As Good As Dead

Cary Elwes tries not to make a crack to Andie MacDowell about using a stronger brand of sun lotion.

(2010) Thriller (First Look) Cary Elwes, Andie MacDowell, Frank Whaley, Matt Dallas, Jess Weixler, Nicole Ansari, Brian Cox, Clark Middleton, Emma Kantor, Juliette Bennett, Nasry Malak, Crispian Belfrage, Claudine Oriol, Mario D’Leon, Elissa Middleton. Directed by Jonathan Mossek

 

Vengeance is a dish best served cold or so they say. Ten years after is plenty of time for the dish to cool down I’d say.

Ethan Belfrage (Elwes) is a left-leaning photojournalist in New York  who has a family, a nice loft in midtown and a fairly successful career. He walks the dog, is friendly with the neighbors and is in general an upstanding citizen.

When a pair of thugs break into his apartment and tie him up to a chair, he is at first alarmed but not too surprised – apartment break-ins are not entirely unknown in the Big Apple. When a hideously scared woman calling herself Helen Kalahan (MacDowell) strides in, Ethan becomes a little bit concerned. When it turns out that one of the thugs, Jake (Dallas) is her son, Ethan begins to get a bit suspicious. When he notices that the other one, Aaron (Whaley) has an SS tattoo on his neck and seems more than a little bit bloodthirsty and unhinged, Ethan begins to sweat.

It turns out that Helen believes that Ethan had something to do with the murder of her husband (Cox), the hate-spewing preacher of a kind of skinhead survivalist fundamentalist Christian cult. She means to extract a confession from him, even though Ethan denies it. In fact, he denies it under torture, which doesn’t seem to impress Aaron all that much. When Ethan denies it after Aaron intentionally injects an overdose into a neighbor woman, well, one begins to wonder if maybe he is innocent after all. Still, you get the nagging feeling that Ethan knows a hell of a lot more than he’s telling.

This has a Hitchcockian element to it that’s quite pleasant; there are bad men involved and you’re not sure if the lead character might not be worse than the lot of them – and you have the nagging suspicion that he’s getting his just deserts. Then again the murdered pastor is so heinous that you can’t help feeling that justice was served on that end as well.

MacDowell, long one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, spends the entire movie in make-up depicting terrible scars, walking with a limp and generally spewing hateful things. One of the true Southern belles in the business, it’s kind of shocking to see the twisted reverse of that institution – it’s frightening and fascinating at the same time. This is truly one of her best roles in the last few years.

The movie is for the most part well-scripted although it bogs down occasionally. There is a sense that there is cruelty and violence mostly for its own sake; it loses its shock value early on and I think the film might have benefitted with more psychological aspects – as when the neighbor is slowly dying and Ethan is helpless (or is he?) to save her.

I think if they’d tightened up the writing a bit and cut some of the filler this might have been quite a taut little thriller. A little more flashback showing off the “good” pastor might have added a bit to some of the backstory, particularly to Jake who seems a tad conflicted here. There are enough elements to give this a slight recommendation, but not really enough that I feel motivated to urge anyone to go out of their way to find it either.

WHY RENT THIS: Tense when it needs to be and rather than revealing the twist all at once, does it in stages which is in itself a nice twist. 

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Turgid and muddled in places. Uses violence more gratuitously than necessary.

FAMILY VALUES: Plenty of violence (some of it brutal), a bit of drug content and a fair amount of cursing.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: MacDowell is originally from Gaffney, South Carolina and rose to fame as a model, with Yves St. Laurent, The Gap, Vogue and Calvin Klein.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: None listed.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $55,618 on an unreported production budget; I wouldn’t bet on profitability here.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

NEXT: Hulk

Advertisement

Paris, je t’aime

This annoying Parisian mime has his poor woman beside herself.

(First Look) Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe, Gerard Depardieu, Marianne Faithfull, Ben Gazzara, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Bob Hoskins, Olga Kurlyenko, Emily Mortimer, Nick Nolte, Natalie Portman, Miranda Richardson, Gena Rowlands, Barbet Schroeder, Rufus Sewell, Leonor Watling, Elijah Wood. Directed by Many, Many Directors

Ah, Paris, the City of Light. No other city in the world conjures romance and civilization the way the capital of France does. Visions of sidewalk cafes, the Left Bank, the beautiful architecture and the masterpieces at the many museums make Paris a city where one’s oeuvre for the finer things in life can be properly exercised.

