Friday, July 21, 2006

in which I complain that movies aren't as good as they used to be

To the Central Cinema to see Chaos, a kidnap thriller by the director of Ring. It's most interesting for the way it fractures time, although at least one plot strand gets completely lost because of this. Does the handyman actually kidnap the businessman's nephew? Did his "wife" tell the handyman the businessman's sister was an easy mark? Even unexplained, this subplot doesn't seem to advance anything in the story, other than getting the handyman away from the apartment so the bodies can be switched, which could have been achieved any number of other ways. Some lovely images--most particularly the two conspirators behind a cage of rain, and some haunting sequences of corpse disposal and corpse recovery; and a great lighting change towards the end during a fairly hot petting session in the back of a van--the handyman discovers the switchblade hidden in the woman's pocket, and suddenly the warm lighting changes to a cold morning light; it gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. There's also some great quasi-bondage sequences--people realizing what they're doing and going, "hey, this is kind of exciting!" A puzzling ending, which doesn't seem organic at all, just a convenient way of closing off the story--almost moralistic, as all the "bad" people get punished. Ultimately a frustrating movie, although a worthy noir. I suppose it's unfair to criticize something I can only read in subtitles, but it seems that all modern noirs are about the plotting, and none of them have good hard-boiled dialogue (save Tarentino, bless his heart). 8 people in the audience, although this place just projects video and has basically no advertising budget, so it's not surprising.
Final shot: repitition of symbolic opening shot.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home