Burl reviews Mulholland Drive! (2001)

 

Attention malingerers, it’s Burl, here with a review of a fine example of Lynchiana! In fact it might be one of the Lynchiest films he ever made, and that’s saying a lot! Of course the picture I’m speaking of is not Dune, but Mulholland Drive, which I remember seeing in a cavernous old Vancouver movie palace nearly on my own in the cinema, which itself was a somewhat Lynchian experience, ha ha! Plus I went to school with a guy named David Lynch, and while that has nothing to do with anything, I thought I’d mention it!

So I hear you asking “Ha ha, Burl, what’s this movie about?” Whoa, bear, not so fast! Well, after all, it’s a dream, and me explaining the story to you will sound a bit like I’m telling you one of my own dreams! It can be boring and even annoying to hear about someone else’s dream, and I think there are some who take this movie, or any mildly challenging oneiric work, in that negative spirit! Ha ha, not me though! I love a good dream movie, and this is one!

There’s a car crash on Mulholland Drive in the hills above Hollywood, and a lady, pretty but mindstunned, and played by Laura Harring from Silent Night, Deadly Night III and The Forbidden Dance, stumbles out of the wreck! She sneaks into a house and falls asleep, and the next day Betty, played by Naomi Watts from Matinee and The Ring, arrives in Los Angeles straight from Deep River, Ontario, all bright smiles and big eyes, and in the company of an elderly couple she met on the plane! She’s staying at the home of her absent aunt, which of course is the house the car crash woman is squatting in, and is part of a Hollywood complex managed by Ann Miller from On the Town! Spying a poster for Gilda, the amnesiac woman calls herself Rita, and together Rita and Betty set out to discover Rita’s true identity!

Meanwhile, as a squad of cops that includes Robert Forster from Alligator investigate the Mulholland car crash, Justin Theroux from Miami Vice is trying to direct a movie! He's receiving cryptic casting offers he can't refuse from a pair of gangsters, the Castigliane Brothers, who are played by the film’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, and that fine old fishface Dan Hedaya, well known from Endangered Species, Buckaroo Banzai, Tightrope, Commando, and so many others! Also meanwhile, Mark Pellegrino from Bad Meat plays an imbecilic hit man who must shoot everyone who sees him, and of course there’s the vignette with the two guys and the horror-hobo behind Winkie’s!

Meanwhile meanwhile, Betty gets a chance to do her big audition! In the office of movie executive James Karen, whom we know from Time Walker, Betty plays a scene with a leathery Troy McClure-type star played by leathery Troy McClure-type Chad Everett from The Intruder Within! Ha ha, she really gives ‘er and wows everyone in the room, including an agency rep played by Lee Grant from Damien: Omen II! And indeed it is an electrifying scene, something you might expect to happen in a naïf’s aspirational dream of Hollywood!   

And of course there’s the Cowboy, and what else can be said of this sprightly lad? His warning to the film director, that if he does good, he will see the Cowboy one more time, and if he does bad he will see the Cowboy two more times, is potent enough on its own that no follow-through is required, and take that Chekhov and anyone else who needs a continuity of incident in their dramas! Ha ha!

And then at a certain point everything changes, and characters you thought were one thing turn out to be another, and a movie you figured for a neo-noir is so far around the genre wheel that it’s almost a neo-nor again; and then Rebekah Del Rio busts out an amazing performance of Roy Orbison’s Crying, but in Spanish, and the old laughing people come crawling out like bugs, and you say to yourself ha ha, this is weird! But it’s a dream! all a dream of Hollywood, and thus a dream about a dream factory that was inspired by the dream factory itself, and so where does cinema end and dream begin, and is there a line of demarcation, however fuzzy, and why need there be anyway? And let us embrace mystery for once, and all together we'll cry "Ha ha!"

Sometimes in a movie I might be totally out to lunch as to what’s going on, but within my haze of confusion I suddenly recognize that the story has come to its proper end and I think boy oh boy, if the movie ends right now that would be just perfect… and then, what do you know, it ends! That has happened now and again - Irma Vep is one example - and that’s what happened with Mulholland Drive! Let’s call it Unexpected Perfect Ending Syndrome! It’s one of my favourite things a movie can do, and accordingly I give Mulholland Drive four dumpsters!

