Review: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

Directed by : David Slade
Starring : Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner, Xavier Samuel,
Synopsis : In "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse", Bella once again finds herself surrounded by danger as Seattle is ravaged by a string of mysterious killings and a malicious vampire continues her quest for revenge. In the midst of it all, she is forced to choose between her love for Edward and her friendship with Jacob—knowing that her decision has the potential to ignite the ageless struggle between vampire and werewolf. With her graduation quickly approaching, Bella is confronted with the most important decision of her life.

Review : The Game - 1997

Runtime : 2 hrs 9 mins
Genre : Dramas
Synopsis : For the follow-up to his dark crime thriller SEVEN, director David Fincher decided to remain in a film noir vein. The result is THE GAME, a fast-paced cinematic roller-coaster ride that stars... For the follow-up to his dark crime thriller SEVEN, director David Fincher decided to remain in a film noir vein.
Starring : Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, Deborah Kara Unger, James Rebhorn
Director : David Fincher

The Game is an intensely exciting puzzle-gimmick thriller, the kind of movie that lets you know from the start that it's slyly aware of its own absurdity (which is why it can then get away with it). In San Francisco, Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas), a wealthy investment banker, sits sipping whiskey and staring gloomily at CNN in his huge, dark, glow-lit mansion, the sort of place that Bruce Wayne might enjoy bidding on. All Nicholas really knows how to do in life is make money. He's a dullard, a control freak, a middle-aged corporate Scrooge. Rescue arrives in the form of his ne'er-do-well younger brother, Conrad (Sean Penn), who, on the day that Nicholas turns 48 — the same age his father was when he killed himself by jumping off the roof — presents him with an invitation to call Consumer Recreation Services, a sinister company housed in a crypto-fascist steel-and-glass office. The company designs elaborately staged and executed life ''games,'' each one tailored to tap the hidden emotional and therapeutic demands of the client. Since Nicholas Van Orton is such a stiff, his game, it seems clear, would need to be the wildest of rides. Hanging in the air — for Nicholas and the audience — is the irresistible lure of the forbidden.

Sure enough, Nicholas is soon facing a dizzy array of traps and terrors. He gets sent on taxi rides to hell, climbs around elevator shafts like Bruce Willis, and is drawn into an increasingly ominous relationship with a sexy waitress (Deborah Kara Unger, from Crash), who first bumps into him with a tray of drinks. His life becomes a daisy chain of existential terrors, each one steadily more dangerous.

The Game is a contemporary variant of Hitchcock's ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances — the myth of ecstatic anxiety he chiseled to capricious perfection in North by Northwest (the seed of all modern action movies). What's suspenseful here isn't simply the threat of the situations in which Nicholas finds himself. It's our curiosity about their hidden purpose — that, and the fact that Nicholas can't be sure about what's fake and what's ''real,'' what's part of the game and what's not. Is the waitress an impostor, or just someone who happened to spill a drink on him? More urgently: Are the game's anonymous designers actually trying to do Nicholas harm? The Game has the ingeniously unfolding, Chinese-box structure of something like Deathtrap (as well as a genre-teasing ''postmodernism'' that reminded me of Scream), yet it's also infused with a chic aura of yuppie dread. A fantasy-nightmare of giving up control and plunging through the safety net of your own perceptions, the movie is an elegant piece of pop paranoia — Kafka as roller-coaster ride.

The Game was directed by David Fincher, the dark wizard who made Seven and the egregiously underrated Alien3. Working from a script by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, Fincher has crafted a thriller about a man who self-consciously watches his life turn into a thriller. What happens in The Game won't stand up to much logical scrutiny — almost every twist is predicated on the game's planners knowing exactly what Nicholas' responses will be — yet, taken on its own far-fetched terms, it's a gripping series of fake-outs. Douglas, jowls flexing in outrage, taps into the bead-sweat desperation he knows how to inject with more energy than any other contemporary star. Emotionally, there's not much at stake in The Game — can Nicholas Van Orton be saved?! — but Douglas is the perfect actor to occupy the center of a crazed Rube Goldberg thriller. The movie has the wit to be playful about its own manipulations, even as it exploits them for maximum pulp impact~~~

THE GHOST WRITER : Review

Tony Blair, a war criminal?

