Director: Atom Egoyan
Year Released: 1987
Rating: 2.5
Egoyan goes for the Big Statement about life in the modern age, with people staring distractedly at televisions playing nonsense and where actions can be recorded for posterity; meanwhile, one particularly dysfunctional family has the Son sleeping with the Step-Mom, Dad recording sex with Step-Mom and Grandmother's locked up in an old age home. The third act is especially problematic, wherein a phone sex worker takes in the Son's Grandmother, and Dad finds that Son's been meddling with his video collection and becomes hysterical, running frantically around a hotel - it's all more or less a part of Egoyan's thesis but not exactly tied to actual psychology or believable. Icy cold to the extreme and close to being petrified (like a philosopher speaking in monotone during a seminar on the complexity of love) Egoyan's about the theory and not the heart - if I didn't know any better, I'd say he has the same worldview as Cronenberg (and in particular, Videodrome).
