She is pointedly an ac tor, a term she uses on the phone when talking to potential sources with information on Chubbuck. Kate Plays Christine features Kate Lyn Sheil, a prolific performer who's appeared in House of Cards, Sun Don't Shine, and a slew of other indies. His last film, Actress, was about Brandy Burre, who retired to have a family after her big break starring in The Wire but who can't help but perform for the camera, even while playing herself. It also has a provocative pre-emptive argument against it in the razor-edged Kate Plays Christine, from documentarian Robert Greene. Despite Hall's gameness and the film's contrast of depression with Florida sun, Christine is excruciating, by design and in its very concept. She's pinned like a butterfly by her own unhappiness and by the event that has already defined her, though she doesn't know it yet. Details of Chubbuck's life - from the pressure to find "juicier" ratings-friendly stories, to the illness that gives her limited time in which to have children - emerge as possible and reductive explanations for the end she's ricocheting toward rather than as windows into her character. In Christine, Chubbuck is tragic without being sympathetic, because the movie never tries to get inside her. Smith-Cameron) with whom she shares a home. She yearns for connection but compulsively pushes people away when they reach out to her, whether it's her co-worker Jean (Maria Dizzia), her crush George (Michael C. Hall plays her as a self-conscious, ungainly figure who's uncomfortable in her own skin and who hides behind work. This new movie, written by Craig Shilowich, is awash in the same formal dread, but Chubbuck is never in danger of hurting anyone but herself. They both have their provocative points, but together they add up to a fiery debate about our rubbernecking impulses and why we like to watch terrible things.Ĭhristine comes from director Antonio Campos, whose two previous films have both been aggressively chilly, exquisitely composed portraits of psychologically detached young men, one of which, the Ezra Miller drama Afterschool, also centered around female deaths caught on video. She's the uneasy talk of the Sundance Film Festival thanks to Christine, a scripted drama in which Rebecca Hall plays her, and the documentary Kate Plays Christine, which features actress Kate Lyn Sheil preparing for a similar role. But now, more than four decades later, Chubbuck has become the focus of two movies of her own. People often cite it as an inspiration for the 1976 film Network, though that's not true - Chubbuck and Howard Beale are joined by an eerie coincidence in timing. It was filmed, but the footage has never been released. It was an infamous event that seems more like the stuff of urban legend than reality. ![]() ![]() She killed herself on air in 1974, pulling out a gun and shooting herself in the head after announcing, "In keeping with Channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in 'blood and guts,' and in living color, you are going to see another first: attempted suicide." She did puppet shows for children at a hospital. She was a reporter at a Sarasota television station, where she handled community affairs news.
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