Crime Fiction (2007) User Reviews

Comment when I watch it

[rgbrydge · 5/10 · 24 February 2008]

Crime Fiction doesn't look that bad actually - it's a weird combination of comedy and crime movie with dirty low budget set at $160 000 which hardly allowed producers to hire professional actors, but it's quite popular for some reason. Two channel AC3 audio is included within this 1 CD rip.

Crime Fiction was written by current Comparative Literature Ph.D. student Jonathan Ullyot and is described as a "perverted crime drama" by the filmmakers. The plot of Crime Fiction centers on James Cooper, a young literary failure, who is forced to relocate to Chicago from New York City after his first novel flops. "After an argument with his out-of-state girlfriend ends in murder, James's luck takes a turn. He buries her body in a cornfield, writes a best-selling novel that documents his crime and becomes an instant literary celebrity,"

Good narrative work

[sltfilho · 6/10 · 13 April 2009]

This movie was written by a skillful writer - later on I knew the actor is the writer and also a PhD literature student, and the most funny and contra-ironic thing is that the script is good, but the movie itself... well. Elliot might have to deal with the good and the bad luck that haunts the main character (the writer within and outside the plot).

You can tell the writer has some knowledge of structuralism, post-structuralism, Tzvetan Todorov's theories and this kind of text. It is a fun exercise on how a narrative is swollen by a wider one, and by a wider one and so on. The character development is a bit poor, however: James becomes the stereotypical successful writer, the older writer is a cliché himself all the time, and not in the most funny way.

There are some details that add up on the story. Billy: YES. That one was way cool, and the retro ambiance and music partially work, although they seem misplaced among a stir of aesthetic experimentations that absolutely don't blend: short cuts, then camera-on-the-shoulder, then flashes, then yellow light in old hotels... better stick to one language only. Actually, there are a couple of scenes where the cinematography was great (the hotel couch with telephone ringing). But it was spoiled by this absurd long-haired blond hotel bell boy. Whaat?! Although some dialogs were a bit cheesy ("the world is a box of sh**!!!!"), they might have worked on a better direction. The directing really wasn't good: the low budget makes it difficult, certainly. The scene were the girl pretends to be locked out of her room was so mechanically spoken and lacking of sensuality that was a turn-off, for example.

All in all, I'd recommend it as an exercise on narratives, even if it does not develop the potential that enclosing narratives may have (Italo Calvino, 1001 Nights, Jorge Luis Borges). But it's fun if you can imagine how the script was written and what the film s trying to say besides its flaws. I might think this theme might even be somewhat postmodern cinema.