It seemed a little crazy of me to watch this following two ‘08 movies I’d actually had a little hope for (yes, even Prom Night) and been let down so bad over. But, I don’t know, I never really stopped liking M. Night Shyamalan as some did – the furthest I drifted from him was over Unbreakable which I didn’t like at all on the first viewing. A second viewing remedied that entirely and I never entirely distrusted him since.

And you know what? After these 90 minutes, I’m still with him all the way. No – this movie is not terrifying as some people seem to have been led to expect, and if you go in with those expectations then, yes, you’re liable to wind up laughing. I’m guessing this is bad marketing – I don’t know because I don’t put myself in the position to be overexposed to such things. But if you do want to talk about the fear factor of this director’s movies, then at least compare it to Lady in the Water and The Village (two of the movies not oh-so-subtly mentioned on the poster tagline, lol) and realise, in this department at least, it’s still a slight return to form (if you like such phrases). I found the opening immediately arresting, the later scenes like with John Leguizamo and the two boys truly nightmarish, Zooey Deschanel of course stunning (what on earth are those eyes made of? lol) and the ending really quite moving.

It’s hokey and wobbly sometimes, but, y’know, I’m willing to trust that none of this is entirely unintended. Shyamalan’s shown so many times that he’s clearly a Hitchcock fan and so many of the moments particularly in this movie feel a lot more like the master of suspense’s frequent tongue-in-cheek moments than just a hack who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Whether that’s true or not, it still works for me better than the gigantic pile of crap I’ve had to expose my retinas to so far this year.

Again, I’m guilty of not having seen the original here which probably makes me a bad film lover, though it seems to be the right way to approach the thing as the director really made it almost exclusively because he felt too few people had seen the non-English-speaking production … which is kinda sad in itself to begin with.

I guess I want to start before I go “off on one” so to speak (it’s not guaranteed but it’s possible … oh it’s always possible lol …) by saying, I get what the director is trying to do and say with this film (and, presumably, the original) – if only because his self-confessed intentions have been so well-documented. Again, I find this kind of sad – like the saying goes, if you could put it into words, well, what’s the point in painting it? And a lot of the more positive reviews of this movie seem to go in one direction against the criticism, amounting to, “You don’t get it. THIS is what it means,” which to me really says it all.

I didn’t personally get the intention in the end. By which I mean – I get it, but it didn’t work for me as apparently was intended. Though none of the horrors are actually shown onscreen, I felt as the end credits rolled that I’d seen them anyway – that I’d got my kicks, as it were, despite the approach. I saw Naomi Watts in her underwear and tied up, I heard her screams, and those screams were so terrifying that I looked away even though I knew there was nothing to see. So I won’t deny its incredible use of cinema … but, honestly, I never really felt like it was any different from what has come before – Texas Chainsaw, Last House, Clockwork Orange, Straw Dogs. Frankly, Cannibal Holocaust did a much better job of making me feel “involved” in the horror; in this whole department, there’s really only one short sequence here that lived up to what I expected.

Haneke is a fine film maker – you can feel a lot of Kubrickian influence here and I’m interested in seeing his other work. Naomi Watts and Tim Roth are fantastic. All the technical stuff is top notch. It takes a long time to get going, though, and even once it does it’s far from gripping; and in the end, personally I feel it fails miserably in its aspirations. I think those who think the naysayers are missing the point on this one need to go back and look at how intelligent a lot of the old nasties really were.

At one point when I was just discovering how amazing cinema was, I was a huge fan of the classic Seventies political thrillers like The Parallax View this harks back to at times. I probably still am, though I haven’t even so much as watched All The President’s Men as recently as I’d like. Perhaps needless to say, at this time of year, with a no-name director at the helm, a title that doesn’t quite gel, and despite the cast, I really didn’t expect this to even touch those classics. Well, to be as brisk with my point as the movie itself is at 86 minutes … I was very pleasantly surprised.

