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It is a performances centric movie

hyped garbage

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

One can describe the core of 'Wild Side' in just two single words: sex + action. It is a receipt that always works.Consquently this film lacks any depth. It just shows a bunch of hyper-people, picturing characters that some among us should like to identify with. If you don't, 'Wild Side' urges you to use the speed-up button on your DVD-playing machine.Positive: this film provides some coherent story, and is able to keep your attention all the way down. Although still far under his James Bond-level, male lead Christopher Walken's credible performance lifts 'Wild Side' from its depths.

Donald Cammell's opus, Wild Side, is a tornado, a hurricane. Wild Side is the essence of emotion in film. Cammell's film compels you; it over comes you with passion, both with fury and sexuality. When all hope in film is lost, when you feel that nothing interesting is being made, a movie like Wild Side comes along and redefines all your ideas of genre, acting and film Alex is a bank executive who, after some troubles with money, becomes a high-price call girl. She falls into a sexual triangle with a big money investor, his wife and an undercover FBI agent. Bruno, the investor, is played by Christopher Walken, who was basically born to act in Cammell's films. In one of his most intense performances, Walken is an electrifying current of visceral energy. He is so engaging on screen I actually felt relieved when he wasn't around. The acting in the film is brilliant, which I attribute largely to Donald Cammells directing, but none of it comes close to the performance given by Walken.The film is filled with flowing steady cam shots, muted flashbacks and colored dissolves that work so perfectly you are suddenly sucked into a David Lynch style world without the disorientation or confusion. What Cammell's does in the film is hard to put into words because no other director can do it the same. The film feels dirty, it feels sick and your left with a hangover of sexual tension that will burrow in your brain for days.An interesting side story to the film, after Cammell showed his film to the executives they were horrified. They re-cut the film (from 111 to 96) and released their cut version. After Cammell saw the cut he committed suicide in front of his wife. His wife said the bullet from his gun was not fatal at first and he asked his wife to bring a mirror so he could watch himself die. Cammell sounds about as intense as they come and we love him for it. Fortunately a Directors Cut was released a few years later and it's outstanding. Wild Side was the last of four films that he made.

Legend goes that after the studio took from his hands Wild Side to recut in something resembling a commercial picture, Donald Cammell shot himself in the head, survived for 45 minutes, and asked his wife (co-screenwriter in this and White of the Eye China Kong) for a mirror to watch his last moments. I say legend because there's the same scene in his previous film White of the Eye, and Hollywood loves to print the legends of its heroes and antiheroes. Whether or not it's true, Donald Cammell killed himself over his art and that should say something. As with every man who takes his own life, there was violence in his soul and as a true artist (not just a technician) naturally there is violence in his art.People may like this simply because it's outrageous, because the human behavior is demented, like a crazy man in the street will always attract a crowd. There's a 15 minute scene where Christopher Walken threatens to rape Steve Bauer at gunpoint and it's amazing to see something as gleefully audacious captured on film. But there's more to the film for me than outrage, or even emotional and moral devastation. There's a camera that disorients and distorts our gaze, editing that cuts across time and space and thoughts, and a glimpse at a world that is alive and vivid. I love how Cammell photographs his electric night, it reminds me of what Wong Kar Wai was doing at around the same time, or the drenched neonoirs of Takashi Ishii, and it prefigures Michael Mann's journeys into the nights of Los Angeles in Collateral and Miami Vice. The nightsky is humming with deep blues, the lights blur and bleed, and walls are painted in vibrant reds or sickly greens.Like White of the Eye before it, Wild Side threatens to make no sense yet it does, there's a plot and a resolution, but none of it is very important (I'm still undecided that Cammell thinks that). It's a strange film made stranger yet by the fact that it doesn't purport hidden insights to be unlocked. Sometimes it flails and convulses in a monstrous almost-Zulawskian way but there's little meaning behind that flailing, it's the flailing itself that matters, the violent anarchy of emotion and expression. Christopher Walken's unhinged overacting is a prophecy of Nic Cage to come and must be seen to be believed. The film itself is not so much a prophecy, but rather the ramblings of a crazed mind that yearns and aches. See it if you've stepped out of the box.

Anne Heche, Christopher Walken, Joan Chen, and Steven Bauer have never been better in this quirky, daring, amusing, and erotic thriller. Try to catch it on pay cable, where it's regularly aired. Apparently, the director's cut is even better.