I'll admit to groaning when I learned that Getting Out of Rhode Island was about a small-town filmmaker with naked ambition--flashbacks to film school and to the people there who had no frame of reference outside their own pipe dreams of cinematic immortality ensued. Imagine my surprise to discover a film that critiques such petty fantasizing instead of merely embodying it, pulling it off via a well-edited and brilliantly-mixed synthesis of growled insults and soul-dulling white noise. This is the rare sub-indie feature possessed of its own style and point-of-view--and if Getting Out of Rhode Island is a little ragged at times, it's so ambitious and well-observed that it nevertheless puts a narcissistic satire like The Player to shame.
[http://filmfreakcentral.net/iviews/iviews5.htm#island]
"Getting Out of Rhode Island" is wildly reckless on a variety of levels: its foundation is a fully improvised screenplay (which, more often than not in films, never clicks), its production style is Dogme-inspired cinematography (which can induce queasiness in even the strongest stomach), and its story is spread across an ensemble that is so large it makes Robert Altman's films seem minimalist in comparison. Even more troubling is the plot, which is normally the anathema of anyone reviewing indie cinema: a movie about making a movie!
But in a small miracle, all of these sure-fire problems blend into something very different and devastating. With "Getting Out of Rhode Island," de Rezendes has fashioned a visceral symphony of faces, thoughts, sounds and gestures that swirl with the fury of a typhoon. Anyone who approaches "Getting Out of Rhode Island" expecting connect-the-dots storytelling will be in for a rude and often violent surprise, as the film repeatedly challenges the mind while aiming a hard sock to the solar-plexus.
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