This Needs to Stop

“Cashback” is a 2006 film by Sean Ellis that recently made its way to Netflix Canada. Intrigued by the poster (potentially NSFW), I gave it a shot.

Ben breaks up with his girlfriend, realizes he can pause time, and looks at a bunch of exposed boobies.

For a film that’s impenetrably crass, Cashback manages to be the least titillating film involving excessive quantities of exposed breasts that I have ever seen.

Have you ever looked at an artist’s work, full of paintings of nude women, and wondered, “Did they just get into art because they wanted to see naked girls?” You may, as I have, immediately attempted to ignore this feeling and imagined that it’s only a way for you to excuse your own lack of creativity (not to mention meager charm). Cashback instead demands that the viewer embrace this feeling as the only way to appreciate the film at all.

This is a drama/comedy so lacking in wit or intelligence that one wonders if there could possibly be any other motive behind it beyond the opportunity to pay beautiful women to expose their breasts. The audience’s only purpose is to bear witness to this awkward transaction.

In the scene that first demonstrates Ben’s ability to pause time and disrobe (and draw) his paused victims, a supermarket aisle is shown containing four stunning women in various levels of exposure. These women are the type that you only see rarely, and sport the sort of carefully selected beauty typically reserved for actors in the pornographic arts. And yet here they are, and we are expected to believe that, not only did they all end up at the same supermarket on the same night, but in the same aisle at that.

The sheer unbelievability of it all defies even what one might be used to seeing in porn. Who are these people, and are we really expected to believe that they’re real?

In almost every scene containing women, the person in charge of casting made every effort to ensure that only improbably pretty women made it into frame, but made no similar attempt for the men. It is so noticeable that it becomes everything the film is about.

But it gets worse than that. Ben, the main character, also narrates flashbacks to his young childhood where he is obsessed with girls of perhaps 10 or 12 years old. Once again, we’re left to wonder who was in charge of finding “beautiful” children, meant to be sexualized and studied.

And let us consider for just a moment that Ben can pause time. And, essentially, he only uses this incredible power to draw naked strangers. Surely the filmmakers could make some attempt to justify this, full of revisionist symbolism, about how this demonstrates how we all waste the time we’re given and the privileges we have, etc. etc. Or even that Ben cannot, in fact, pause time, but it is just his rampant imagination and insomnia that grant him the ability to think he has. But that explanation would fall as flat as every other component of this movie.

Of course, brooding voiceover fills most scenes, ostensibly to deliver the insights that the film does not contain (about anything, let alone life or love).

In the end, this is a film in which nothing interesting happens among a cast of boring characters, where the least absurd element is Ben’s ability to manipulate the fabric of time.

Never Let Me Go is my favourite film of 2010, hands down. – Review by Joel

Never Let Me Go is a film about love. I’d say it’s about death, but that would suggest that love isn’t always, in some way, about death and loss:

The context in which love is experienced is the knowledge that it will one day be lost.

I won’t say too much more about the themes or plot because knowing too much will only prepare you for the end. And it would be an insult to the characters in some way, I think, to have steeled yourself against what you will experience in the last act.

You will cry. Or at least want to. As the credits rolled no one in the theater made a motion to move, as if the slightest disturbance might shatter everyone’s constitution at once.

This is no Notebook. This is a plausible narrative that makes you sad because of how the world actually works, or could.

You will wonder, however briefly, whether it’s ever really worth loving anyone.

Never Let Me Go was easily missed during its theatrical run (who is the audience for this sort of tragedy?), but you should absolutely pick it up when it is released on DVD on February 1st.

So why should you watch it? Because it is an amazingly well written, directed, and acted film about a series of thoughts and feelings that have never been expressed this well before.

Starring:
Carey Mulligan (also fantastic in An Education)
Andrew Garfield (from The Social Network, and soon to be Spider-man)
Keira Knightley (the “big name” in the film, but you really do forget it’s her)