Burl reviews Force of Evil! (1948)

 

Ha ha, it’s Burl here with some political noir for you! This is the first picture made by Abraham Polonsky, a cool guy who got himself blacklisted for not naming names, while his own name was named by The Long Goodbye’s Sterling Hayden, who regretted doing it all the rest of his life! Polonsky was a Marxist practically from cradle to grave, but, unlike too many of his fellow travelers, was smart enough to soundly reject Stalinism! His askance view of capitalism, largely shared by that ol' pinko Burl, is naturally on full view in his debut picture as a director, Force of Evil!

When I thought idly of Force of Evil over the years, I thought of it as a boxing picture, but that’s because of Body and Soul, which Polonsky wrote! John Garfield from We Were Strangers is in both movies, and he stars here as Joe Morse, a slick Wall Street lawyer in the employ of numbers racketeer Tucker, played by Roy Roberts from The Big Trees! Joe’s older brother Leo, who raised him after the death of their parents and who put him through law school, but from whom he is now estranged, is also in the numbers business, but in a benevolent, small-timer sort of a way!

Leo is played by Thomas Gomez from Key Largo, and boy is he good! He can whip himself into a froth just as well as Eugene Pallette can, but you really know he means it! All the actors are good, in fact, including stagestress Beatrice Pearson as Leo’s innocent secretary Doris, who eventually, if briefly, succumbs both to Joe’s corruption and his slab-faced charms! Marie Windsor from ‘Salem’s Lot plays Mrs. Tucker, the vampish gangster’s wife with whom Joe occasionally dallies; Paul Fix from Strange Cargo and Jet Pilot is the even more dangerous mobster Ficco; and Howland Chamberlain from Feudin’, Fussin’ and a-Fightin’ is Leo’s milquetoast slaphead accountant Mr. Bauer, and they must have got him at the same shop they get all the bald, moustached, bespectacled gangland accountants for TV and movies! Ha ha!

Though he discovers his moral bearings near the end of the picture, Joe spends most of it being a croquefort, even if his wish to help his brother is genuine! Ha ha, he does little jerky things like put Doris up on a shelf when she disagrees with him, and big jerky things like coming up with an idea to destroy all the small-time numbers bankers in town so his buddy Tucker can take them over! Apparently, you see, the folks who bet on these numbers always pick the same number, 776, every July 4, and Joe sees to it that 776 indeed comes up this particular Independence Day, meaning the small books will have to pay off big, and thereby get squeezed dry!

Well, Joe tries to warn his brother about it before it happens, and tries to help him after, but his clever scheme ends up costing Leo everything, and himself nearly that! Ha ha, there are no happy endings when going up against the forces of greed and capitalism (but I repeat myself, ha ha), which are after all simply code names for the force of evil referred to in the title!

It‘s a terrific, crackerjack picture! Joe seems like a typical film noir failpuss, but he’s actually quite a complex character, and it’s easy to get wrapped up in his story! Polonsky does a marvelous job with his first stint behind the megaphone, and one wishes he’d been given more chances rather than falling to the ridiculous blacklist! On top of all this, the picture will teach you about the numbers racket, and you’ll finally be able to explain to your friends just what it is! I give Force of Evil three and a half jolly newsboys!

Burl reviews The Long Goodbye! (1973)

 

With a scratch of the match it’s Burl, here to review a hard-boiled detective story in shaggy 70s garb! Of course there are movies like The Late Show, and I’ve already reviewed The Big Fix, Klute, and the great Night Moves, but all must bow to the king daddy of Me Decade noir revamps, The Long Goodbye!