But like any city its size, Paris has more than just one face and more than just one personality. Paris has many neighborhoods, some ethnically arranged and others more lifestyle arranged. One of the joys of exploring Paris is to delve into these neighborhoods, not all of which turn up in guidebooks.

Some of them, however, appear here in this love letter to and from Paris. 18 vignettes have been directed by some of the world’s best directors (or teams, such as the Coen Brothers) like Gus van Sant and Isabel Coixet. Appearing in them is a tremendous international cast, some of whom (but not all) are detailed above.

Each vignette is set in a different neighborhood in Paris and all have something to do with love, which is fitting enough. As with any anthology film of this nature, the segments work to varying degrees but I have to say that I can’t honestly say that any of them are horrible.

The only one that really feels jarring to me is the one directed byVincenzo Natali, whose “Quartier de la Madeleine” is a Gothic vampire romance, with Bond girl Olga Kurlyenko chasing Elijah Wood through fog-shrouded streets. The tone differs from any of the other films here and it felt more like a Parisian Twilight episode which didn’t really work for me.

Other than that one misstep, there is some magnificent work here. In Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa’s “Place de Victoires,” a grieving mother (played with astonishing power by Juliette Binoche) gets a chance to say goodbye to her dead son as given by a cowboy (Willem Dafoe) who is acting not unlike Charon on the River Styx, escorting the boy to his final destination. It’s the most powerful segment in the movie in many ways.

Another wonderful piece is “Quartier Latin” by actor Gerard Depardieu and co-director Frederic Aubertin (who also directed the linking segments). Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands, veterans of the John Cassavetes stable, play an aging couple who get together the night before they see the lawyer to finalize their divorce. It is bittersweet without being cloying, a tribute to the two actors who pull off some of the more understated work of the movie.

In a different vein, the Coen Brothers direct their Steve Buscemi in the ”Tuileries” segment for slapstick comedy, as a mute tourist is warned not to make eye contact in the Metro station and foolishly does, twice, leading to all sorts of mayhem being perpetrated on Buscemi, who takes more abuse from the Coens than he has since “Fargo.” The Coens do this kind of thing as well as anybody ever has.

Even horror director Wes Craven gets a shot, with his set in the cemetary at “Pere Lachaise” features Emily Mortimer and Rufus Sewell as an engaged couple scouring the cemetary for the grave of Oscar Wilde, with Sewell getting romantic advice from the ghost of the writer himself. While this sounds on the surface to be right in Craven’s wheelhouse, it’s actually a bit of a departure for him, being much more romantic than we’re used to from the auteur of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street and the Scream franchise.

The great Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron does a stunning job with “Parc Monceau,” shooting the segment in one long continuous shot, allowing Nick Nolte to do his thing as a doting father trying to maintain a bond with his daughter. In “Pigalle,” director Richard LaGravenese need do nothing more than film a conversation slash argument between married couple Bob Hoskins and the extraordinarily sophisticated and beautiful Fanny Ardant.

Alexander Payne of Sideways fame directs the concluding vignette, “14^th Arrondissement” with superb character actress Margo Martindale narrating the effect a trip to Paris had on the life of a frumpy Midwestern postal worker. It’s a sweet little coda that ties things together nicely.

As I said, not everything works but most work well enough to be reasonably satisfying and all have at least something to recommend them. All in all, it’s a pleasant little pastry that has been put together with loving care by many of the best chefs in the business, and it’s ready for you to sample and I recommend that you do, even if you don’t love Paris but especially if you do.

WHY RENT THIS: A cornucopia of wonderful vignettes about the City of Light with something of a tasting menu of some of the finest film directors in the world.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Some of the segments flat-out don’t work.

FAMILY VALUES: There’s some bad language, a bit of sexuality (it is Paris after all), a few mildly frightening moments and some adult themes. While there’s nothing really that you wouldn’t let your children watch, they would probably be bored to tears unless they’re Francophiles.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The original intention of the movie was for each segment to represent a specific arrondissement in Paris (there are 20 in all) but this idea was abandoned.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: In the special edition 2-disc DVD Steelbox edition of the film, there are 18 featurettes, each devoted to a specific segment of the movie. Oddly, these aren’t available on the Blu-Ray making it a rare instance where a DVD edition has more extras than the corresponding Blu-Ray edition.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

TOMORROW: Paris 36 (Faubourg 36)