6/10/2010

DVD Review: Director (2008)



Now Available to Own




Although she was taught to use a camera at the age of four by her devoted grandfather, something tells me he wouldn’t exactly be proud of Adriana’s career path towards life as a real film director.

Fired from exotically shaking it – mini-DV camera in tow – at a Caracas, Venezuelan gentleman’s club and told to leave the country for good, somehow Adriana (Claudia Davila) winds up looking no worse for ware in Miami where she answers an internet ad seeking a movie director for a privately produced “mockumentary” about a jewel heist.

And while she’s at least wise enough to wonder if -- similar to her last job -- Adriana will once again be working in adult entertainment, she doesn’t think to ask just why the automatic weapons being prepped in the Escalade look so real and how on Earth they’ve acquired a jewelry store to go along with an independent production.

Midway through the crime and long after she sleeps with her brand new employer (Stephane Kay), Adriana is suddenly given a ticket to the clue bus when a patron yells “help, no please,” wherein she realizes that what she’s been filming isn’t the stuff of Hollywood’s latest blockbuster but a robbery in progress.

As an illegal immigrant who fears she can’t run to the police with her unbelievably ludicrous story without being deported back to Venezuela, Adriana makes the next in a series of unwise decisions to stick it out with what the police quickly dub “the movie gang."

Vowing to make her next footage of an art warehouse heist far more professional than her poorly critiqued debut, she yells out direction while the burglary is underway, editing it on a laptop and podcasting her mini-masterpieces to the world in cyberspace.

Helmer Aleks Rosenberg’s Director works on the basest visceral babes-cars-and-guns Michael Bay level since it’s shot like a rap video with actors who look like they’ve been all hired as sexy background artists for an MTV event and finely chopped hip-hop style with T&A galore.

And as such, the remarkably dubious Director demands you lower your IQ to Gump levels in order to appreciate it in the slightest but if you’re content to roll with the ridiculousness that’s at least professionally polished, you may enjoy at least partaking in an eye-roll or two of testosterone driven trashy events that need to be seen to be believed.


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FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.