Tapping secret messages on imaginary keyboards
There are some movies that are bad, but nevertheless have some good ideas that could be used to better effect elsewhere. Especially in the case of movies that never escaped obscurity, it seems like a waste to let these good ideas languish in movies that nobody likes or will ever see.
In the 1997 Canadian movie Uncut, which I liked but hardly anybody saw, one character is obsessed with typing. He taps out messages everywhere - on beer bottles, on telephone keys, on table tops and on his boyfriend’s back.
The device is most interesting in a prison scene when the typist and another character are forbidden to talk. They tap their fingers on the table as if typing on an imaginary QWERTY keyboard; their secret messages appear on the screen as subtitles.
There’s never much at stake in “Uncut,” though. It’s too experimental for an audience to care what happens to anyone. But I could see two characters forced into silence tapping out secret messages to each other on imaginary keyboards being pretty dramatic in another context.
6 years ago