Camera Movie Review

Richard Martini thrives on making movies out of nothing. His 1996 Cannes Man was shot on the run at the Cannes Film Festival, using whatever talent he could weasel into the production.

Amazingly, Martini seems to be able to do this with some regularity. His 2000 film Camera -- an official Dogme 95 movie -- ostensibly follows the life of a digital video camera from its first purchase (or theft, rather), to various bedrooms, skydives, weddings, suicides, breakups, and more. The camera is sold, resold, stolen repeatedly, and eventually ends up in Martini's hands.

Martini's been in charge the whole time, of course, You can tell because of the way he swindles every celebrity he encounters into appearing in his movie -- as far as I know he started shooting after finishing his last movie in '96 and didn't stop until he had enough footage to turn into a motion picture. He somehow captures Angie Everhart skydiving and gets a possibly drunk Jack Nicholson waxing philophical about toothpaste. Plenty of characters in the film berate the director to turn off the camera -- is it part of Martini's "script" (he is credited as the writer) or are they being serious? Thinking about these questions entertains you, but only for so long -- ultimately Camera reveals itself as a vanity project and a storyless one at that, the kind of video I used to shoot on Christmas day in order to kill time.