Ha ha, this is a long-time favourite of mine, with the only turn-off being the running theme of domestic violence against ladies! It’s not as though the movie endorses this, but it’s hard to watch sometimes! Given that, it’s amazing how delightful the movie nevertheless is in telling the story of how the scales fall from Philip Marlowe’s eyes and he finally ceases to be the most passive detective in film history! Ha ha, and at the end of the picture, after Marlowe has finally asserted himself and taken direct action, he’s so delighted with himself that he dances a merry jig!

Back to the start, however: Elliott Gould from The Silent Partner is Marlowe, who lives in a scrumptious tower building near the Hollywood Bowl and has a gang of topless candle-dipping yoga hippies for neighbours! The opening fifteen minutes of the movie are devoted to Marlowe’s efforts to feed his cat, because that’s just the sort of picture this picture is! Soon his buddy Terry Lennox, played by the famous horsehidesman and inventor of Big League Chew, Jim Bouton, appears at Marlowe’s doorstep and requests a ride to Mexico, which Marlowe grants! And thus begins his troubles!

Nina Van Pallandt from The Sword and the Sorcerer and the fantastic Cutter's Way plays Eileen Wade, who calls on Marlowe to find her husband Roger, played by Sterling Hayden from Dr. Strangelove doing John Huston playing Ernest Hemingway! Hayden is terrific as the blustering beachside author, and Marlowe quickly locates him at a clinic run by Dr. Verringer, a role essayed by Henry Gibson from Innerspace and Tulips at his near-slimiest! All this would seem to have as much relation to the main narrative as Marlowe’s troubles with his cat, and this turns out to be the case, in that it has plenty to do with it! Ha ha!

Marlowe also has troubles with a vicious gangster called Marty Augustine, and when you want someone to play an unpredictably brutal crime lord, who better than the director of On Golden Pond, Mark Rydell? The picture also features little appearances by the likes of David Arkin from Cannonball, David Carradine, whom we recall from Armed Response, Rutanya Alda from The Stuff, Arnold Schwarzenegger from Predator, and George Wyner from Fletch! And then of course there’s the security guard who does impressions: a marvelous creation indeed!

It’s one of the most Los Angeles movies ever made, and I guess that’s really saying something! It’s also, I suppose, one of the most Robert Altman movies ever made, though not necessarily the Robert Altmaniest! (M*A*S*H or McCabe & Mrs. Miller or Nashville or even Short Cuts might take that prize!) And finally it's one of the most 1970s movies ever made, ha ha, which is another feather in its cap so far as I'm concerned! It undoes the detective genre, subjecting its gumshoe to a series of indignities, inconveniences, and downright punishments, all the while underlining how decent a fellow he is at heart! But, ha ha, he’ll only be pushed so far, though that limit is a lot farther than a Marlowe played by, say, Bogart would accept!

Quite frankly I think that if I made a list of my top twenty movies, this would be on it! It has a singular atmosphere, note-perfect performances, great and understated cinematography, and a theme song that plays over and over again, on radios, in supermarkets, or by the efforts of a Mexican marching band! It’s a very special motion picture, and if you haven’t seen it, I thoroughly recommend it, with the caveat that it contains some very unpleasant violence against women! I give The Long Goodbye four Walter Brennan impressions!

Burl reviews Pier 5, Havana! (1959)

 

Ày-üho, it’s Burl, here to review a picture shot, at least partially, in good old Havana, Cuba, reportedly in that small window of time between when Castro took power and when Americans figured out that he was a Communist! Ha ha, so it was against the odds, in an era when anti-Communist sentiment was still pretty strong and capitalism venerated as a universal balm, that a funny little anti-Bastista, pro-Revolution mystery-actioner was produced, which we now know as Pier 5, Havana!

It’s a picture made with economy by Edward L. Cahn, who also brought us Creature With the Atom Brain and Zombies of Mora Tau, but they nevertheless did get down to Cuba for some location work, and I even recognized some of the locations! Ha ha, I went to Havana in the 1990s and really enjoyed myself there, and one of the amazing things is that the city, its buildings and its vehicles, its bars and hotels and museums, and even many of its people, seem to have been preserved as in aspic from the very time period depicted in this picture! It’s quite a fascinating place, and I recommend a visit!

