Product Details

• Actors: Gretchen Mol, Paul Rudd, Rachel Weisz, Fred Weller
• Directors: Neil LaBute
• Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), English (DTS ES), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo)
• Subtitles: Spanish, French
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Universal Studios
• DVD Release Date: June 1, 2003
• Run Time: 96 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B00005JMBQ
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #53,385 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "The Shape of Things" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Controversial director Neil LaBute tweaks our culture's moral compass in his dark comedy The Shape of Things. Dorky museum guard Adam (indie heartthrob Paul Rudd, made to look as dweebish as possible) meets student Evelyn (Rachel Weisz) as she's preparing to deface a classical statue; instead of stopping her, he musters up the courage to ask her out. But soon he finds himself so completely in her thrall that he willingly succumbs to her every want--and she wants him to change his hair, his clothes, his face, even his friends (Frederick Weller and Gretchen Mol). In In the Company of Men, LaBute presented two men cruelly experimenting with a deaf woman's affections; The Shape of Things proposes that women can be just as monstrous. Though LaBute could stand to delve more deeply, this well-acted and cunningly written film will provoke conversation afterwards--and not many movies nowadays can do that. --Bret Fetzer

Product Description

No Description Available.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 6-JAN-2004
Media Type: DVD

See all Editorial Reviews

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The shape of things to come..., June 1, 2003

By 

Mark Twain "Sam" - See all my reviews

The Shape of Things is a four-person play translated to the big screen. Despite long, stretched out scenes and theatrical dialogue, it all works very well thanks to the energetic performances of the entire first-rate cast.

The movie--based on LaBute's play of the same name and starring the same four actors from the play--is a uniquely contemporary story of love, sex, and art set in a college town, which follows the steadily intensifying relationship between Evelyn (the wonderful Rachel Weisz) and Adam (the charming Paul Rudd). As Evelyn strengthens her hold on Adam, his emotional and physical evolution discomforts his friends Jenny (Gretchen Mol back in top form) and Philip (well-acted by Frederick Weller), with unexpected consequences for all. The quartet of college-age characters deal with the conflicting human desires for autonomy and connection, truth and love, and the notion that seduction is an art, making for a clever and mean-spirited satire on life and friendship.

The material is a sort of throwback to LaBute's first two movies, "In the Company of Men" and "Your Friends & Neighbors," after the bigger-budgeted, broader-canvassed "Nurse Betty" (in which he directed someone else's screenplay) and "Possession" (in which he adapted A.S. Byatt's novel). Like the first pair of films, LaBute once again homes in on an intimate group of men and women and the razor-edged sexual politics among them.

Some of the behavior in "The Shape of Things" is every bit as nasty as in the other films, once again reaching the point of getting a tad bit 'uncomfortable.'

Adam and Evelyn - the symbolic names are no accident - meet while he's working as a school museum guard and she literally crosses the line to spray-paint a sculpture that has had its genitalia covered. "You're cute. I don't like your hair," she tells him, and a romance is begun. Soon she's suggesting wardrobe and styling fixes and taking him to graphic performance-art happenings. She's of the art-equals-provocation-equals-truth school and butts heads with Philip, who's more of a regular-guy philistine.

LaBute doesn't pretend that his source material is anything other than a play. He keeps the action divided into 10 discrete scenes, with snippets of Elvis Costello's poisoned-romance songs (the musical equivalent of velvet-sheathed knives) serving as the links between them.

You must accept a certain theatricality to the material, as much of the action occurs off screen, and what's there hasn't been "opened up" so that conversations take place over multiple locations. The performances are scaled down from what they must have been in the theater, but LaBute's dialogue has its own particular rhythms that aren't entirely "realistic." And that's fine. The writing is smart, so you stick with the story on its own terms.

