The Automatik

I have said many times lately that the music industry has gone so far in its crassness and sheer vulgarity, that the only logical next step is for bands to start killing each other and/or audience members on stage. The creators of 15 Minutes seem to have reached a similar conclusion. However, I found the movie somewhat disappointing and I wish that it had focused less on instant celebrity and more on the masses who devour the most grotesque side of humanity as entertainment. For all of its preaching on the pitfalls of fame, the big-name cast of 15 Minutes (Robert DeNiro, Charlize Theron, Kelsey Grammer) was distracting. It actually weakened the message of the movie, one which seemed to shout that the famous always get their come-uppance.

The filmmakers did well in casting unknowns in the role of the two Eastern European criminals. The most impressive was Karel Roden, particularly menacing as cold-hearted murderer Emil Slovak. His friend Oleg videotapes Emil’s killings with meticulous yet detached tenacity. Soulless talk show host Robert Hawkins (Grammer), who airs the tapes on national television, is almost cartoonish in his depravity, but he doesn’t seem all that different from trash tv hosts like Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones with their pending lawsuits from real-life murders. By showing so many explicitly violent scenes however, the movie seems to be undermining its own point. It is most effective in its more subtle moments. Ed Burns is good as nice-guy-firefighter Jordy Warsaw who is not exempt from being starry-eyed over hot shot police detective Eddie Flemming (DeNiro). His aborted love affair with a murder witness is sweet but too short. Flemming’s romance with television reporter Nicolette Karas (Melinda Kanakaredes) is another effective, but underdeveloped plot point.

Rather than being grave and graphic, I think 15 Minutes would have worked better if it had been either more detached from its subject or more intimately involved with its characters. Better still if the filmmakers had gone the other route and done the whole think as a deadly black comedy, the kind mastered by Bret Easton Ellis in novels like American Psycho and Glamorama. No matter how heavy-handed or clumsy 15 Minutes may be, its point is well-taken. How far will we push the envelope of celebrity culture until it pushes back too hard?