Pier 5, Havana is more or less a budget version of The Third Man, with a pugnacious American not overburdened by brains on the search for an old friend who has disappeared! There are big differences, though: here, the American is Steve Daggett, played by Cameron Mitchell from movies as diverse as Deadly Prey, Action U.S.A., Without Warning and Raw Force, and he’s more proactive than old Holly Martins was; while the missing figure, Hank, is a souse, but otherwise a jolly enough fellow rather than a murderous, amoral dealer of bad black market medicines!

Steve Daggett’s adventure through Cuba in its immediate post-revolution aftermath takes him first into the custody of amiable, crafty policeman Lt. Garcia, played by non-Hispanic Michael Granger from Murder By Contract! Garcia in turn takes Daggett to see his old love Monica, essayed by willowy Allison Hayes, perhaps most famous from Gunslinger; she had first married the disappeared Hank and then taken up with a penthouse smoothie called Ricardo, played by Eduardo Noriega from High Risk!

Daggett runs into trouble with a gang of Batista supporters, who put a brutal punching on him and leave him to crawl around on the floor like a hen! Nestor Paiva from Tarantula and Otto Waldis from Artists and Models are part of this gang’s brain trust, and their plot involves bombing various buildings being used by the new Castro administration! Ha ha, by Guevara!

When Hank, a man barely alive, stumbles out of the jeep with which he narrowly escaped from the Batista-ites, he turns out to be played by Logan Field from Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers! Ha ha, by this time Daggett is in full noir detective mode and the picture offers double dealings, phone booth knifings, fake crates of chocolate, gangplank rolldowns, and pierside punchfights: the whole bit! The action gets a little talky here and there, and the narrative complexity the picture initially teases us with has dissolved into beardwax by the conclusion! Still, the pro-Castro take is just so unexpected and strange that interest is maintained throughout, and it’s nice to see Mitchell in an heroic role, even if he comes off as a bit of a dimbulb! I enjoyed my viewing, and I give Pier 5, Havana a couple of aspirin!

Burl reviews 52 Pick-Up! (1986)

It’s Burl here with a little 80s neo-noir! I guess it’s more just a thriller - it doesn’t attempt to recapture the noir style like Body Heat or something, but at the same time it has many of the tropes we associate with the noir genre, in particular a main character who finds himself in a quicksand of trouble thanks to his own poor judgment! The patsy in question is played by famed leatherman Roy Scheider, whom we know so well from Jaws and Sorcerer, and the picture is called 52 Pick-Up!

Scheider plays a wealthy industrialist who hasn’t forgotten his blue-collar roots, and who, despite being married to Ann-Margret from Grumpy Old Men, is playing a game of bohankie on the side with the lamentably late Kelly Preston from Mischief! A blackmail gang made up of John Glover from Gremlins 2, Clarence Williams III from Tough Guys Don’t Dance, and living gumdrop Robert Trebor from My Demon Lover take the requisite pictures and put the screws to the fancy car-driving beefjerky!

You can guess where it goes from there! Scheider immediately confesses to his wife, then sets about resisting the blackmailers with all his leather! They raise the stakes, and soon grisly murder becomes a flower in their bouquet! Scheider is implicated, so can’t go to the cops, and because this is an 80s movie it eventually comes down to such predictable events as a gun battle in a house and, finally, an exploding car! Ha ha!

John Frankenheimer, who brought us The Train and Prophecy, is the somewhat unlikely director of the picture, and he gives it the kind of B movie sauce someone like Alan Pakula or Sidney Lumet would have eschewed! It’s a little bit too bad the Elmore Leonard story was relocated from Detroit to Los Angeles, and the L.A. location is never used to its full potential; but on the other hand, the cast all do fine work! The leads are all good, as are the blackmailers, and there’s solid support from the likes of Vanity, whom we recall from Deadly Illusion, and Doug McClure from Tapeheads and Humanoids From the Deep! Clarence Williams III is especially good here, as the sort of scary fellow you’d be better off avoiding!

