Grim... wrote:
8MM is really good.
8MM - Grim... mentioned this above and it's been on my Netflix watchlist forever, and unlike most other films in this category it didn't disappear before I finally got round to it.
(NOTE - I'm not going to spoiler this as the film is nearly twenty years old. (DARTH VADER IS LUKE'S DAD!) But if you haven't watched it yet and are going to, this will spoil it a bit, maybe worth noting Bamba.)
Let's state upfront that this is a Joel Schumacher film whose output is, of course, 'variable' if we're going to be kind about it. However, he gets a lifetime pass from me simply for Falling Down, if nothing else. The screenplay was written by the guy who wrote SE7VEN, to give you an idea of its joyousness quota..... (More on that below.)
Now, this film is not as good as Falling Down (but then again Falling Down is one of my all-time favourite films), however I think it's both misunderstood and underrated in equal measures. (Rotten Tomatoes has it at 22% which is ridiculously harsh.)
I do remember when this was originally released and there was a bit of a kerfuffle about it being really nasty and all about snuff films which everyone knows aren't real and 8MM is artistically repugnant etc blah blah, but the negative press stuck with me and I never watched it, despite liking both Nicolas Cage and Schumacher, albeit mostly because of Falling Down in the latter case.
8MM IS NOT ALL ABOUT SNUFF FILMS, even though it has one in it. A (single) snuff film is simply the vehicle through which the story is told and the message is delivered.
You know how Falling Down was misunderstood in some quarters and almost sold as 'MICHAEL DOUGLAS GOES ON A KILL CRAZY VIOLENT RAMPAGE FUCK YEAH!' (and vilified by many as such) despite the fact he only kills one person in the entire film when he's pushed well past breaking point, and the film as a whole is clearly a (way ahead of its time IMO) cogitation on the state of American society at the time and the frictions therein (the guy who wrote the screenplay has explicitly said this).
Well replace 'MICHAEL DOUGLAS GOES ON A KILL CRAZY VIOLENT RAMPAGE FUCK YEAH!' with 'DISGUSTING SLIMY SNUFF FILM EXPLOITATION NONSENSE!' and you'd be on the right track as to how wrong nearly everyone is about this film.
Roger Ebert is one of the few critics who called it right at the time, and having watched the film, and then read his review, I'd suggest you do the same if you're interested in it -
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/8mm-1999In simple terms, Nic Cage plays a private investigator to the powerful and wealthy who is well regarded for being discreet and effective, he's happily married and they've not long had a baby. He's called in by an elderly rich widow to investigate an 8MM film that was found in her husband's safe after his death. (They had to hire a professional safe cracker to get into the safe.) The film appears to show the sadistic murder of a teenage girl by a masked man, and the widow asks Nic Cage to establish whether or not it's real. (She is desperate to know it's not real, but she also asks him to find the truth.)
Nic Cage is initially quite blase about it (urban legend, just good special effects etc) but on watching the film has sufficient doubts to take on the case.
He is then slowly pulled into a world of depravity and evil the likes of which he had never imagined could exist, where with sufficient money anything can be purchased, and the most dreadful urges can be indulged and satisfied.
Having read up on the film a bit since watching it a couple of days ago, it seems that Schumacher and Andrew Kevin Walker (the chap who wrote this and SE7EN) had a falling out over it and Walker disowned it as he felt Schumacher made too many changes to his screenplay and toned it down too much, so fuck knows what it was like in its originally conceived form. (He was also very unhappy about Schumacher giving the film an almost happy ending, whereas his screenplay had more of a SE7VEN style headfuck, apparently.)
Overall I think the point of this film, the message, if you will, is that real evil exists and money in particular has almost infinite power to corrupt and twist human beings. Given when the film was written and made, the soaraway 90s when everyone was getting rich and money was god, it's a prescient message if we look at where we've ended up.
Despite all the above this is not a 'great film', succumbing to some lazy thriller conventions on more than one occasion, and whilst Cage is good in the lead role and never goes 'FULL CAGE' I'm not sure he's the best man for this particular job. The rest of the cast are excellent though, including Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini and Peter Stormare (the near-silent killer out of the film Fargo).
By modern standards the violence and gore aren't particularly hardcore, I get the feeling there was quite a bit of editing/snipping/reframing required to get it an 'R' as opposed to NC-17, to the point that the editing gets rather choppy in a couple of instances, but then again do we really need to see someone's head get caved in, 'Irreversible' style?
It's a dark, somewhat unremitting film, imperfectly made - but it's different and bold enough to be worth a watch IMO, it's hard to imagine a major studio cranking something like this out today.
By the end of the film, driven close to insanity by what he has uncovered, Cage collapses into his wife's arms and cries, 'My God, save me, save me.' These are the last words spoken by him in the film.
795/1000