Gamer (Neveldine/Taylor, 2009)

After having seen Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (my first film from the duo) and garnered some interest in Neveldine/Taylor, seeing the Gamer Blu-Ray for $1.99 at a out-of-business Blockbuster I couldn't resist. With Ghost Rider, a pure franchise vehicle not written by the duo, the filmmaker were clearly restricted. Ghost Rider had its moments of anarchy and insanity yet it was nothing on the level of Gamer. A completely no-holds-barred ridiculous accumulation of half-second shots and insane CGI. And no matter how tongue-in-cheek it is, it also is an outrageous satire of the Internet/Virtual/Gaming worlds. The opening of the film completely sets up the pace: a series of shots that no person could follow, at least not without getting down to frame-by-frame inspection. The shots are so chaotic and edited so quickly that your brain assumes the series of events actually makes sense yet this most likely isn't the case. I'm sure there is no continuity and no sense of cause-and-effect editing. Some of the editing/pace/anti-compositions are almost Mekas/Brakhage like.

From MUBI:

"There are a lot of people out there making "serious" movies that can't direct actors half as well as Neveldine and Taylor can, and people who try for "artful" that couldn't pull of the chiaroscuro of the mansion scene, which puts more or less everyone who's ever cited Jacques Tourneur as an influence to shame. That the scene transforms, over the course of a few minutes, into a song-and-dance number and then a fight (but of course the musical is the ancestor of the action movie), then a bit of sci-fi special effects and finally a confrontation on a basketball court, is just further proof of their impatient genius, which is really indistinguishable from idiocy."
- Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

The song-and-dance routine mentioned above is nothing short of amazing.