'Creative Control' Review
The near future, according to Benjamin Dickinson's satirical Creative Control, will bring specs way cooler than Google Glass. The glasses of tomorrow are called Augmenta – simple-looking lenses on transparent frames – and the box art promises that the spectacles will cover your reality with a "layer of magic." With the glasses, you can record everything you see, type on the air and scan passers-by like a terminator robot. And with just a bit of tech savvy, you can even make a virtual sex doll of your best friend's girl.
That's what Brooklynite marketing exec David (played by the filmmaker) does pretty much as soon as he gets his hands on the technology -- and it's a great shame. One would hope that a self-described "creative" living in the Eden of hipsterdom would develop an amazing, super-cute Neko Atsume-like reality, or maybe a useful app that reads body language. Instead, David uses this uber-powerful technology to creepily masturbate over his crush, Sophie (Alexia Rasmuseen), the girlfriend of his serial cheater photographer pal, Wim (Dan Gill).
We watch as David secretly pursues Sophie, who at first indulges his romantic interests, and as he tries to flex his creative muscle in marketing Augmenta. For the latter task, David gets Reggie Watts (who plays himself as a genius philosopher-comedian) to create art with the glasses, so as to show the masses that Augmenta ain't some toy. Meanwhile, David's own tinkering with the technology, along with his alcoholism and incessant pill popping, set the stage for his fooling himself (via drunken nights with the virtual sex doll) into thinking Sophie actually loves him. All the while, David's yoga instructor girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner), grows ever more distant as she struggles to deal with superficial city life and her boyfriend's substance abuse issues.
This is all captured in impressive black-and-white by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra. The only bits of color in the film alight from Augmenta's sleek projections, especially renderings of Sophie's virtual body in David's fantasies. Thematically, the stylization speaks to the power of desire and how it, at least here, can distort one's reality. The film's soundtrack is also heavy with classical music, particularly Vivaldi, suggesting the look and feel of an elegant car commercial. It makes sense given that Dickinson spends a lot of time poking fun at the glossy shallowness of future-Brooklyn.
The film is also funny. There's a hilarious hangover-of-the-future gag, and Dickinson (who co-wrote the film) is good with dry one-liners. On the other hand, Watts' zany bits don't amount to anything more than amusing asides, which is a definite bummer. I wanted to like his parts, but they just didn't come together.
Likewise, Creative Control, as a whole, doesn't quite congeal. The falling-in-love-with-an-augmented-reality-character plot, although it's pushed along by the film's humor and visual style, is too improbable to swallow outright. Moreover, the characters are so terrible to each other that it becomes difficult to care about them to the degree where the film's themes would pack any emotional punch. Even though Creative Control wraps up nicely – with a final shot is straight-up impressive – you're just ready to be done with the glasses of the future.
Creative Control is playing at the Lagoon Cinema.
