“There are just so many stupid, annoying, worthless people on the planet. They just like, get in the way of what you want.”

The first thing this movie reminded me of was my most shameless personal fave, Slap Her … She’s French (especially considering that movie’s alternate title “She Gets What She Wants”) ... but it’s a lot more subtle, extreme and subversive than that. It’s funny I found myself watching it during the BBC’s “White” week, in a way. The moment Evan Rachel Wood starts her speech about how wonderful it is to be white being as she wants to be an actress, all of this told to a Muslim student, listing Asian as her second choice, then Afro-American, and finally Arab … it certainly makes you gasp if anything more than I remembered “Slap Her” did – and where that race line goes in the end … I still don’t know quite what to think of it except to compare it to the other stereotypes in the movie, like, yes, the male and female ones, and say that it is one of those movies where the stereotypes really never bother me quite as much as they should, basically because the script just oozes smarts and Wood delivers those smarts in a way I really think nobody else could. It seems like she gets better with every film I see her in, and the final shot of her here is just phenomenal. James Woods, Jane Krakowski and Selma Blair are the icing on the cake.

I guess my first surprise here was how procedural and straight-faced this movie is. I read a brief summary of the plot prior to putting it on and couldn’t imagine anything but a generic Seventies exploitation thing doing its best to cover up the fact that it’s making a mockery of the severity of rape (okay, I’ll admit, following the last two movies I was probably just hoping to complete a perfect triple bill, lol). But dang … not only does this thing have a court room scene in it, but it also has Anne Bancroft as the DA looking at every moment like she wants to rip every penis in the room off with her bare hands.

Most of all, it reminds me of the movies Brian De Palma was making around the same time – most notably Blow Out – or things like Peeping Tom ... movies that really used the separate elements of sound and image in cinema to service the theme at hand. You get perfect opposites here like the accepted nude photography of its central character, a victim, a lipstick model vs. the photographs taken as evidence following her rape. Later, we see her even younger sister being groomed in the ways of glamour photography, preceeding an even more unwatchable sequence. We have the predator, an electronic composer, capturing sounds like those made by the birds on his windowsill, but also later, the very heartbeat of his victim. I love this kind of thing, it’s what cinema is all about for me.

Frankly I’d be happy watching Anne Bancroft shouting “Objection! Objection! Obbbbbbb-jection!” for 90 minutes, lol … it’s like the girl version of ... And Justice For All when she’s around. And Mariel Hemingway was supercute at this age.

This is an odd movie for Hitchcock, a fairly bog-standard (albeit above average for its kind) court melodrama, with barely a flourish from the master in sight. The score has a nice main theme, and there’s some clever dialogue, but this remains way down on the list of Hitchcock movies worth seeing.