Keyword Archive:
Murder

Murder by Death (1976)

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
★★★★★

No pulse, no heartbeat. If condition does not change, this man is dead.

This is Neil Simon’s attempt to do a Mel Brooks number of the genre of detective fiction and it’s probably for the best that he tackle it, because I think that the director of Blazing Saddles and High Anxiety would have wielded too blunt an instrument to make it work. Even with Simon’s slightly more sophisticated touch, Murder by Death is comedy in broad strokes, but even if you’re not a fan of murder mysteries, enough jokes score to make it a diverting 90 minutes.

Murder by Death

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A Mighty Heart (2007)

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
★★★★★

I am not terrorized. You can’t be terrorized.

Despite its Hallmark Hall of Fame title, A Mighty Heart is a spare, unblinking look at the last days of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl through eyes of his wife, Mariane, and those who desperately tried to find him after he was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan. With a subject just asking to be sensationalized, director Michael Winterbottom’s matter-of-fact documentary-style approach is not only much more effective, it’s downright commendable.

A Mighty Heart

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Bubble (2006)

Monday, April 17th, 2006
★★★★★

This place is poor.

Bubble, the first movie of Steven Soderbergh’s six picture deal with Mark Cuban’s HDNet, is a two-pronged experiment in both distribution and technique. On the business side, it’s the first film to have a deliberately orchestrated simultaneous release in theaters, on cable television and on DVD. Soderbergh and others believe that the DVD “window,” the period of time between a film’s theatrical release and its home video release, is inexorably shrinking to nothing. Others, especially some in the movie theater industry, think that this window is rather vital to their business model and that Soderbergh is full of it. This led more than a few theater chains to boycott this film because of its simultaneous DVD release.

Bubble

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Lady in White (1988)

Monday, November 28th, 2005
★★★★★

Help me find her!

Lady In White in an Old-Fashioned Ghost Story in every sense of the word, probably more effective told around a camp fire than it is as film, but it’s no slouch on the screen, either. Writer, director, producer and composer Frank LaLoggia obviously saw this film as a labor of love and, despite occasionally spoon-feeding the audience a little too much, he has crafted a warmly affectionate look at small town life in 1962. In fact, the portrait of Willowpoint Falls is so vivid that the ghost story almost seems like an intrusion. On the other hand, I guess that’s what ghosts do, dramatically speaking.

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Family Plot (1976)

Sunday, November 27th, 2005
★★★★★

Isn’t it touching how a perfect murder has kept our friendship alive all these years.

The last Alfred Hitchcock film, 50 years after the first, showed that the director had not lost his macabre sense of humor. Family Plot may lack the taut, intricate plot of his more famous works but it succeeds well for what it attempts to be, a light comedy-thriller. It’s a fun, unassuming film, especially compared to the R-rated Frenzy and the cold-war machinations of Torn Curtain and Topaz.

Family Plot

My original memories of this film, from viewing it perhaps 20 years ago, told me that this film was styleless, that Hitchcock’s setbound directorial style gave it the ambiance of a made-for-TV movie-of-the-week. I was wrong, perhaps due to the fact that my previous experience was with a VHS copy of the film, projected on a large screen in a college lecture hall. That sort of presentation is never going to do a film justice.

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Mystic River (2003)

Monday, October 24th, 2005
★★★★★

Maybe someday you forget what it’s like to be human and maybe then, it’s okay.

In Clint Eastwood‘s Mystic River, a tragedy that shattered childhood innocence reaches out to destroy lives decades later. In a way, one of the main characters is murdered as a twelve-year-old but takes thirty years to die.

Mystic River

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Rear Window (1954)

Thursday, October 20th, 2005
★★★★★

People do a lot of things in private they couldn’t possibly explain in public.

Three of Alfred Hitchcock‘s most famous films, Rope, Lifeboat and Rear Window, work around a very restricted geography, two New York apartments and a lifeboat. Of the three, Rear Window is the most successful as a film. It takes place almost entirely with the Greenwich apartment of globetrotting photographer L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (James Stewart), marooned for the last six weeks with a broken leg suffered on his last assignment.

Rear Window

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Rope (1948)

Tuesday, October 18th, 2005
★★★★★

Of course, he was a Harvard graduate. That might be grounds for justifiable homicide.

Rope is Alfred Hitchcock’s purest exercise in stylistic experimentation. In adapting the play “Rope’s End” to the screen, Hitchcock wanted the action to seem unbroken and continuous. The problem was, of course, that film magazines could only hold eight minutes of film. That meant that every eight minutes, the director would have to find some way of masking the transition to the next reel. Usually that meant having a character momentarily block the camera with their back. The experiment was only partially successful because, quite frankly, each cut only managed to draw undue attention to itself.

Rope

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