Timecode
Timecode
R | 28 April 2000 (USA)
Timecode Trailers

A production company begins casting for its next feature, and an up-and-coming actress named Rose tries to manipulate her filmmaker boyfriend, Alex, into giving her a screen test. Alex's wife, Emma, knows about the affair and is considering divorce, while Rose's girlfriend secretly spies on her and attempts to sabotage the relationship. The four storylines in the film were each shot in one take and are shown simultaneously, each taking up a quarter of the screen.

Reviews
ChikPapa Very disappointed :(
Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.
KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.
Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
mdarmocida OMG this was an absolutely awful movie! The movie puts you in the wrong mood from the very beginning when they start with the upper right camera but keep rolling credits and playing intro music in the other three frames (making it nearly impossible to understand the upper right frame). Then they gradually bring in the other frames one at a time. Once all four frames are on-board you're thinking the movie will pick up and the plot will take shape - never happens. If you're going to do something this daring you should at least have a good story with which to do it. However, this is without a doubt the worst movie I've ever seen (and I've seen some pretty bad movies). Even if the same story was a single screen movie it would also be the worst movie I've ever seen - again the story sucked. The story goes nowhere and there's never a payoff. It's like the producers put this movie together simply for the sake of syncing four frames in a time-code without any concern for the movie being good; either that or they spent so much money on the technical challenge and the brand name actors that they didn't pay for a writer and had a retarded monkey write the script for them.
Jackson Booth-Millard I have always wondered if there was a film where it is basically one long take with no written lines, no cuts and no editing at all, and this experimental film drama from director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) is exactly what I was looking for, in terms of freshness. The film consists of four frames simultaneously showing four different stories in real time, and once or twice meeting each other, and to help you know which of the four frames to look at there is a good use of sound cuts and bridges, and a little bit of music (by Figgis). The action all seems to lead to or from a (TV/film) studio where many members of cast and crew are going/come from, and the actors of course improvise every single line, and when they are not talking you concentrate on the frame that has sound. Starring Terminator 2's Xander Berkeley as Evan Wantz, Pirates of the Caribbean's Stellan Skarsgård as Alex Green, Golden Brooks as Onyx Richardson, Saffron Burrows as Emma, Super Mario Bros' Richard Edson as Lester Moore, Salma Hayek as Rose, Holly Hunter as Renee Fishbine, Executive; Danny Huston (son of John, and half-brother of Angelica) as Randy, Kyle MacLachlan as Bunny Drysdale, George of the Jungle's Leslie Mann as Cherine, Jurassic Park III's Alessandro Nivola as Joey Z, Ana's Assistant; Basic Instinct's Jeanne Tripplehorn as Lauren Hathaway and Dracula: Dead and Loving It's Steven Weber as Darren Fetzer. Apparently 15 takes of continuous filming were made over two weeks, the actors changed their clothes in each one so that they could not cheat in editing, and the actors were responsible for their own costume, hair and make-up. It may strain our eyes a little, and it may take you a few seconds to realise the frame you are supposed to be focusing at a particular time, but a very original and refreshing way of film-making. Very good!
oj-9 Students of media should definitely take a look at Timecode.Is it great cinema according to conventional production values? Heck no. If you want a good story sumptuously told, go watch Gone with the Wind or something like that.Is it something new? Yes! It is a very interesting experiment that points to the future of movie-making / visual storytelling / video games with plots. I'm rating it 10 for this originality.There's a complex story -- many IMDb commentators have said there are four different stories, but I disagree -- that is performed and shot improvisationally. (The other big one-take real-time film, Russian Ark (2002), was not improvised, but carefully scripted.) There are four synchronized hand-held DV cameras following the characters around. We viewers get to see what all four camera operators saw, synchronized down to the frame, on a four-way split screen. We get to see all the nasty color-balance and focus glitches on the cameras as they move from indoors to out, and close shots to wide.We get to hear what the sound editor chose for us in post. However, the DVD has an extra feature letting the viewer choose which camera's sound to listen to.It points to the future of visual storytelling because it conceives of the film's story as unfolding continuously and unpredictably in a very large space in hard real time. The cameras roam around the space observing the story. They are very much like the over-the-shoulder viewpoint feature available in many first-person style video games. Both the camera shots and the actors' movements and speeches are improvised.It is all a bit self-referential, in the way that The Player (1992) was. Near the end of the movie the pretentious character called Ana does a pitch basically for this same movie. (Note that The Player itself begins with a very long take, rigorously scripted.) The film is named for the technology that permits the four-camera synchronization. In 50 years the name will seem as quaint as a film named "Sprocket-hole" might seem now.Timecode is worth watching for the amazing way it conceives of and presents its story. I know there will be more releases (with tighter stories about something other than the movie business) like this coming out, but I believe they will be packaged as video games rather than as cinema.
Lea Cave This movie is a pretentious attempt at being "revolutionary" or whatever the hell you want to call it. Sure this was a potentially interesting idea (real time and quartered screen), but it wasn't used in a very powerful way. Being different doesn't make something good, and this movie is a prime example of that. This idea could have actually made a point or followed a story that wasn't clichéd and boring instead of some over-dramatic Hollywood crap. This movie was a confusing and bland waste of time. I never felt the need to find out how anything ended up or felt any attachment or interest in any of the characters. It was lacking in any kind of substance whatsoever, and I hope that the majority of people who consider viewing this movie spare themselves and change their minds.