Although I'm aware that there has been an erosion of civil liberties, increased surveillance, illegal detainment of suspects, and an overall disrespect for privacy, I don't yet feel I live in an Orwellian universe. But yet you see the recent glut of films which are so preoccupied with spying that it borders on the paranoid. Similarly, just two weeks ago I waited in line to buy tickets for the vastly popular International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., which has been selling out for five years.
The abundance of such films began in February, with the carefully detailed biopic, BREACH, with the excellent Chris Cooper, playing an FBI agent selling secrets to Russians. Then there was the Academy Award Winning LIVES OF OTHERS, with its subject the East German spying operation, the Stasi. It crops up in the Dogma inspired Scottish film, RED ROAD, in which the heroine spends her days watching images filmed by surveillance cameras on banks of video monitors. Surveillance is also present in two thrillers set in the future, CHILDREN OF MEN and 28 WEEKS LATER.
A continuing theme in films that deal with spying is that one can't trust what one sees. That's true in Hitchcock thrillers like THE 39 STEPS and NORTH BY NORTHWEST, through Coppola's THE CONVERSATION to the films of today. It's also a recurring theme at the Spy Museum, where, upon entering, one assumes a fake identity as one goes through the more than two hours of exhibits and interactive games.
Now comes 'BUG' which is an exercise in paranoid behavior from Academy Award winning director William Friedkin, whose filmmaking career has been largely dormant for over 25 years, with the exception of the highly underrated TO LIVE AND DIE IN LA. Even the ad for BUG is an exercise in deception. Although it announces the film is from the director of THE EXORCIST, anyone expecting that kind of thriller will be strongly disappointed. Instead, they will find a claustrophobic, overly verbal drama (it was adapted from a stage play) with two of the most unpleasant, unsympathetic characters I've sat with for a long time. The play's three act structure is readily apparent, the characters give increasingly long paranoid rants, and, except for a 3-secnd shot after the characters make love, there aren't even any bugs. That's the point I guess, but while it's always nice to see Ashley Judd do her damsel-in-distress bit and, of course, see her in various stages of undress, sitting through this was close to unbearable. I've seen some hard to sit through film lately, like the beautifully acted DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT and STEPHANIE DALEY, which, by the way, had one of the tightest scripts I've seen lately, but these films, apart from being fresh and excellently directed, had characters one could feel for, and, a film we could admire for overall integrity and craft.
Not so with BUG. But, perhaps I too can't trust what I see, or perhaps my own judgment. For, lo and behold, critics actually liked BUG. In fact, the Boston Globe and Entertainment Weekly actually raved. They even found humor in the excess of the paranoid ramblings. At least audiences have not been giving the film strong word of mouth, and the Rotten Tomatoes website only gives it a 61, sort of a "D", But the discrepancy between the film I expect to see from reviews and advertising, and what I actually see has been increasing lately. It began with Miranda July's YOU AND ME AND EVERYONE WE KNOW, which I found derivative from performance art and self-consciously quirky, as was THE GRADUATE rip-off GARDEN STATE. The same was true of BROKEN FLOWERS. Even the virtues of last year's award winning BABEL eluded me. To me, it was a rehash of the same devices of the same director's AMORES PERROS and 28 GRAMS, devices which became familiar in TRAFFIC and SYRIANA.
Although I can sympathize with the characters in BUG whose hysteria urges us not to trust what we see, which for me it carries over to the advertising and the too easy reviewing that goes on. But perhaps Big Brother is watching me after all.