To call this a thriller is an understatement. There’s one point – you’ll know it when you see it, I don’t wanna spoil anything but let’s just say “little girl, middle of the road” – where I literally almost started hyperventilating. As you may have heard, the movie covers the same succession of events – the shooting of a president followed by a series of explosions somewhere in Spain – from multiple points of view. On more than one occasion, these snippets reach an unbearable peak only to freeze and “wind back” to another perspective just before the end is revealed. It’s at times overwhelmingly effective, and to say it’s a movie with twists is the second understatement you could make of it.

For me, it’s the Forest Whitaker “segment” that will really stay with me and that I’ll come back for. It’s always interesting to see what actors do after they win an Oscar and while this does slightly follow the old, “now I’ll do a dumb blockbuster” thing that I think began with Nicolas Cage following Leaving Las Vegas with The Rock, I think more interesting here is how vastly different Whitaker’s character is here from Idi Armin. He plays almost literally a nobody who just happens to get caught up in the story and he does it so endearingly and believably I was on the verge of tears just watching him be so natural before the stuff with the little girl.

No, it’s not up there with the 70s classics – it’d need to be 30 minutes longer and put in a blender with either last year’s American Gangster or Zodiac for that. It is, however, the kind of pure ride I haven’t seen in a while. I remember the interviews with Jennifer Garner and Jamie Foxx over last year’s The Kingdom and while I got nothing from that production it almost seems like this is the movie they were selling. I really loved it.

“One o’ these days this city’s gonna explode. You used to be able to play stickball on the street! Christ, what’s happening …”

I kept thinking this would take off somewhat more than it ultimately does … dare I say that the first thing that strikes me as worth mentioning about it is how … straight a thriller it is, really overall just another undercover cop movie with “the gay” laid on heavy with a quaint disclaimer at the start that it’s not representative of all of them lol. Which is nice …

Most of all it reminded me of last year’s Zodiac ... it was during that movie that I finally realised that Jake Gyllenhaal perhaps isn’t so odd-looking afterall, having the eerie doppelganger of young Al Pacino before him. The look and music of this thing combined with Pacino must surely have been on Fincher’s mind when putting together his Seventies throwback.

It does finally leave you with something to chew over with its ending which seems to me to be open to far too many interpretations for me to touch upon here. So I’d like to see it again … but I’ll likely not do that until the rumored 140 minute uncut version emerges.

I’m sure I’d seen parts of this before – though perhaps it’s that the imagery is just so practically iconic, the red car and the dirty truck, that you see a couple of stills and feel the whole thing. There were certainly parts I hadn’t seen, however; like the whole inner monologue of the roadside diner, such an amazing scene right there. This is a very pared down version of Spielberg than we’ve become used to; you can feel the more action-oriented stuff like Indiana Jones, but more than anything it’s Jaws that comes to mind – you could almost say Jaws is “Duel with a shark” (the ending in particular, I’d love to do a side-by-side comparison of the whole flaming car going into the truck etc with the destruction of the shark; Dennis Weaver’s almost pitiful celebration dance atop the cliff is just beautiful).

There are a lot of movies like this, from The Vanishing to The Hitcher to Breakdown and they pretty much always work, it’s almost as reliable a startpoint for a movie as a conman story (Gone and the like notwithstanding, lol :P). This is really no exception: a tight, claustrophobic, beautifully designed chase that really leaves no doubt in your mind about the heights Spielberg would soar to. Apparently there’s a 90 minute cut; but hey, the original 75 minute TV cut worked fine for me this time, and at that length, really, I should be ashamed as a film fan for taking so long to give it my attention.

Okay, here’s how I occasionally find myself watching movies. Sometimes I have other things to do. I have this thing that I’m pretty sure that if a movie is actually brilliant it will grab my attention whether I’m entirely focussed on it or not but the fact is, I always prefer to be entirely focussed on it to start with if possible which is why I’m pretty hopeless at getting round to actually watching the damn things sometimes.

So what happened here was new to me. I read the synopsis – ah, lovely, simple “Wrong Turn” type thriller, probably awful but possibly quite gripping like “Breakdown” or whatever. Perfect kinda movie to half-watch. About 10 minutes in, I found my gaze drawn to the screen. Because it was getting interesting? HELL no. Because I suddenly had to check if it was actually as bad as it suddenly struck me lol.

