RED EYE - wes craven - 6.9 / 10

Better than it has any right to be, Wes Craven's Red Eye still peters out long before its conclusion. But the things that work about it work very well. For instance, the heroine (played by Rachel McAdams) has previously been assaulted and raped. And that previous attack causes her to fight viciously against ever being made a victim again. Thus her attempts to defy the villainous Jack (Cillian Murphy) play not as unbelievable, only-in-the-movies developments but as vital to her character's mental survival. She can't allow herself to be a victim again and thus must resist at every turn. Her actions are entirely believable and motivated. And that makes her one of the strongest women characters in recent film history.

Her character's history of being raped also functions as a metaphor for our collective wounding by the attack on the World Trade Center. With most of the film set on an airplane and involving a plot to kill the Director of Homeland Security, Wes Craven is certainly gunning for our post-9/11 anxieties. The first act of the film plays as a romantic comedy, never hinting that something sinister and dangerous is lurking around the corner. Although that surprise is ruined by the film's trailer and advertising campaign, the idea is that America, pre-9/11, lived the same sort of charmed existence, never thinking anything bad could happen. And when the shit hit the fan on September 11, as in this film, we Americans had a hard time believing that it was really happening. But slowly our resolve hardened just as McAdams's character's does in this film. She and we attack blindly when reflection is probably the safer and more levelheaded course of action. Furthering the 9/11 metaphor, when the terrorists of the film finally mount their attack against the Homeland Security director, the effect of their strike looks eerily similar to the damage inflicted by the planes on the World Trade Center.

So yeah, there's a lot of heady stuff going on underneath the surface of this film. The problem is that most of the stuff happening on the surface isn't that interesting. It's the kind of film I could talk myself into liking but won't really have any interest in ever seeing again. Mostly that's because by the last twenty minutes the film has turned into the standard crazed-killer-with-a-knife-stalking-the-heroine thing. It's just not that interesting at this point because the outcome of this sort of thing is never in doubt in mainstream American pictures.

STEALTH - rob cohen - 0.7 / 10

Updating the Top Gun style men-and-their-planes film for the new millennium is not, in itself, a terrible idea (although it's unlikely that doing so would result in a decent film). However, grafting onto the genre some nonsense about an artificially intelligent plane is just stupid and, more damningly, pointless. Even the most gullible conspiracy theorist doesn't imagine that we're anywhere close to being able to create artificial intelligence. Besides which, if you're gonna make the plane behave and sound like HAL 9000, it doesn't take a genius to figure out where the plot's headed.

I guess it's a function of having no real enemies to fight. Rather than create some believable geopolitical conflict to give our flyboys something to fight (and possibly alienate some of that international audience looking to drink from the trough of American special effects extravaganzas) Cohen and Co. needed to make the conflict internal within the Navy. (After all, terrorists, the only politically correct villains out there, don't have any planes.) So they came up with this nonsense about the AI plane. But at least that plot development is understandable (stupid, but understandable). Having Jessica Biel (one of the top three fighter pilots in the Navy... uh-huh) shot down in North Korea so that the AI plane and her boyfriend can make a dramatic landing and save the day is just laughable. Taking this film out of the sky is a terrible mistake. The only thing it has going for it are the flying sequences that, being the first of the digital age, are at least noteworthy and startling. To turn the movie into a search and destroy mission near the Demilitarized Zone makes no sense. And besides, since there's no possibility that she's going to be harmed in any significant way, it also robs the film of any tension.

Rob Cohen makes movies to make money. He's said so in countless interviews and on the commentary track of his magnum opus The Fast and the Furious. But his last two films (XXX and Stealth) have tanked. I don't believe this means anything about the American movie-going public at large but at least the bean-counters in Hollywood are going to hesitate before handing this idiot a hundred million dollars again.

LOST HORIZON - frank capra - 5.3 / 10

This is the film that finally got Frank Capra's name above the title. Unfortunately, it's also his most boring. Ridiculously slow paced with no propelling action of any sort, the film is such a slog to get through that I couldn't make it. Despite three attempts to watch it, I couldn't get more than halfway in. And maybe the argument could be made that had I seen it through to the end my opinion might have changed. But I doubt it. It's not like you can't see where this is going from the first frame. And that place isn't particularly compelling.

But the problem with this film isn't really the plot. Rather it's the meandering conversations that get in the way of the plot. After his plane crashes in the mountains, heroic Conway and various other people (the head of a monastery, his fellow crash survivors, local women, whatever) have very lengthy, quasi-philosophical talks about all manner of topics. But these conversations are not really about anything. If they were, they might be compelling in and of themselves. But they aren't. And the viewer is left watching the same two or three shots for five minutes as two decent ordinary characters talk about how great everything is and how much they agree with one another about the greatness of said things. It's dreadfully boring. I'd rate it lower but having not seen the end I'm giving good ol' happy ending Capra the benefit of the doubt.

By the way, it seems that Spielberg's had two legendary precursors (Capra and John Ford). I'd only thought he'd had the one. That makes me think there might always be a Spielberg out there, a great visual stylist who, under the aegis of "giving the people what they want," makes a bunch of good films that shoot themselves in the foot with too much sentimentality and a basic unwillingness to closely examine the failings of their society and their government. Conservative mouthpieces, I guess you'd call them. Just really really talented ones.