Disturbia

Regular readers (I'm assuming, I know) know that I'm NOT a horror buff, usually restricting the movies to new releases that look like they have "something." I decided to "pass" on Disturbia back in the day, and this is an old review from when it was released on video.

Disturbia (DJ Caruso, 2007) Take Rear Window and remove any veneer of civility to it and you have Disturbia. The voyeur this time around is a kid with an ankle bracelet and a three-month house probation. After exploring his boundaries and testing his limits, he grows tired of electronics and junk-food, and begins to spy on his neighbors for thrills. Fortunately there're the new neighbors next door with the comely daughter, and unfortunately, there's the creepy older guy (David Morse, who can play good or bad angels interchangeably) who clubs and routinely brings home one-night-stands with one-too-many.

 

Oh! Did I mention that a lot of young women are routinely disappearing?

Did I mention that said grounded voyeur's recently widowed mom might have "the hots" for this guy? And before you can say "I am thy father's spirit," the kid is thinking she's in danger.

What separates Disturbia from Hitchcock's older, wiser film and why Sir Alfred and John Michael Hayes are head and tails better that DJ Caruso and Chris Landon and Charles Ellsworth is that the situation was set up in a way that the windows that James Stewart's character peered into were like mini-movie theaters reflecting his own fears of settling down in a domestic situation (even if it is with Grace Kelly!). His voyeur recognized himself in his various targets.

Young Kale Brecht (Shia LaBoeuf) has no such depth. True, his vantage point is limited to three houses, but all of them are occupied by antagonists of a sort. He's dead set against two of them, and the neighbor girl he just WANTS to BE against. And being as this is a movie aimed at teens, the resulting Guignol is Grand and then, not so, sort of like The Silence of the Lambs without a hint of maid service, designed to merely creep out and punch up the "ick" factor.

And, of course, it has to be resolved with the kid taking direct, violent action because, hey, he's a teen-ager—he needs to consciously murder someone to fulfill himself. Even "Hamlet" had the good moral sense to give the hero his just desserts.
As an inferior remake with borrowed pretensions, I sent Disturbia back on its merry little way to infect another household, not unlike the tape in The Ring.

Not quite "you watching you watching them," 

more like "Me watching me watching me watching me watching me..."

The Hurt Locker

The Oscars are this weekend (Lord, help us!) and there are a couple of Best Picture winners I haven't re-published from "The Olde Site." So, rather than doing anything "newish" I'll opt, instead, for "timely."

 

I'm not a fan of The Oscars (like everybody), but I watch it (like everybody) and I complain about it the next day (like everybody). You can't seem to have one without the others. People enjoy complaining about them but wouldn't dare miss watching them. Everybody has some Oscar-decision that's an obscenity in their eyes...and there are some that are questionable (my Saturday "Trash" post will be one of them)*.  But, most of the time, I just don't care. The Oscars, being voted on within a year of each film's release, are always going to be short-sighted, with absolutely no chance of being able to judge a film's lasting legacy. The decisions are always factored by politicking or prestige. Maybe trendy. But probably not. They'll always be there whether one watches them or agrees with them.

 

Oh. And this was written at the time of the film's release.

Moonwalking Through the Kill-Zone

or

"Cravin' a burger. Isn't that strange?"

 

A lone figure walks down an alien landscape in a space-suit of Kevlar and crash-helmet, his only companions are his breath and his thoughts. Death surrounds him, and he walks towards the only certain death he knows of: a make-shift explosive device, conceived in cunning and hate that he must dis-arm in order to save himself, his comrades, and the watching by-standers, one of whom just might be waiting to explode the device. It is not some forbidden planet, or an anarchic Western town, but it could be. It's downtown Iraq, and it comes down to one man walking and facing his fear.

 

Kathryn Bigelow will probably never be considered a "superstar" director.

That's too bad, because she's miles ahead of the so-called "young Turks" doing action movies these days. Instead of following current trends, she adheres to the rock-solid action direction styles of Anthony Mann and Don Siegel: let the audience know what's going on, and one other thing that too many directors these days forget—an audience has to know the territory their heroes walk through to fully present the dangers they face. In The Hurt Locker she may use a hand-held camera a bit too much to re-create the verisimilitude of war-footage, but it comes in handy to lock you into the searching point-of-view of Bravo Company's of Bomb "Tech's" and "Post-Bomb Assessors"—"The Blasters"—in Iraq's Camp Freedom ("They changed it from Camp Liberty to Camp Freedom because Camp Freedom sounds better," says veteran Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) to the new Team Leader Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner, looking like a cross between Nathan Fillion and Brendan Fraser, like most of the principals of The Hurt Locker, his performance is understated and full of small nuances). 