The movie ultimately lies on Weisz's shoulders, though, as she has to convince you that Adam would give in to Evelyn's manipulations, her obvious beauty notwithstanding. And she does, her performance balancing seduction and the sense that she's one eye twinkle away from being a whack job. Evelyn is the character who would be most at home in the take-no-prisoners world of LaBute's earlier works, yet you suspect the director's sympathies might lie closest with her, or at least her inclination to shake things up.

Any meaningful dissection of "The Shape of Things" must revolve around the ending, yet revealing it would be a crime against art. Suffice it to say that LaBute is interested in the way that surfaces affect our perceptions of content, and how those perceptions can, in turn, become our reality. It's harsh and mean but LaBute never loses sight of what shape he wishes this crafty story to take. In the end, his aim is true.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Film powered by a powerful performance by Rachel Weisz, September 23, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Shape of Things (DVD)

A top-notch movie that not only puts the fear in you about the relationship you are in but makes you question your motives in the process. Every thing in this film puts in question the power struggles we face in the relationships we are in and makes us face ourselves as human beings. Neil LaBute not only creates a movie that so exposes the nerves and muscles of relationships, but exposes the hypocrisy of the society they dwell in as well. Rachel Weisz not only floors you with her powerful performance as Evelyn but also makes you question your own morality in the process by her character view of the world. No one is innocent in this movie, and even though Evelyn may seem immoral, she might also be the most moral character of the entire film because she at least does not hide her views of the world. Which makes her sort of a beacon of truth, even though her views are as disturbing as they are immoral.

I dare anyone to not come out of this film a different person that the one who started to watch it. It will not only blow you away but floor you as well with it's ending.

Thank you Neil Labute and Rachel Weisz for such breathtaking and powerful movie.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars lord henry wotton as a 21st century bohemian art student?, July 19, 2003

By 

Portia (United States) - See all my reviews

"The Shape of Things" is a beautifully acted, 4 person cinema-play that is too intimate to be a film and too in-your-face to be very illuminating or fresh.

Adam, a happy, morally-together all-around good guy dork is befriended and ultimately seduced by Evelyn, a gorgeous, slightly-radical thrift-store-shopping art student who walks the fine edge between eccentric and sociopathic.

The Picture of Dorian Grey is a template that LaBute used unabashedly, Evelyn simultaneously taking the roles of Henry Wotton, The Tempter and Corrupter-- and Basil Hallward, The Sensitive Artist Using Life As A Canvas. Adam is quite obviously pre-and-post Dorian Grey, at first youthful innocence, and later a cold, past-salvation work of "Art" with a capital "A". She never cared for Adam, she only saw him as a tool with which to create her Important Statement about how we View Others to the Unenlightened Masses.

Evelyn uses Adam as a canvas to create her masterpiece (Aka her graduate thesis project). In retrospect, it's a madman's bet with his own alter-ego: I bet that I can use all my feminine wiles to take this nice, unique, moral guy and turn him into a mainstream, corrupt toy of my own creation.

Of course, the point is duly made and shoved into audiences faces like one of the experimental performance-art pieces that Evelyn takes Adam to. Adam morphs into a sort of post-modernist Dorian Grey, except it's his face which bears Evelyn's brushstrokes (right down to a nose job), instead of some canvas safely hidden in an old schoolroom.

The 4 (and only 4) actors portray their roles admirably. Especially Rachel Weisz, who is the central force of the entire film and makes you feel uncomfortable, angry, respectful and admiring simultaneously while making her point well enough to make you understand her position, even if you disagree.

Unfortunately, the film suffers from its own pretensions as much as anyone else's, and you start feeling towards the end that the movie itself is playing a trick on you just as Evelyn is-- it has no affection for its audience, and it doesn't really care if it breaks your heart or crushes any ideals. It only cares about being right and being shocking. I'm all for being right, even if it shocks people. But twisting reality to appear truthful just for the pleasure of pushing the limits of Beauty, Art and Truth is never enjoyable. The real bohemians would have disapproved. Oscar Wilde would have been amused.