or as in the case of ‘Rubber’, a head scratching oddity that we cannot classify as bad. ‘What do we do now?’ We debated quite a bit over whether or not we should put ‘Rubber’ on this blog, and finally decided against it but I felt it was worth mentioning this experience because we were aware of the pitfalls of a club and blog like this such as watching seriously bad movies but we never considered finding a movie that is too good for the blog or too weird for this blog. If we should come across a movie like ‘Rubber’ again we may make a page for such movies but for now we will merely scratch our heads in uncertain confusion. Was it a bad movie? We don’t know. Did we miss the point? Possibly. Was this a seminal piece of film making that will influence films for years to come? Probably not. We will however never forget the experience of following the adventure of Robert the tyre.
*Hatman watches the readers as monkeys in business suits ride into the background on unicycles before suddenly exploding into a shower of brightly coloured confetti and streamers. Hatman looks over his shoulder and then back to the readers.*
Why did that happen? No reason.
H
October 21, 2016 at 10:17 am
Whew. There it goes. A reaction to a blog piece about the phenomenon called ‘Rubber’. I wouldn’t call this a movie, let me explain:
I watched this movie on New Years Eve, together with my partner and her brother. We were in a joking mood, and sought after a bad movie, which we could watch and laugh about. Somehow, I can’t recall, we stumbled upon Rubber. We decided to give it a try.
I am not going to explain the plot, I think this post already covers it enough. Let me assure you this, after watching this, it doesn’t feel like those ~90 minutes are merely a waste of time. During those ~90 minutes, I felt like I was a patient at a mental institution, as sterotyped by ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’, completed with straightjacks, white rooms and soft walls.
People often wonder how sick any person should be, in order to come up with a concept like ‘Saw’. Well, I wonder how sick the script writer of this movie should have been. And how he ever got the funds to film this piece of garbage, well, that is way beyond me.
In addition to that, this post I’ve written on Jenzubeans Facebook wall, pretty much sums up the experience of watching Rubber:
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