Robsessed (2009)

(On DVD, January 2011) The adulation of teenage girls for young male heartthrobs is a gender-specific phenomenon I can’t quite understand, but I knew what I was getting into when I picked up this cheap biography of Twilight star Robert Pattinson:  Even at $0.99, I knew that I was getting ripped off, and the end result does not disappoint.  A mediocre collage of talking heads, terrible paparazzi pictures and breathless hagiography that sounds read from a tabloid profile, Robsessed is cheap celebexploitation filmmaking and it shows.  How cheap?  Well; no interviews with Patterson, scarcely any footage of him (and none whatsoever from Twilight), little original material… basically, nothing requiring real money.  Nothing else really compensates for the lack of resources: There’s no wit to the cinematography, barely any depth to the interviews (all with distant third-party sources, pundits or “superfans”) and little insight to the pop-magazine-grade writing.  The producers are as innumerate as they are exploitative: The case says the film lasts “110 minutes”, whereas it really lasts 70 (or “1:10 hours”)… not that anyone was really asking for 30 more minutes of this stuff.  The happiest surprise to the film is in seeing respected fantasy author/critic Kim Newman talk cogently about vampires and point out that Patterson-the-actor is far less important to his fans as Patterson-as-Edward-Cullen, perhaps the closest the film comes to self-awareness.  Otherwise, it goes without saying that Robsessed is practically worthless: anyone with a high-speed internet connection could come up with a better multimedia profile of Patterson by simply clicking away on search results.  Still, as audio-visual wallpaper while doing something more worthwhile (like washing dishes, or rearranging a stamp collection), Robsessed is perfect low-attention chattering.  Plus imagine the ironic hipster credentials once you start showing off the box at parties, either now or in twenty years!