James is described as "a rowdy boy" and "reckless." Before his arrival, "the suit," that cumbersome Kevlar get-up which would protect anyone but the man who needs it most, has been the last resort in a disarmament situation. But that's not good enough for James. He likes to disarm the things by hand, and collect the odd bit of equipment for a trophy that "could have killed" him. He'll go in with "the suit" first, and puzzle the thing out, something that doesn't win him prizes with his team-mates, especially Specialist Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), because the longer it takes James to disarm a bomb, the more vulnerable his team-mates are to snipers.

It doesn't take long for the team to realize that James loves his work a little too much, and that it may kill them before their tour is up. Bigelow keeps a running track of the "short-timer" count-down as the situations become more dire and the traps more intricate, electronically and ethically.

War films have gone through a weird evolution from the time they were conscious enough to move beyond the "good guys vs. bad guys" (while still acknowledging that both sides share their share of casualties. But it's been since the Korean conflict that movies started to go deeper into the psychosis of war—not the PTSD issues, but the psychosis of being inside the conflict. One of the counselors at Camp Freedom ineffectually tells Eldridge "You know, this doesn't have to be a bad time in your life." Easy for him to say. All Eldridge can think about is the best outcome of the war—surviving it. And when his orders come down to "Be smart. Make a good decision" it's tough to say what is a good day and what is a bad day. 

But lately, war-films have taken a look at the man on the line and what makes a good soldier, and it comes down to a blurred combination of self-sacrifice and controlled psychopathy. Whatever the motivations its the results that count. We've seen that theme in Hell is For Heroes, and Patton, Apocalypse Now, The Burmese Harp, Full Metal Jacket, and Flags of Our Fathers. How the soldier compartmentalizes the war experience to survive and even stay sane through the fire determines his ultimate worth as a soldier and as a human being. It is that perspective, of life is brief increments, that keeps a soldier walking alone in The Now, where "The Big Picture" is unseen in the limited view of his path, unknowable and brutally finite—the past a bitter memory, the future an empty promise, and today is walked with the high of High Noon.

 

* For instance, there's the case of How Green Was My Valley beating out Citizen Kane for Best Picture of 1942 (as well as Sergeant York and The Maltese Falcon). And yet, I can't kick about the choice because I love both films, and I can certainly see why someone would prefer Ford's classic against Welles "Greatest Film Ever Made."

16 Blocks

Richard Donner died Monday at the age of 91. I don't do obituaries, but I've seen every movie Donner ever made—with the exception (drat!) of one. He started in television directing episodes of your favorite television series if you're in your 60's, 50's or 40's, starting in 1960—with "Zane Grey Theater" up through "Kojak" and "Bronk" in 1975. One of those episodes is an all-time favorite of "The Twilight Zone" is "Nightmare at 20,000 feet" starring a peripatetic William Shatner. He dabbled in movie-programmers until making his mark with 1976's The Omen, which caught the attention of the producers of Superman—the film he's most known for (along with the "Lethal Weapon" series). He is probably the "godfather" of the current glut of superhero movies, not only from Superman, but also shepherding the "X-Men" series for his production company, run with his wife Lauren Shuler Donner.

This is the only review I have of his considerable work (a capsule from a couple web-sites ago) and it contains a summation of his work—"seems completely incapable of placing his camera in any place but the best position to convey action and meaning." Just so. When I've found "that one film" I'll, of course, do a "Now I've Seen Everything" write-up.

16 Blocks (Richard Donner 2006) An odd, efficient little thriller about a broken down cop who gets the bad assignment of driving a police whistle-blower sixteen blocks to the courthouse to testify before the Grand Jury about police corruption. But first he has to run a gauntlet of New York's less-than-finest who all could be sent to the pokey if the kid talks. And after hearing Mos Def's high-pitched, cleft-pallet-patter-way of talking, you start feeling some sympathy for their thinking, too. Cop and whistle-blower have two things in their favor: a populace more suspicious of the police than those running from them, and director Richard Donner, who, though he may have problems with pacing, seems completely incapable of placing his camera in any place but the best position to convey action and meaning, no matter how claustrophobic the surroundings. Bruce Willis is the reliably unreliable cop drinking to retirement, who finds one last thing to fight for, although his persona tends to shift a bit from barely functioning to resembling an older John McClane without a sign of shakes as he draws down on a colleague. Willis is fine, though, as is David Morse as the crooked cop with the most to lose. Of the two endings shot, the one attached to the film is the most "blue sky," and it's not really satisfying. The better down-beat ending, unfortunately, depends on a character turning when he's shown no previous sign of doing so. Neither one works completely, but at least the "Happy" ending strains credulity a bit less. Over all, not bad, really.