Anya ,'Showtime'
A place to talk about movies--old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
Red Eye was a recent suspense movie that had excellent, tight pacing.
I gave that movie points for creative use of a ballpoint pen and a field hockey stick. I took away points for the villain being about 11 inches tall. But yeah, for what it was (illogic abounding), it was pretty fun.
I don't watch horror movies to be scared, so all of those horror movie lists always skew wrong for me.
But yeah, for what it was (illogic abounding), it was pretty fun.
If you're able to suspend disbelief that Cillian Murphy's plan was not actually the worst concieved villainous plan in the history of villainy, the internal logic holds together pretty well -- better than most thrillers, I think. But boy, that plan...how drunk does a band of evildoers have to be before they come up with something that needlessly complicated?
Oh, there've been a lot of dumb villainous plans in films. For instance, even if everything had gone according to plan, Bob le Flambeur's casino heist was stupid.
But, yeah, suspend disbelief and Red Eye wasn't half bad. I'm not saying it was anywhere close to my top 100, but it wasn't filled with goofy McGuffins and deux ex machinas and horrible CGI that wouldn't scare a four-year-old, and that's saying something.
Cillian Murphy eliminates the need for scary CGI.
Except for the phone book he is sitting/standing on to make him look like he is bigger than my thumb.
Hey, the Zuni Fetish Doll was pint sized too, and that didn't keep it from being scary...
Oooo, shiny.
Oooo, shiny.
Yeah, I'm psyched about that. Newbury Comics actually has it at a price about as good as I've seen on-line, so I may pick it up today. I've seen it in a couple of different forms (probably the first two mentioned in the description), and I'm not sure any amount of editing can make it a definitively great (or even good) movie, but there are a lot of interesting pieces in it.
I know Welles had hoped during the making of it that it would be a nice commercial hit (of course, he though that about THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI and TOUCH OF EVIL too, so there you go), but why he ever thought that people would embrace a movie with such a loathsome protagonist (Robert Arden and Ralph Meeker probably went to the same charm school) is beyond me.
The version I saw was incoherent as hell, but yes, there were some nice moments to it. In retrospect, it reminds me of the first version of Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, which could be described exactly the same way.
The version I saw was incoherent as hell, but yes, there were some nice moments to it. In retrospect, it reminds me of the first version of Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, which could be described exactly the same way.
The premise is brilliant (spoiler fonted) - mysterious, wealthy man claiming amnesia for a large chunk of his past hires detective to find the details of his life, which he uses to find and dispose of former criminal associates so he can kill them and maintain his respectability - so I understand why Welles thought it had commercial potential, but then he tried to throw this into a tricky time structure, and also made sure the detective character was so repulsive that you couldn't possibly root for him. And, of course, it was the time sequence that got frelled and then ostensibly restored by the various re-editings over the years.
Wonderfully eccentric cast, though, as is the Welles-ian tradition.
