Film review for creative people: Entropy

Entropy

"The hardest thing to do in life is direct your own"

Currently showing on Sky Movies, I was intrigued to see this film following Sky's brief synopsis: "Romantic comedy set during U2's Popmart tour starring Stephen Dorff as an aspiring filmmaker documenting the tour whilst his personal life continues in turmoil".

First, let me let you understand that this programme synopsis is really quite poorly written. It is more the case that the lead role played by Stephen Dorff is a film director who gets fired and then reverts to music video direction, hence U2's bit. Bono and Larry Mullen Jnr do, however, have nice little cameos.

I found the film interesting as a commentary on the way creative people think outside the world of work. From personal experience (including looking back at parts of my own life) it seems that creative people are very much in control of their professional careers - even when they are dealing with the big evil: the client. What we see in Entropy is the lead character's life fall apart in days, as he tries to re-build it into a better life than it was when things were working just a few days previous. When reality sets in (via the medium of thinking he is seeing Bono and his pet cat talking sense to him) the character instantly tries to revert to the situation as it was to start with - giving up on his new dreams and trying to find a solution to his problems.

Thank goodness there was a bitter-sweet ending. 'Romantic Comedy' started ringing in my subconscious in the final twenty minutes of the film, warning of a typical Hollywood happy ending. Bitter as things did not work out as 'planned', but sweet as our character learns from his mistakes. To make it extra-cheesy, the creative character uses the whole story as a basis for his next film. Aaw, how nice.

Anyway, a lot of this stuff reflects on my own life including details like talking to my cat about women when drunk out of my skull, so I thought it was quite interesting. I won't go into emotions as that's not what this page is about, but I will say the film was engaging for me, as a creative person. You might think it's utter wank, and indeed, there were a lot of things about it that were.