Review 851: Primetime

I'm just going to go ahead and read the description from IMDb.

In 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.

Stephen Miller, what did you think of Primetime?

Yeah, I feel kind of mixed about Primetime, some of which we can get into.

We maybe should do a brief spoiler section for the movie.

Basically, the good...

I think Robert Pattinson is fantastic in this movie.

I think he is awesome.

I always...

Not always.

I usually like Robert Pattinson because he finds like a weird angle into his characters.

He never just does things the most obvious way.

And here he is imitating a real guy, Chris Hansen, and he is imitating the persona that he was on television.

But he's getting into it in this like weird, slippery kind of way.

fame obsessed, deranged way that feels like a creation of his own.

You know, like we've seen Chris Hansen in documentaries.

He does not quite act the way the Robert Pattinson version acts.

And he's like totally captivating whenever he's on screen, which is most of the time.

Like, I think the craft of this movie is great, especially Robert Pattinson's performance.

The movie is also doing an interesting thing that again is similar to Inc., where it is borrowing the aesthetics of the thing it is about, right? In ink, it was about tabloid culture and it was made with the aesthetics of tabloid culture, like low attention span, quick cuts, bright colors, flash, flash, flash, you know.

This movie is very much trying to be leering and grainy and make you feel like a voyeur for watching the things that are going on.

And it nails the aesthetics.

This movie has this propulsive energy that I think works very well.

It's a very well-made movie.

It's very good at the things it's trying to do.