It’s no super-barnburner, but this is a well put together 80s thriller that gets lost in all the Jagged Edges and Morning Afters and what have you! And, ha ha, it’s a Cannon production, so it’s not afraid to get a little sleazy around the edges, with the pornoo parties and so forth! I enjoyed 52 Pick-Up, and I give it two and a half deadly car cassettes!

Burl reviews Niagara! (1953)

Hi, Burl here, and welcome to the falls! Yes, I always wondered if the movie Niagara had much to do with Niagara Falls themselves, and I’m here to report that the answer is boy, do they! Ha ha! The great falls feature so heavily in this move that they had to invent a special device to place over the camera lens to keep it clear of mist! It’s true!

The location photography is only one of the charms of this picture! Henry Hathaway directed it, and I confess that I always associate his name with Westerns, even though he made plenty of films noir and other types of pictures too! Ha ha, he’s one of those journeymen, all right! And he does a fine job on this movie, which I guess you might call a sort of film noir, although it was shot in rich, three-strip Technicolor by the marvelous Joe "Bigger Than Life" MacDonald!

I didn’t know much about this one before watching it, except that Marilyn Monroe was in it! And indeed she is, but she’s not really the star! Except of course she is the star; how could she not be? She looks stunning here of course, and her performance as a lady unhappily married to Joseph Cotten, is solid enough to transcend her status as an icon!

Monroe and Cotten are staying at the Rainbow Falls Motel, one of those places Humbert and Lolita might have stayed in on their own trek through America! Except the Rainbow Falls Motel is in Canada, and most of the action takes place there, or in a tower near the bridge across the river, or in those tunnels and balconies that surround the Canadian falls! The unplaceable accents of the police who investigate the goings-on mark them as Canadian, ha ha!

And just what are these goings-on? Well, at the same motel as Monroe and Cotten are a sensible young wife and her dope of a husband, who get mixed up in the other couple’s drama, realizing that Monroe is having an affair with some other fellow; and we viewers learn that Monroe and her boyfriend are planning to get rid of Cotten by bopping him and tossing him into the cataract! A bell tower playing a certain tune will indicate that the plan has come off, but in fact everything goes sideways, and matters come to a head with Cotton and the young wife heading to their doom over the great falls themselves!

Ha ha, it’s all very Hitchcock, and one can imagine old Sir Alfred having a crack at this story! But he’d have added some wrinkles to it, a few extra suspense setpieces, more detecting from the detective, and more humour! As it is, there are some marvelous moments, like the bell tower murder and the final scene at the falls! Unfortunately there are no scenes at the Niagara Falls Museum, which I once toured, finding oddities like a Zulu warrior accouterment called “Penus Cover” and a fierce, towering stuffed bear with a little card in front of him reading “Grizzle Bear - He Killed Six Men!” Ha ha, the museum is now gone, and its collection in the hands of a Toronto millionaire’s estate, but I’d like to have seen it on film, that’s for sure!

Anyway, Niagara was great fun, if occasionally stagy (some of the dialogue scenes in the motel rooms go on a bit long) and not always up to the full potential of the story! It’s great to see this tourist mecca the way it was in the 1950s, before the hotel towers and the sketchy attractions! I recommend a viewing of Niagara, and I give it two and a half records crumbled up in anger!

Burl reviews My Favorite Brunette! (1947)

Hi there all you mugs, and happy summer solstice! It’s Burl here to review a film noir comedy, a spoof of the genre that came out as noir was still in its fairly early days: yes, it’s a Bob Hope picture called My Favorite Brunette!

Of course we know Hope from Son of Paleface, and here he plays baby photographer Ronnie Jackson, a chatty coward who harbors dreams of becoming a real private eye! He tells his tale in flashback from death row, and it goes as follows: his office is connected to that of a genuine private dick, who is played in surprise cameo fashion by a just-leaving-town Alan Ladd, the wee actor who may or may not have been in Island of Lost Souls, ha ha! When the beautiful Dorothy Lamour, well known from Creepshow 2, walks into the detective’s office, Ronnie Jackson takes advantage of Ladd’s absence to step into the role of detective himself! (Lamour’s character is called Carlotta, which immediately puts the viewer in mind of Vertigo!)

