CQ (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

The premise of CQ:

The year is 1969, and a French auteur is making an exploitation sci-fi film which combines New Left radicalism with New Freedom sexiness, tapping into all the faucets of the zeitgeist, like a hybrid between Blow-Up and Barbarella. (Barbarella's beautiful 6'4" angel, John Philip Law, also appears in CQ, with an extra 33 years worth of lines in his face.) Unfortunately, the putative French action film-within-a-film has no action. It doesn't have an ending either, so the producers fire the pretentious French director (Gerard Depardieu), who says he only wanted to "subvert the audience's expectations" about a nudie sci-fi action film. Eventually, lacking any alternatives, the producers give control of the picture to the inexperienced young Anerican editor (Jeremy Davies), who has no idea how to make a movie or even how to end the one he's handed. His concept of moviemaking is to film snippets of his own life in B&W with a hand-held camera - "personal filmmaking".

The scenes from the deliberately bad film-within-a-film can be very entertaining. Unfortunately, the bad sci-fi scenes always seemed to outstay their welcome. It was clearly a case where less would have been more. We see excerpts in which an evil Guevara-like revolutionary (Billy Zane - the only really funny thing in the movie) is using his base on the dark side of the moon to train men to overthrow world capitalism. The world corporations call upon the double top secret sexy agent Dragonfly to use her own unique methods to infiltrate the camp and defeat the anti-profitarians. Of course, it eventually turns out that Dragonfly has been deceived by the corporations, and that the revolutionaries are groovy and right on, brother.

Movie critic James Berardinelli summed up his case on CQ as follows: "Pretentious and self-indulgent - those two words come to mind when considering CQ, the feature debut of director Roman Coppola. For precisely that reason, a certain percentage of viewers are going to love this film. Personally, I found it to be a mess - a jumble of half-formed thoughts and ideas that amount to very little. The movie has highlights, but it is never consistently engrossing. I could have walked out on CQ at any time and not given a second thought to what happened to the characters - a sure sign that a narrative film is not accomplishing what it is expected to do."

Most critics disagreed, perhaps swayed more by some of the fine "highlights" and less concerned with a need for a cohesive whole.

I liked it much more than Mr. Berardinelli seemed to, but I agreed with his point, in the sense that I felt the film had some great moments, but was thrown off by bad pacing, artistic pretensions, and some weak characterizations. (I am again exempting Billy Zane, who did exactly what the filmmaker hoped to accomplish with that character. If only the other actors "got it" as well as Zane). I guess I was sort of satisfied with the moments of pleasure the film gave me, while James Berardinelli focused in more on what they should have done and failed to do with the rich premise.

The irony of the film is that the producers of this movie should have done exactly what the producers did with the faux movie in the story. They should have told the director that a heartfelt narrative film should be heartfelt with a coherent narrative, and should also have characters the audience can relate to.

The concept was good, and there were times when it seemed to reach its potential, but the overall execution was lifeless and often self-indulgent, as if there were no need to entertain a prospective audience, and no need to worry about commercial success. Desson Howe of the Washington Post had an excellent point: "It's the kind of movie every kid in film school wanted to make but didn't have the father to produce."

The DVD is filled with extra features, one entire side of the DVD is nothing but bonus material, and the disc includes two versions of the film (widescreen and full-screen). See the notes to the left.