I’ll be honest and say right away that i’ve never actually read Oscar Wilde’s play ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’, which this film is based on, so I can’t make comparisons between the film and the play. I can however tell you exactly what I thought of the film. It was a compelling film which kept me gripped from start to finish. It’s a great British film with an interesting take on the themes of corruption, vanity, and greed. We see a man fall from grace and lose the respect of all those around him. This happens as a result of his inability to accept fate and the natural course of life.

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Paris is a magical city. Being introduced to the ancient architecture and the thick, rich culture, especially for an American not used to it, can be overwhelming. I was fortunate enough to visit there twice. The first time was with a group of 3 other Americans. We were stationed in England and had to leave base for the weekend. Since we didn’t need visas and because we figured we might not have another opportunity, we pooled our money together and had enough to get us on the ferry ride across the Channel and the train trip from Calais into Paris. We stayed three days two nights as vagrants wandering the streets of Paris, sleeping under the Eiffel Tower or in a subway station or in the nearest McDo, each of us taking shifts ordering a coffee so we wouldn’t get kicked out while the others grabbed a few winks. Sleep was hard to come by. Though I had on an overcoat, a shirt, a T-Shirt and thermal underwear, the bitter April cold seeped in and any rest we all got was fitful at best. On the third day there, just before heading back to England, I went up on a high point that overlooked the entire city. It might have been the lack of sleep or the overwhelming beauty or a combination of both, but something hit me looking out over the vast cityscapes and brought a few tears to my eyes. The film Paris starts off with those cityscapes. All the emotions of that weekend came flooding back and I fell in love with the city all over again.

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Back in the mid 80′s- an entire different universe for over half of the people who might be reading this- there was a bit of fascination in films and TV shows that showcased a prototype method of transportation. Most of the time it was new stealth weapon helicopters (like Blue Thunder or Airwolf) or high-tech cars used for secret missions. Black Moon Rising is a little different than that trend, since it was simply a prototype futuristic like car that looked cool and could hit 250 miles per hour. It also had some kinks to be worked out, like problems in overheating. Then the car gets stolen, the bad guys don’t know what to do with it, and the owners hire a professional thief named Quint (Tommy Lee Jones) to steal it back.
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The Haunting in Connecticut is so wrapped up in an overindulgence regarding jump scares that it cuts out the potential impact of what is creepy and what is scary. I don’t know about the next person, but, in a nutshell? If one buys a house which used to be a turn of the century funeral home, and the crude tools of the mortician’s trade are still locked up in the basement, that would be interesting, wouldn’t it? Then someone finds out, hey, not only were there dead people on display, a whole bunch of people actually died around the dinner table. Worse, forget all the things that go bump in the night- isn’t having a relative suffering from cancer and severe hallucinations scary enough on its own? Or how about the dangers of alcohol abuse? Apparently not. Just give the audience flashbacks with a torture chamber and flashes of electricity turning on and off. Try not to yawn.
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I have not lost anybody significant in my life, not lately anyways. The last close relative of mine who died was my grandfather in ’91 so I have not had to go through the healing process of grief in a very long time (knock on wood). My wife, however, has not been so fortunate. Her mother died just last year and I’ve seen the pain she’s had to go through, and still going through, to be able to move on. Her and I saw this movie on two different levels. Aaron Eckhart plays Burke a psychologist whose wife died in a car crash. As he went through the healing process, he wrote what it takes to move past the death of a loved one in a book he titled, A-Okay. The book helped many people and soon he began doing book tours and, eventually, seminars, which is where we catch him at the beginning of the film, talking to a sold out room at a hotel in Seattle. While there, he literally bumps into Eloise (Jennifer Aniston) since she arranges and delivers the hotel’s floral arrangements. It’s one of the weakest “meet-cutes” ever and a sign that the reason this film worked for me was not due to great writing but due to the actors and what they brought to their parts.

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You know those recommendations you get on sites like Amazon when you browse for DVDs? The ones that say things like “People who liked this movie also liked…”? That’s how I first heard about The Hurt Locker, and I’m pretty glad I did. If you thought Black Hawk Down set the standard for modern war movie you should definitely check it out. No other movie I’ve seen gets you this close to what it must be like to be a soldier in Iraq.

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The Fix is in. That is the title of episode 168 of “This American Life” where the story of Mark Whitacre was first heard by screenwriter Scott Burns and eventually made into a movie. Such is Hollywood. After seeing the film yesterday, I looked up the Chicago Public Radio program and listened to it this morning. I would have appreciated hearing the episode before seeing the film for most of the same reasons that I think the second viewing of this film will be more satisfying then the first. I didn’t get to the screening early so I sat fairly close to the front (the only seats that were available). Behind me slumped a group of irritating kids who spoke loudly to each other and said “Matt Damon” in the Team America voice every time he came on screen. Idiots behind me and, on screen, idiots in front of me. And Mark Whitacre does come across as a blundering idiot for most of the film. Now, there is something to be said about the unreliable narrator in movies. When we go to see a film, we assume, unless we are specifically told otherwise, that our main character is a normal natural human being that feels, thinks and behaves in the same way we all do and therefore we feel that we can trust them. When we find out more then half way through the film that this is not the case, it can sometimes work – i.e. A Beautiful Mind. Then again…..

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One of the biggest problems facing moviemakers, or really, any working artist seeing a project through, is being too close to your project. Often times it takes an objective eye and a kind word to show you that you’ve gone off the rails and need to correct your trajectory. Once you’re in production, things really start humming and you’re just running to keep up. You don’t have time to do what you need to do, like taking a big step back every once in a while to make sure things still make sense in the big picture. The Hollywood system feeds into this problem by pushing things even faster then they already go, giving people even less time to breathe. Plus, if you get any notoriety you begin to gather around you a cloud of “yes men” who constantly tell you that you spin gold every time you speak thus blinding the artist from any mistakes he or she may be making. I’m sure one or both of these happened to Whiteout, because I refuse to believe that a film can be worked on for over two years and still come out with as many problems as this film does without one of these things happening to it.

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Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) has several troubles on her mind: she is in a job she doesn’t really like, she is a single mother whose child is the product of an affair which still continues years later. Her kid has a vivid eccentric imagination that causes his teachers to recommend varied drug prescriptions. Her sister Norah (Emily Blunt) also has trouble holding down a job. Both of them have unsung emotional scars due to the death of their mother many years before. After investigating the shocking suicide of a man in a sporting goods store, her married cop boyfriend- once her high school love- gives her a fancy idea: Start up your own crime scene cleanup crew.
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I’m not quite sure where director Steve Shill was going with the alleged ‘erotic thriller’ Obsessed. It isn’t all that erotic, (not even for a PG-13 rating) it isn’t much of a thriller. There is a point in the film’s middle section where there is the potential to be less Fatal Attraction wanna be and more closer to Disclosure. No such luck. What you see is what you get, and what we get is one of the worst films of 2009.
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