It raises itself back up almost to the level of all other entirely missable teen thrillers in the end, if that’s any consolation … but really, when the best I can say for this is that it incremented my viewcount? Make of it what you will, lol. BTW the second time I looked up in the way I would if my interest had been piqued was to basically say, “WTF, is that it?” over the ending, lol. It’s really almost enough to put me off watching these kinds of movies even as background crap ever again; that the silly announcer man voice over the end credits chose to recommend The Number 23 for next Saturday night’s viewing simultaneously says all that needs to be said about the target audience here and makes me almost glad I’ll be at work when it’s on lol.

The classic. I think. This is one of those movies I’ve watched so many times both for fun and for study that I can’t help but quote vast chunks of it out loud as it plays. There are just so many things about this movie that, to my surprise every time, lift it far above the quality genre pieces the other installments in the series are.

It’s a perfect screenplay, to start with. Syd Field talked a lot of nonsense (I realised, eventually) about screenwriting and his “paradigm” is broken down with every recent passing week, but one of his books I’d still recommend is “Four Screenplays” which simply broke down four screenplays – this one, Thelma and Louise, Terminator 2, and Dances with Wolves – and showed why his system worked, owing a lot of course to Joseph Campbell, whose thoughts on mythology are overwhelmingly present here too – I think Jodie Foster in particular is fond of talking about the mythical aspects of this movie whenever she’s asked about it.

It’s interesting to me to notice that all those four screenplays, all produced between 91-92, have some seriously powerful women in them – Clarice Starling, Thelma and Louise of course, Sarah Connor, Stands with a Fist – and one of the most stand-out things about Silence is that it was made at a time when doing the whole feminist thing still actually meant something, before people started to see such things with an eye for cynicism and post-modernism.

I like the lightness here too, though, and it’s something I noticed while watching Hannibal is yet another thing I think they got right (in comparison to the very straightlaced Red Dragon and Hannibal Rising) there; “If this door should fall down or – heh-heh – anything else …”, “No … no, you ate yours,” – I think part of the reason I for one really didn’t object to Thomas Harris thinking a romance was spawned here is because of how the sharp minds of Clarice and Hannibal right from the off even resembled one another in the humour department.

It’s really just one of those perfect movies you can’t say much of for or against, being as it’s there in front of you as it is and it couldn’t be any other way. Even though I practically know it by heart, I still love it, could even watch it over again right now just a few days after watching it before. It’s classic Jodie, definitive Hopkins, perfect in genre; basically, more deserving of the Oscars it received than just about anything since. What else is there to say?

I’d truly forgotten how fantastic some of the sequences in this one are, having really only seen it once, at the time of its release, and probably in a rather shoddy format. I’m surprised to find it now even better than I remember, and I remembered it as pretty good; out of all the Hannibal movies that have followed the classic Silence of the Lambs, prequels and sequel alike, this is the one perhaps that most closely resembles it. Kristi Zea back on board as production designer certainly contributes to that; Danny Elfman’s score draws heavily on Howard Shore’s work; and in addition to Anthony Hopkins reprising Hannibal, there’s as Anthony Heald Dr. Chilton; most crucially, I think this must’ve completely bypassed me when the movie first came out, Ted Tally returns as screenwriter.

I certainly think I’d still say Manhunter is the better adaptation of this story – I haven’t seen that one in a while, but I know that everytime I watch it (and I’ve seen it a few times) I’m pleasantly surprised by it all over again – but I like that even with the time passed since Silence, someone thought it worth taking the time to fill in the gap in the Hopkins Lecter series; and considering that time passed, it’s surprising how well it works – especially that last scene of him in the cell, that leads directly into Silence ... like, how bold can you get in goading comparisons? When you watch them all in order like I have this week, the effect is really quite amazing. This is all before even mentioning the other cast members: Ralph Fiennes, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman … had enough yet? ... how about Harvey Keitel, Frank Whaley, and Lalo Schifrin as a conductor? Boy did they pull all the stops out on this one, and it was far from a wasted effort. I didn’t even mention Edward Norton, like he even needs mention. But the most amazing thing about all this? It’s directed by Brett Ratner. Which kinda almost makes the movie a small miracle all over again.