Jonathan Poritsky

Last night, at a mid­night screen­ing of Inception in NYC, the new trailer for Devil came up. The audi­ence, obvi­ously the tar­get demo­graphic, was wrapped up in it, very excited at the prospect of an enclosed hor­ror film (strangers stuck in an ele­va­tor with some sort of super­nat­ural ele­ment). That is, until the fol­low­ing title card came up: From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan. The house erupted into a load moan, very close to a boo. Then they all laughed off their unan­i­mous dis­dain. Then they applauded once the trailer wrapped.

Had they paid bet­ter atten­tion, they would see that M. Night penned the story, not even the script, while direct­ing cred­its go to Quarantine broth­ers John Erick and Drew Dowdle. It is clear that peo­ple are fed up with Shyamalan, espe­cially after the unfor­giv­able The Last Airbender, how­ever I think we can learn a lot about this reaction.

First off, the whole celebrity attach­ment thing is get­ting to be a bit much, espe­cially when even the press isn’t always tak­ing the time to look at who directed a film. I saw a great deal of mis­re­portage — no, not on blogs — about Robert Rodriguez direct­ing Predators, which is entirely untrue. Nimród Antal worked closely with Rodriguez to be sure, but the buck ulti­mately stops with the director.

Of course, Rodriguez is a name you want attached to a film like that. Viewers are clearly over M. Night’s trick­ery, but peo­ple should remem­ber his begin­nings. Shyamalan is a man of many tal­ents who, most would argue, has been cor­rupted by his fame. He started as a writer and is an extremely gifted sto­ry­teller, so I think the move to bring­ing his story to another direc­tor is per­fect. Perhaps we will even see him move away from the cam­era on more projects so he can slowly win back the hearts and minds of the hor­ror and thriller fans he has (not really) betrayed.

That being said, an entire film that takes place in an ele­va­tor is very easy to screw up. So we’ll just have to wait and see. The trailer itself looks pretty wonderful.

It’s entirely pos­si­ble that I’ve seen this film before, but it’s also pos­si­ble that I never swal­lowed it down all in one sit­ting. I’ll be brief:

There is only one thing not to love about Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman: the very seri­ous hunk of jarls­berg that must be downed while watch­ing it. Certainly, the film reeks of early 1990s over­writ­ten performance-vehicle sen­ti­men­tal pieces of cheese whiz. But that goes down much bet­ter if you take it with a grain of salt. Read on…

A solid if uno­rig­i­nal indie flick with mov­ing per­for­mances and a tight, quirky script is what I had hoped to see at the movies. Instead, I saw Sunshine Cleaning, which plays like an idea try­ing des­per­ately hard to find a story.

The film fol­lows Rose Lorkowski, played by Amy Adams, a down on her luck sin­gle mother in Albuquerque who makes ends meat by clean­ing houses. Rose’s sis­ter, Norah, is a for­mer punk-kid who never grew up, can’t hold down a job, and lives with their idio­syn­cratic father, played with respectable charm by Alan Arkin. When Rose’s police offi­cer boyfriend, who is mar­ried, tells her how much money there is to be made in clean­ing up messy crime scenes, a light­bulb goes off and the tiny glint of a plot begins to form. Of course, the two sis­ters start a busi­ness clean­ing up crime scenes while deal­ing with their own emo­tional hangups.

I’ve been look­ing for­ward to Tony Gilroy’s fol­lowup to his incred­i­ble Michael Clayton ever since I hot wind of it. Apparently, I’m not alone. The 6:30 show I tried to go to was sold out, as is this 7:35 show. It’s packed and there was a line when I got here at 6:50. I’m going into this blind ( haven’t read any reviews) so I’m really excited. Congrats Tony Gilroy. Now let’s just hope I like this one, I’ll let you know tomorrow.

Laundry is run­ning in the base­ment and I’m killing time by work­ing on the Valkyrie review and watch­ing TCM. I know, a trav­esty to dou­ble task with a film, but any­way, Rudolph Maté‘s 1948 noir pic The Dark Past was just on. I’ve never seen it before, but from my mud­dled van­tage point, it was pretty won­der­ful. The short of it is a ther­a­pist tries to cure a killer while he is being held hostage. Black and white, guns, cop­pers, and psy­cho­analy­sis. What could be better?! 

The film hinges on a real slick con­cept, essen­tially the pen being might­ier than the sword. Our main pro­tag, Dr. Collins, spends the bulk of the film try­ing to fig­ure out a neb­u­lous recur­ring dream of the das­tardly Al Walker, played by William Holden. Of course, the film is a cau­tion­ary tale, warn­ing that emo­tions left unchecked could rot, fes­ter, and grow into, well, into a mur­der­ous thief. Pretty basic stuff these days; the film plays like the last quar­ter of every episode of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”. Lee J. Cobb imbues Dr. Collins with an Atticus Finch level of impos­ing pater­nity. Hmmmmm, an ana­lytic cau­tion­ary noir film, do you think the bad guy might have some daddy issues?

So any­way, check this one out if you’ve got a chance. I enjoyed it. Now back to writing…