Immediately Ronnie becomes embroiled in a kidnapping case, and soon finds himself facing down a gallery of classic nogoodniks! These include Peter Lorre (from Muscle Beach Party), Lon Chaney Jr. (from House of Frankenstein), John Hoyt (from Desperately Seeking Susan) and Ann Doran (from Them!)! Hope dispenses great zingers all the while, and there are comic set pieces as when Lorre moves an important piece of pseudo-evidence all around the room, in hopes that the incompetent, unobservant Ronnie will find it and thereby be mislead! Ronnie and Carlotta take a detour to a bughouse, where Ronnie must act loco! Ha ha, he doles out plenty of funny business here! And others dole it out on him, as when a cop threatens to punch Ronnie in the nose so hard, it’ll look like other people’s noses!

Then we come to the events which lead to death row! A professor is murdered, and the evidence points to Ronnie! Of course, the knife-waving Lorre is the real killer, and he’s part of a conspiracy that operates much the way James Mason and the boys did in North By Northwest! They take over a big house whose owners are away and make it their lair, then when Ronnie escapes their clutches and comes back with the police, they’ve changed everything around to make it look as though Ronnie’s a crazy man! Ha ha, Hitch went to see this one, that’s for sure, or Ernest Lehman did at least!

It’s a funny picture, but the great thing is, it’s also a genuine noir! It was photographed in reasonably moody chiaroscuro by Lionel Lindon, who had already shot both Road to Utopia and The Blue Dahlia, so he was well qualified for the gig! Peter Lorre does well by the comedy, but works hard to convey a genuine menace, and he succeeds! Hope spends the whole picture calling him names, like “gremlin” and, most often, “cupcake,” and it just makes Lorre more and more angry!

Unfortunately there’s not much of a payoff - we never even learn if the bad guys (whose plot I confess I never really understood) were caught or not! But that’s okay, because at the end we get another comedy cameo, this one from Der Bingle himself, who plays the executioner disappointed that he doesn’t get to pull the switch on Hope! Ha ha!

In the end, My Favorite Brunette is a fine evening’s entertainment, the more so if you’ve got an appreciation for Bob Hope’s tiger growl! I give it three McGuffin maps!

Burl reviews Lassiter! (1984)

Hut hut, it’s Burl! That’s right – Burl talking! I’m here to review a picture that’s long been forgotten and swept into the dustbin, and that picture is called Lassiter! Ring any bells? Ha ha, I thought not!

You might be more familiar with the picture’s star, Tom Selleck, who of course is well known for his roles in Terminal Island and Midway, and, of course, High Road to China! He stars as Lassiter, of course, who is a jewel thief living in pre-war London for reasons of his own! Lassiter seems to have a pretty good life: he creeps around in the houses of the rich, plunders their valuables and then goes home to his taxi dancer girlfriend, Jane Seymour – Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman herself!

But then suddenly an extremely angry Bob Hoskins shows up in the company of a meek FBI man (played by Joe Regalbuto from The Sword and the Sorcerer) and demands that Lassiter must steal diamonds from the Nazis! Ha ha, Lassiter doesn’t want to, but they pressure him pretty hard! The rest of the picture involves Lassiter refusing this offer he can’t refuse, and planning the job, and then figuring out how he can get away from the nasty Hoskins, who actually presents more of a threat than the Germans!

It’s June of 1939 in this scenario, so the war is a couple of months away from being on in earnest! I guess then it makes sense that the Nazis would never seem particularly threatening, but on the other hand they make such attempts to create nasty antagonists – the sadistic dragon-lady played by Lauren “Malone” Hutton, and a brutal henchman essayed by none other than Dim from A Clockwork Orange – that the failure is particularly notable, and egregious!

For most of its running time, the picture seems to be completely twist-free, with everyone expressing their motivations and intentions with complete honesty! Ha ha, thankfully the last act features a bit of double-dealing, but it’s too little and too late I’m afraid!

