1) The new film The Strangers must be a remake of the Romanian film Them, which I saw last night. I haven’t seen The Strangers, but it could not improve on the original. One of the most heartening developments at the movies in the last couple years has been a small surge of short, no-frills suspense films that are all suspense. Films like Vacancy and 13 Tzameti establish character, setting and situation handily, and then drop you right in the protagonist’s shoes for an hour of real-time menace. A film like P2…tries but fails to do the same. Them falls into the former camp, and gets extra points for its ending, not easily forgotten.
2) What I tend to forget, on some level, is how crappy movies starring Will Smith or auteured by M. Night Shyamalan invariably are. Why is that?
It was easy to resist Will Smith for years, when his movies were made for children (Men In Black) or for no one (Wild Wild West), but recently he defiled a couple of classic genre novels in a way that made for good-looking trailers. The kind of trailers that make you go to a movie. His new film Hancock has the best-looking Will Smith trailers yet. Bastard.
My weakness for Shyamalan is easier to explain: Like the DePalma of my teenaged years, the man knows where to put the camera. He always manages to put together at least one or two sequences of eerie beauty before the wheels fall off.
Both these guys bring out the degenerate gambler in me. Odds are against Hancock or The Happening being any good, but odds are even worse that I’ll miss either one.
1 comment:
Joe-My book group is reading Detroit Noir for next week. Any comments to make on writing noir or the publication of the book. I think it's going to be difficult to discuss so I'm looking for filler.
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