Allan Hunter 30th October
National newspapers are approached with lurid but fictitious tales of stars who may have gone under the surgeon’s knife. Enormous sums are offered for the juicy details and it made my heart proud that the Daily Express was the only newspaper to point out that this was illegal and to send them packing. A sobering and thought-provoking film.
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Eye for film review - 4 STARS
One of the best, and most satisfyingly contradictory, weapons available to the sceptic is the argument that demolishes itself along with the view that it aims to undermine. Back in ancient times, hard-line sceptics would use the metaphor of the ladder that must be pushed away once it has been climbed, or of the purgative remedy that flushes itself away along with the diseased contents of a patient's stomach, to describe a peculiar kind of deconstructive approach that lives (and dies) in a parasitic relationship with the position to which it is opposed.
This is, more or less, the methodology adopted by Chris Atkins in Starsuckers, his follow-up to the Blair-busting documentary Taking Liberties (2007). For while Starsuckers is concerned with the powers of the media to manipulate, misrepresent and manufacture reality to their own end, to make this case it self-consciously appropriates the very strategies of the media that it is criticising, so that accepting Atkins' arguments in their proper spirit should also involve radically questioning them. In short, it is a film that makes sceptics of us all, shaking us from brainwashed passivity into a state of awareness that makes resistance possible.
Film Four Review - 4 STARS!
Celebrity culture hasn't just invaded the lives of 'Heat'-stricken soap stars flopping between bar and rehab with the paparazzi on their tails. According to Chris Atkins' mischievous and eloquently angry investigation into the causes and cost of our obsession with fame, it's colonised our consciousness, remoulded the media and sold us a series of impossible dreams. Atkins' thesis: this new, non news-based form of 'news' operates as a sly form of social control, and in five fascinating lessons he deconstructs the celebrity-industrial complex to reveal who's doing to what to who, and why.
Review - Netribution
| 23 OCTOBER 2009
Narrated by a jovial-sounding voice that uses "we" and is supposedly the representation of the media, Starsuckers takes us through the ways in which celeb culture takes hold of the public, including hooking children on it, and creating fake news. An interesting choice for a Friday morning press screening. As Atkins put it on his Twitter, "have been advised against going to the Starsuckers Press screening friday to avoid actual bodily harm," but judging from the atmosphere in the room afterwards, he may well have found some sympathisers. It's not hard to see why, judging by the quality of the film.
Associated Press
New movie takes aim at celebrity journalism
"I didn't realize quite how much of our news is public relations, or lies, or on the basis of criminal acts," said the film's 33-year-old director, Chris Atkins.
"Starsuckers," which premieres Wednesday at the London Film Festival, takes aim at Britain's fiercely competitive tabloid press, but its real target is much broader. Atkins believes that society's obsession with fame — gaining it and being near it — has distorted everything from the way news is reported to our children's aspirations.
The film opens with the statement that "everybody is naturally and powerfully attracted to fame," and tries to show how big companies in entertainment, media and PR use that desire to create a world full of insatiable consumers.
Through a series of stunts reminiscent of Michael Moore's movie polemics, Atkins aims to show how dignity, truth and even the law go out the window in the pursuit of celebrity.
Review - The Arts Desk
By Matt Wolf - Friday 23rd October
That fame, and the pursuit thereof, is hurtful to the soul is the unexceptional if, I suppose, ever-invaluable message of Starsuckers, the Chris Atkins documentary given genuine ballast by the details it selects with which to argue its case. Though overlong for what it is, and often veering off on tangents worthy of separate movies in themselves, the film makes you laugh and wince in equal measure. Anonymity has rarely seemed a healthier place to be.
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