15 Minutes - The Culture of Excuses

Dec

21

15 Minutes - The Culture of Excuses

≡ Category: Action, Highly Recommended, Movie Reviews By Country, Satire, United States |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Satire/Action
Director: John Herzfeld
Year: 1991

Rating:

TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE

15 Minutes, which takes it’s name from Andy Warhol’s dictum that “…everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” is a no-holds-barred satire on celebrity culture and the tell-all television talk show mentality. That might seem like shooting fish in a barrel, but writer/director John Herzfeld raises the stakes by asking a question. What would happen if there was a collision between the moral bankruptcy of celebrity culture and the poisonous pure capitalism of the Eastern Bloc countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union? As if that weren’t enough, Herzfeld piles on a satire of bootstrap independent filmmaking, and wraps the whole thing up in a savage thriller package.

Emil Slovak (Karel Roden) and Oleg Razgul (Oleg Taktarov) come to America to collect a financial debt, but Oleg has the filmmaking bug. He steals a high-end video camera and starts filming everything, calling himself Frank Capra. When Emil kills someone in a fit of rage and burns down the victim’s flat to cover his tracks, he attracts the attention of Fire Marshal Jordy Warsaw (Edward Burns) and Detective Eddie Flemming (Robert De Niro).

But don’t get the idea that 15 Minutes is a police procedural. The murders and arsons that follow are there to present the violence done to society’s moral standards in a literal form.

Writer/director Herzfeld does an excellent job of maintaining each conceptual thread of narrative, interwoven by the slick editing of Steven Cohen. The visuals pop in that candy-coated Hollywood way, but cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier does more than just provide pretty pictures. The use of different video modes on the cinema verite shot supposedly by the Oleg character are used to mirror the psychological state of the characters. In another scene, one character’s pain is implied by shooting the action in a metal subway bathroom mirror, which distorts the image. In yet another surprising visual, water sluices through a hole in the floor made by a pickaxe in a backlit whirlpool at an arson crime scene.

Director Herzfeld does a fine job with the action, too. 15 Minutes might seem graphically violent, but it really isn’t. You never see a knife touching skin, for example, but you get that impression from competent action choreography, in your face sound design, and clever camera placement.

Another element in the success of 15 Minutes is the casting by Mindy Marin. As the Eastern European thugs, Oleg Taktarov and especially Karel Roden are major finds. Using Kelsey Grammer as the fatuous anchor of a Hard Copy clone was on point. But cleverest of all is the casting of the leads. Robert DeNiro was on a long downward slide at this point in his career, and director John Herzfeld clearly knew it. DeNiro’s performance is shallow, but that’s okay because his character is a bit of a phony, always “on,” always playing to the limelight. Herzfield uses DeNiro’s fading star wattage in witty and surprising ways. Casting Edward Burns is another smart move. Burns is not a leading man, but Herzfeld uses this to his advantage.

If there’s a flaw to 15 Minutes, it’s the dialog, which has that tinny, TV feel to it, which is not surprising because the bulk of Herzfeld’s career was as a television writer.

But Herzfeld’s white hot, righteous anger burns through the dross of the dialog and unifies the various thematic strands in his screenplay, making 15 Minutes thoroughly absorbing, entertaining, and not a little bit infuriating.