That’s what Roman Polanski’s new film, “The Ghost Writer,” would have us believe. Polanski makes no attempt at subtlety as he tries to connect Blair with his fictional prime minister, Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). In the film, Lang is the handsome, charming, popular, recently retired British prime minister. Like Blair, who tried his hand at being a music producer before entering politics, Lang has started out as an actor. And like Blair, Lang is responsible for bring Great Britain into the Middle East war. Like Blair, Lang is married to a dark-haired, politically savvy beauty (Olivia Williams), and like many politicians, (though not necessarily Blair) it is hinted that Lang is romantically involved with his assistant (Kim Cattrall).

As the film opens, a body washes up on the shore of a Massachusetts island (Martha’s Vineyard--an allusion to the Bush compound?), suggesting a murder has occurred. The body turns out to belong to Lang’s ghostwriter, suggesting Lang is connected. Lang arrives at Martha’s Vineyard that night aboard a private jet emblazoned with the corporate name, “Hatherton,” a thinly veiled reference to Halliburton, suggesting corruption. And if the audience still doesn’t quite get it, Lang’s former cabinet minister, Robert Rycart (Robert Pugh), accuses Lang on CNN of acquiescing to waterboarding in Iraq. By the following day, an international court in The Hague has formally charged Lang as a war criminal. Yes, war criminal.

Politics aside, the film is an entertaining, though somewhat predictable, intellectual thriller. When a new ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) is hired to revise Lang's memoirs, he is immediately attacked by mysterious assailants who steal what appears to be Lang’s manuscript. Later, he finds clues and discrepancies left behind by the dead ghostwriter. McGregor is excellent as the unnamed Ghost, injecting humor as well as suspense into the story. Fittingly, the Ghost’s name is never revealed--fitting because everyone knows that public figures use speechwriters and ghostwriters to put their policies into words, but seldom are those writers given credit. Lang calls the writer “Man,” and he calls himself, with boyish self deprecation, “the Ghost.”

The film is awash with atmosphere. The Vineyard home where they work on the memoirs looks more like a bunker than a beach house-- dark, gloomy, and isolated. The Ghost writes in an office with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking wind-swept dunes, where throughout the day servants stridently but unsuccessfully try to sweep up the mess of leaves that constantly blows onto the patio -- perhaps a metaphor for the implied cover up of crime?

Supporting actors also add to the atmosphere, many of them almost cartoonish in the way they are presented. Watch for a bald and bloated Jim Belushi as the cigar-chomping publisher John Maddox, and a toothy, rat-faced Eli Wallach as the eccentric neighbor on the beach.

But politics really can't be set aside, especially when a film casts such a snide, insidious, and deliberate attack on a person of Tony Blair's caliber. Moreover, waterboarding hardly qualifies as a war crime. As an interrogation device it has been one of the most effective and one of the most humane. The sensation of drowning induces panic and fear of death, but no actual injury or permanent damage occurs. It's unpleasant, to be sure, and it shouldn't be used indiscriminately.

But horrifying, criminal torture? I don't think so. In fact, several journalists have subjected themselves willingly to waterboarding, in order to report on its effect. I haven't seen many journalists willingly submit to traditional torture techniques like electric shock, beating, or having their fingers cut off. If I were wrongfully accused and interrogated for a crime, I would rather it be by a method like this than by beating or cutting.

Unfortunately, if I were indeed a war criminal, rightfully accused of terrorism, the publicity surrounding waterboarding would probably give me the courage to persevere, since I now know that my interrogators aren't really going to let me drown. Consequently, the effectiveness of waterboarding is drying up, thanks to the publicity and attention given to it by folks like the self-righteous Roman Polanski.