Celluloid Heroes

You think your average juror is King Solomon? No, he’s a roofer with a mortgage. He wants to go home and sit in his Barcalounger and let the cable TV wash over him. And this man doesn’t give a single, solitary droplet of shit about truth, justice or your American way.

Be forewarned, while I normally avoid giving out plot spoilers in my reviews, I feel like it’s necessary this time to fully get my opinion across.

Runaway Jury is probably one of the more morally bankrupt mainstream movies I’ve seen. It stacks the deck completely in favor of one side in order to justify the deplorable actions of the film’s hero, which amount to no less than subverting the justice system to suit his own agenda. The fact that he is, in effect, giving the film’s villain a taste of his own medicine is completely irrelevent when our protagonist is also sinking to the same level or lower.

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That is a million dollar view for $900 a month.

In most of the places that I’ve lived, a water-stain on the ceiling is not scary. Annoying, yes; disgusting, absolutely, but I’ve never had the feeling that it was trying to kill me.

It was in that mindset that I first saw the previews to Dark Water. My initial instinct was quite cynical. Ooooh, dirty water! That’s so scaaary!

Okay, so I was wrong, which is, by itself, not exactly a newsworthy event. Dark Water is an effective, if predictable, supernatural thriller. I had most of the plot figured out about ten minutes after Dahlia Williams (Jennifer Connelly) moved into a dank, depressing but affordable apartment on Roosevelt Island in New York.

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