This fun, well-made documentary exposes some of the methods the popular media use to cash in on the public's obsession with celebrity. Featuring soundbites from Samuel L Jackson, Clint Eastwood, Keira Knightley and PR guru Max Clifford, director Chris Atkins reveals how the public are fed an unattainable and glamorous lifestyle and culture.
The Guardian Review
Writer and Director Chris Atkins presents his spot on expose of the modern obsession with celebrity…Brilliant animation combines with an unsettling voice over to make you feel queasily capable from the off. In the same way the romans were when they popped into the coliseum for a quick Romans v Christians match. Tabloids, agents and PR's are filmed in the wild engaging in sickening mutual grooming. And Max Clifford is seen boasting about his work as a smoke screen operator for the stars. It’s superb. It should be shown in schools.
Times Review - 4 Stars!!!
Not even Max Clifford could stop this polemical documentary coming out in cinemas back in October. It had exposed his secrets. Starsuckers shows celebrity as a spell, presenting five lessons to demonstrate how it’s used as a means of control. Atkins excels in combining Jackass-style stunts, setting up newspapers with stories about Amy Winehouse’s hair catching fire that they print without checking, with heavyweight academics explaining how we are hard-wired to copy powerful people because, in the past, it would have improved our chances of survival. His case culminates in the prediction that we’re heading towards a Lithuanian-style government, in which the second largest party comprises TV producers and singers elected just because they were famous. This is addictive and entertaining viewing.
Full review
Full review
Sunday Telegraph - 4 STARS!!!
Mike McCahill 1st November
British Documentarist Chris Atkins' Starsuckers is an urgent deconstruction of the fame game, and sets out the tools used to get us hooked on celebrity... this is celebrity as the well groomed face of consumerism, and there's something thrilling in the way the film exposes what might once have seemed attractive as ugly in it's methods and motives. Like Michael Moore, Atkins is wholly at ease with pop culture, makes shrewd use of archive footage, and has a fondness for the revealing stunt.... There's unbridled rage at the hijacking of the Make Poverty History campaign by the self promoting stars of Live8. Smuggled into cinemas by unknown distributors, rich with hidden camera footage and boldly naming names, Starsuckers looks like the work of revolutionaries: a precision skewering of a global epidemic of narcissism.
Scotsman review - 4 STARS!!!
Alistair Harkness 1st November
BY TURNS amusing and disturbing, director Chris Atkins's follow-up to his Blair-baiting documentary, Taking Liberties, exposes the insidious relationship between the media, celebrity, politics and the public to show how easy it is to distract us from what's really going on in the world. Providing compelling evidence that shows how the unscrupulous British tabloids are the puppetmasters in this particular theatre of cruelty and contempt, the stunts Atkins perpetrates to prove his points about our frivolous, celeb-slanted culture should confirm your worst fears about the depths to which we've sunk (the secret footage of PR guru Max Clifford talking about some of the venal things he regularly does to protect some of his more deviant A-list clients is especially sickening).
Read full review
BY TURNS amusing and disturbing, director Chris Atkins's follow-up to his Blair-baiting documentary, Taking Liberties, exposes the insidious relationship between the media, celebrity, politics and the public to show how easy it is to distract us from what's really going on in the world. Providing compelling evidence that shows how the unscrupulous British tabloids are the puppetmasters in this particular theatre of cruelty and contempt, the stunts Atkins perpetrates to prove his points about our frivolous, celeb-slanted culture should confirm your worst fears about the depths to which we've sunk (the secret footage of PR guru Max Clifford talking about some of the venal things he regularly does to protect some of his more deviant A-list clients is especially sickening).
Read full review
Observer
Phillip French 1st November
Probably not since Triumph of the Will have so many dislikable, real-life figures been brought together in one film and it all goes to support my old axiom: business tends to corrupt, showbusiness corrupts absolutely.
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Probably not since Triumph of the Will have so many dislikable, real-life figures been brought together in one film and it all goes to support my old axiom: business tends to corrupt, showbusiness corrupts absolutely.
Read full review
Sunday Times - 4 STARS!!!
Cosmo Landesman 30th October
Written and directed by Chris Atkins (Taking Liberties), Starsuckers is a polemical documentary about the machinery of celebrity. Atkins’s thesis is simple: large media corporations exploit the public’s fascination with celebrity and the young’s longing for fame by a series of devious tricks that his film sets out to expose with a few tricks of its own.
Read full review
Written and directed by Chris Atkins (Taking Liberties), Starsuckers is a polemical documentary about the machinery of celebrity. Atkins’s thesis is simple: large media corporations exploit the public’s fascination with celebrity and the young’s longing for fame by a series of devious tricks that his film sets out to expose with a few tricks of its own.
Read full review
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