Getting Paid to Watch
Now Playing: Hollywood spring offerings give me a headache
THE AMITYVILLE HORROR (2005, Andrew Douglas)- substituting sub-RING stingers for real scares, the film pretty much evaporates on contact, leaving little more than the vague feeling that you've kinda wasted your time. Mostly serves as a concrete example of a cinematic pet peeve of mine- anachronistic anatomy. To wit: the film takes place in the seventies, yet not only does Ryan Reynolds have uber-defined abs, but his chest is completely hairless in the heyday of chest hair. If you're not going to stick to the time period, why bother setting it there at all, hilarious "based on a true story" attribution aside? Still, fairly inoffensive stuff compared to the outrage of TEXAS LAMESAW, and Melissa George and Philip Baker Hall are pretty good here. Rating: *1/2.

KING'S RANSOM (2005, Jeff Byrd)- pretty much a textbook example of a Film That Wasn't Made For Me. The characters here are all cartoonish morons, but many of the digs are reserved for white people, particularly Jay Mohr's pushover of a kidnapper. I wasn't offended so much by the fact that white people in general were made the butt of jokes (heaven knows that African-Americans have been the butt of white jokes for centuries) as I was by how deeply unfunny the film is. I laughed not a single time, to be honest. Luckily for me I was getting paid to watch. Rating: 0 stars.

THE INTERPRETER (2005, Sydney Pollack)- works all right as a thriller, with an effective suspense sequence aboard a city bus, but this is a middling effort from a filmmaker who has fared well with thrillers in the past. The UN here is painted less as the semi-listless organization our current administration have turned it into as an idealistic school-kid's image of a one-stop diplomacy shop, enforcing international law and bringing genocidal leaders to justice. Kidman and Penn underplay effectively, but Pollack's uninspired direction betrays them somewhat, luxuriating too much in closeups that emphasize Kidman's bangs or Penn's actorly stylings. Likewise, the "shock" in the climactic sequence hardly registers, not least because Pollack tips his hand, but also because audiences have become suspect of major characters who disappear for extended periods of time. Rating: **.