This week your faithful correspondent catches up with two overrated movies, each of them suffering from its own big, basic flaw that seems mainly attributable to nobody being bothered to flesh out (no pun intended) and execute (ditto) a decent half-idea.
First up is House of Sand and Fog, which has, of course, beautiful casting and a promising set-up: a fatal battle of wills between two essentially well-meaning but very desperate people. Then, alas, there’s the wild card that is Ron Eldard’s short-fused, xenophobic cop, with his totally inordinate degree of influence on the course of events. He seems to have stumbled in from a different film and genre altogether, or more likely to have been brought in as insurance against Kingsley and Connelly’s characters bonding over their perfectly matched freakish intensity, working things out, and robbing the movie of the shock and gravitas it’s so determined to deliver. Thanks to the cop’s antics generally–and to the gun that hitches a ride into the climactic sequence with him specifically–the movie’s ending, though obscenely sad, is too much of a freak accident, too detached from the principal characters’ wills and actions, to count as tragedy. Without the cop this might have been a good movie, but who can tell?
Shaun of the Dead is a pretty good joke while it lasts, which it does for almost half its length, at which point it runs out of steam and turns into…a straight-faced retread of what it’s supposed to be parodying. Whoops. The movie squeezed a little more goodwill out of me than it strictly should have, by virtue of the title character’s sweetness. But I got a far bigger kick out of both the straight-ahead 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead and the inspired mess 28 Days Later–it’s a better problem to suffer from too many ideas than from too few. There’s some point to made here about the zombie-mall movie being too close to a joke in its pure state to be successfully parodied, but I lost a version of this post once already last night and, let’s face it, it’s way past my bedtime now. If this makes sense to you, though, tell me why in email. If it doesn’t…oh, go ahead and email me too.
Next up: The Taste of Others. Up to the standards of Look at Me? We’ll see.