DVD Review: Card Subject to Change - Page 2

In terms of style, voice-over interviews with the wrestlers themselves form the main source of knowledge about independent wrestling in the film. These voices are laid over top of a variety of images of these wrestlers pummeling each other. While the film should be commended for straying from the common and immensely tedious “talking heads” style of documentary filmmaking, these images are flat and uninteresting, neither reinforcing nor ironically subverting the words being spoken. Furthermore, while footage of the wrestlers planning matches backstage is certainly interesting to hear, subsequent footage of the matches themselves do not adequately demonstrate how these plans were executed, whether they failed or went off seamlessly. This footage fails to delineate the artistry or athleticism involved in telling stories through the medium of pro wrestling; it looks like complete chaos, rather than a carefully orchestrated chaos, and the difference is elemental in understanding the talented individuals involved in manufacturing its anachronistic anarchism.

As for the DVD, you get some deleted scenes if you wish to indulge.

Card Subject to Change is a highly disorganized, tonally troubled, and structurally schizophrenic film that fails to make its subject appealing or artful. I recommend you watch the criminally neglected Beyond the Mat instead.

Article Author: Jesse Balzer

Jesse Balzer recently graduated from Minnesota State University Moorhead with a BA in Film History and Criticism. He now survives as a doe-eyed screenwriter and film theorist. He also moonlights as a freelance pissant and aspiring malcontent.

Visit Jesse Balzer's author page