Disconnect (2013)
Directed by Henry Alex Rubin
A hard-working lawyer, attached to his cell phone, can't find the time to communicate with his family. An estranged couple uses the internet as a means to escape from their lifeless marriage. A widowed ex-cop struggles to raise a mischievous son who cyber-bullies a classmate. An ambitious journalist sees a career-making story in a teen that performs on an adult-only site. They are strangers, neighbors and colleagues and their stories collide as ordinary people struggling to connect in today's wired world.
3 connections found
View:
3 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Disconnect to
Due in large part to its smaller ensemble cast and a resistance to littering the landscape with coincidences, Disconnect lacks the artificial feel that at times hurt Paul Haggis' Oscar winning Crash , a film to which this will be compared.
Elsewhere is an amateur vigilante plot lifted straight from 2004’s Crash.
A handful of stories and characters interwoven together to collectively make a necessary point about the continuing need for physical connection, the film reminds in certain ways of 2005's ensemble race-relations drama " Crash ."
No, it doesn’t all work — and it sometimes feels like a much smarter take on Paul Haggis’ Crash (2005) — but enough of it works to make it a worthwhile film.
In 2005, Miranda July delightfully but unnervingly explored the hazards of chatroom anonymity in “Me and You and Everyone We Know,” while Paul Haggis struck a nerve with “Crash,” his sprawling study of urban social detachment and distrust in modern America.
Telling the story of a group of interlinked people who all find their lives upended by the internet, it hopes to be a “Traffic” for the Web 2.0 age, but unfortunately, finds its cues in more ways than one in another similar film, Paul Haggis’ “Crash.”
For all of its silliness — its malevolent force lurks behind the default Skype avatar and does things like fill out all the fields in a form with “I GOT HER I GOT HER I GOT HER” — Unfriended is one of the first movies to take on cyberbullying in the form of anything other than a well-intentioned PSA or as part of an overall ripped-from-the-headlines cautionary tale about internet use (like 2012’s Disconnect or last year’s Men, Women & Children).
Lack of interpersonal connection in the Internet and smartphone age has become an onscreen cliche (and the driving force behind this year's "Disconnect" with Jason Bateman), but writer-director Spike Jonze's "Her" is an original voice among the noise.