The Under 700 Club: Look (2007)
On any given day, the average American is captured approximately 200 times.
The Under 700 Club: Reviews in under 700 words for movies with less than 700 logs on Letterboxd (log count as of this publication: 685)
Look is a movie I've wanted to see since it came out in 2007. Shot in the pioneering days of digital filmmaking and told entirely from the perspective of security cameras, I no doubt found the concept of voyeurism tantalizing at ten years old. This was an age when I learned about the world from movies (it was around this time I finally learned that Michael was spelled a-e-l and not e-a-l because I spent so much time studying Michael Keaton's Wikipedia page) and with hormones knocking down my door, the thought of seeing God-only-knows-what in the dressing room scenes was enough to make me want to see it.
In the 17 years since, I've become less interested in the off-chance of seeing some boobies and genuinely interested in the unique found-footage approach taken by writer/director Adam Rifkin. Who are we when we think nobody is really watching? In the privacy of your cubicle, the empty aisles of the midnight gas station run, with your pants down in the public restroom. Tapping into surveillance footage teaches us all the things we've wanted to know and all of the things we never should.
It took me a long time to see Look, not because it was particularly hard to find, but because I could never watch it the way that I wanted to. It was uploaded to YouTube years ago in a handful of 10-15 minute chunks, but even for a non-traditional film without an obvious linear narrative, that didn't seem to do it justice. I could've just bought the one or two copies always present on eBay, but I never wanted to spend $20 on a DVD to get it shipped from Australia.
When I saw that Scarecrow Video, the Seattle arts and culture institutional staple and home to an unbelievable physical media catalog, needed our help, I decided to finally pull the trigger on their Rent by Mail service. I could financially support a great cinematic cause while finally checking out some otherwise unseen longtime watchlist entries. Look was the first movie I searched for. Along with five other discs, including some forgotten live-action Disney and one of Ed Burns' 48 movies, it arrived last week.* It was finally time.
*The turnaround time is pretty tight, especially if you live far away (I'm on the other side of the country) and your mail service is slow and faulty like mine. I just got charged $28 in late fees.
And…yep…it was everything the elevator pitch made it out to be. If I had seen it at ten, it would've delivered mightily in the opening scene alone, which sees two attractive young women exploring off-the-rack options in a dressing room. And although Rifkin's film is about sex and secrets and privacy and paranoia, it's never that directly salacious again. After that, he throws you into an Altman/Anderson-inspired web of not-immediately-apparent interconnected stories. From the sexually harassing boss to the ATM robbery to the police dashcam to the pedophile who works in your very office, it's about the absolute worst of our society. It's occasionally a tad too dramatic and forced (I would imagine most of what's captured on surveillance footage is banal and boring), but it is a movie, after all. Security cameras capturing an apartment building's tenants silently buzzing in and out of the front door day after day does not a movie make.
A few years later, Rifkin adapted his idea into a television show called Look: The Series and that seems actually hard to find. Although I liked the film and I'm glad that I've finally seen it after all this time, few things are worth a 17-year wait. I can't say I'm going to go through even more trouble to try the show. And I definitely don't want any more late fees...
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