Selleck and his period-inappropriate moustache engage in a few lite-action scenes, but they’re never very exciting, and are scored with completely the wrong sort of music! Sure, the tootling jazz music may be of the time, but it drains the picture of any suspense or excitement in might otherwise have managed! Ha ha, why not use, say, the sort of music that you’d have found in the crime movies of 1939? A much better choice!

The picture had a medium-decent budget, and some talented people behind the camera! But it’s not the lavish style-fest the poster implies, and is often a little bland in its execution! The director (a nice guy – ha ha, I worked with him once!) mostly does TV, and that shows here, I think, even if he does try to spice things up with a little nudity and kinkiness! Ha ha, and the Nazi dragon lady bit is so ludicrously overdone as to be ha-ha-halarious!

The thing that might have saved the picture, even in the absence of style, suspense and complex plotting, would have been a performance of Cary Grant-level charisma from Selleck! But, sadly, he’s pretty boring here! He manages to deliver a few lines pretty well (“Why, has my hair turned white?”), but there’s no pep to his performance, and very little to the film itself either! I give Lassiter one and a half end credits theme songs by Taco!

Burl reviews Side Effects! (2013)

Burl here, writing you a prescription… for murder! Ha ha, I’m here to review Side Effects, the Steven Soderbergh picture which he claims will be his last theatrical release! That Liberace picture was supposed to be a theatrical release, I understand, but it was a TV release instead, ha ha!

It’s already been said in other reviews, but the greatest twist in this unexpectedly twisty picture is that it’s not the genre you expect it to be, and continue to expect it to be even by nearly the halfway point! No earnest study of modern-day pill-popping this, but a patsy-man film noir in the vein of Double Indemnity! And ha ha, if you haven’t seen it and plan to, you may wish to skip the rest of this review, because I’ll probably give something away!

It’s not a “big twist” picture or anything, just a slight genre exercise that’s more enjoyable when you go in expecting something else! The story concerns a young wife, Rooney Mara, whose husband Charleston is just getting out of the pokey, where he was tossed by the effa-bee-eye for investment crimes! She suffers from bouts of suicidal depression and gets both worse and better when her mind doctor, Jude Law, gives her a new type of  pill!

But soon: tragedy! Ha ha, she’s cutting up a red pepper in her sleep one night when she turns and puts a vicious poking on poor Charleston! After that her previous mind doctor, a funny caricature of a horn-rimmed lesbian played by Catherine Zeta Jones, gets in on the action! Jude Law is placed in a precarious position, one so time-consuming he hardly gets a chance to shave, and it’s only his dogged investigations in the face of scorn and bewilderment from his family and peers and the unraveling of both his personal and professional life that finally saves the day!

Well, all of this is handled and told in a ruthlessly professional fashion by a director who knows very well what he’s doing! I always like Soderbergh’s genre pictures, and I think my favourite of his might still be The Limey, which I think is the last movie he made before deciding for whatever reason to become his own cinematographer! (No, on looking it up that was his next picture, Erin Brockovich!) Ha ha, cinematographers spend most of their time talking to gaffers and key grips, so I’m not sure exactly how you do that while you should be working with actors! Of course, he uses some pretty fair actors, ha ha, so he probably doesn’t have to tell them much! On the other hand you have Peter Hyams, sort of the flipside Soderbergh; and how did he direct Arnold, who probably needs lots of care, in the terrible End of Days while lighting his set at the same time? Ha ha, I can barely imagine it!

Anyway, Side Effects is a thoroughly polished production in almost every respect! It really hits some strange olden days notes though, when it turns out not only that the predatory lesbians are behind the whole thing, but that the straight white guy saves the day and the family unit, including the unpleasant wife, is restored! It’s clearly Soderbergh trying to mess with us, and that, as I said, is his greatest trick of all!

For that, and the director’s willingness to risk the “Oh, the movie’s over now… and why did I care about what was going to happen at the end?” feeling that such an ancient, corn-fed stratagem can invite, I give Side Effects two and a half hat tips to Psycho!