List Price: $14.94 Our Price: $11.95YOU SAVE $2.99!
Buy it
DVD Secret Window
Johnny Depp gets high off another acting challenge in this tricky adaptation of a Stephen King yarn. Although the mood is too sinister to allow for the mischief of his Pirates of the Caribbean turn, Depp still manages to embroider his role here with plenty of quirky business. He plays a writer, depressed and nearly divorced, who's stuck in an isolated cabin (shades of The Shining) when a stranger (John Turturro) arrives, accusing him of plagiarism. Writer-director David Koepp (Stir of Echoes) does his best to make the rickety material compelling--he gets the maximum out of the cabin set, for instance--but the problems inherent in the King story eventually win out. The climactic scenes are particularly unpleasant, especially in contrast to the cleverness of Depp's performance. A Philip Glass score adds class, but this one ultimately feels like a disappointment. --Robert Horton
This was an absolutely horrible movie. It was totally predicatable, and not suspense-filled at all. There are so many holes in the storyline it will leave you feeling very mad at the end. I had to write a review just because I was so disappointed with it.
All Hat, no Cattle
Poor Mort Rainey! The famous novelist (played effortlessly by Johnny Depp, who earns this wreck its single star) is holed up in his Maine retreat, reeling from his wife's adultery, on the cusp of a brutal divorce, and battling one Grendel of a writer's block.
And don't you know, when it rains, it pours: right in the middle of his nap, a furious stranger in a broad-brimmed hat comes rap-rap-rapping at his Chamber Door, accusing the befuddled novelist of "stealing his story". Would I sit through this shipwreck of a snorefest again? Quoth John Shooter: "Nevermore".
I can't tell you how much I was looking forward to this flick; it had all of the promising ingredients for a spooky little potboiler. It's based on the Stephen King's novella "Secret Window, Secret Garden", which is an intimate and nasty tale of obsession and madness and one of the juiciest in King's "Four Past Midnight". It has Johnny Depp, who can charm the camera with a quirky frown, and John Turturro, equally adept at eccentric roles.
Director David Koepp made his directorial debut with the stylish "Stir of Echoes", while Director of Photography Fred Murphy obviously knows how to wield a camera: he turned out the masterfully moody camera-work in "Mothman Prophecies". "Secret Window" even has Philip Glass doing the stress-inducing soundtrack.
And certainly the movie starts on the right note: we see Johnny Depp hunched in the driver's seat of a car, toboggan pulled down over his maniac locks, scowling face a-twitch, a snowstorm howling outside the car window.
All good stuff, made even more tantalizing when we shift forward six months after the intro's wicked little revelation: now we're holed up in a spooky cabin on equally spooky lake, with a devoted dog, tormented writer, disintegrating marriage, and crazy on the doorstep.
What's not to love? Nearly everything.
If the synopsis I've given you sounds intriguing, then pick up a copy of Stephen King's "Four Past Midnight" and read the very creepy story. Unless you're a hardcore Depp fanatic, a masochist, or an insomniac, you'll get no pleasure from this one-way ticket to Dullsville.
Koepp gives us no suspense, no tension, no momentum, no scares, certainly no horror. "Secret Window" is strictly by the numbers, and twenty minutes into the thing it felt like all hands aboard the project---with the exception of the inventive Depp---had lost interest.
The direction is dull, the pace plodding, the camerawork listless and strictly point-and-shoot, and worse still, the film's aimlessness seems to infect the actors.
The usually interesting Timothy Hutton's (adulterer Teddy) mystifying inclusion merely serves as a reminder of just how good---relatively speaking---the similarly themed "The Dark Half" really was.
The charismatic Charles Dutton (Ken Karsch) is wasted in a role (big, bearish, overconfident P.I.)that was stale back in "Thinner" and "Cape Fear": he goes through the motions and cashes a check. Maria Bello (Amy) does her best work accompanied by a side order of corn. John Turturro (Shooter)lets the hat do the acting.
It's not that "Secret Window" is a howlingly horrible movie---if Koepp had taken some chances, played with the movie, let Depp's natural charisma percolate through the rest of this mummified corpse of a movie, the thing might have had some quirky cult appeal. No hope for the patient, alas: the film is delivered on the slab smelling of formaldehyde and stinking of rot.
That said, at the very least, "Secret Window" really made me empathize with poor crazy old John Shooter. Shooter claimed Rainey had stolen his story, he wanted it back, and he was out for blood. Same with me: "Secret Window" stole my 90 minutes, I want it back, and I'm out for blood.
JSG
SEEEEECRet Windown
This movie would have been utterly terrible without Johnny Depp in the starring role. If you are seeing this movie for the first time, try not to think too much about what will happen. Otherwise, it is pretty obvious to predict what will happen.
Depp plays a quirky writer who is in the middle of a divorce. He had caught his wife cheating on him. A man named John Shooter harasses Depp about plagiarism and things begin to get very violent. Depp creates an entertaining charachter out of a fairly boring role.
As the plot unfolds, people die and the story takes very strange turns. Even though this movie is not the greatest, it is still a must see.
The music and cinematography are good in the film. The acting is sup par besides the performances of Johnny Depp and John Turturro. This movie deserves and eight out of ten.
Collateral offers a change of pace for Tom Cruise as a ruthless contract killer, but that's just one of many reasons to recommend this well-crafted thriller. It's from Michael Mann, after all, and the director's stellar track record with crime thrillers (Thief, Manhunter, and especially Heat) guarantees a rich combination of intelligent plotting, well-drawn characters, and escalating tension, beginning here when icy hit-man Vincent (Cruise) recruits cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) to drive him through a nocturnal tour of Los Angeles, during which he will execute five people in a 10-hour spree. While Stuart Beattie's screenplay deftly combines intimate character study with raw bursts of action (in keeping with Mann's directorial trademark), Foxx does the best work... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Tom Cruise - Jamie Foxx - Jada Pinkett Smith - Mark Ruffalo Director(s): Michael Mann DVD Release Date: Released the 14 December 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.99 Your Price: $14.99YOU SAVE $5!
Buy it
Despite box-office dominance during its opening weekend, The Butterfly Effect is better suited to guilty-pleasure viewing at home. When writer-directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber (who penned Final Destination 2) aren't breaking their own haphazard rules of logic, they're filling this sordid thriller with enough unpleasantness to make eternal damnation seem like an attractive alternative. In a role-reversal from his That '70s Show persona, Ashton Kutcher plays a college-age psychology student who discovers, by re-reading his childhood journals, that he can revisit his past and alter traumatic events, hoping to improve their previously unfortunate outcomes. Instead, this foolhardy experiment in chaos theory (the titular "butterfly effect," popularized by Jeff... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Ashton Kutcher - Melora Walters - Amy Smart Director(s): Eric Bress - J. Mackye Gruber DVD Release Date: Released the 06 July 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.96 Your Price: $15.97YOU SAVE $3.99!
Buy it
Sweetness that doesn't turn saccharine is hard to find these days; Finding Neverland hits the mark. Much credit is due to the actors: Johnny Depp applies his genius for sly whimsy in his portrayal of playwright J. M. Barrie, who finds inspiration for his greatest creation from four lively boys, the sons of widow Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet, who miraculously fuses romantic yearning with common sense). Though the friendship threatens his already dwindling marriage, Barrie spends endless hours with the boys, pretending to be pirates or Indians--and gradually the elements of Peter Pan take shape in his mind. The relationship between Barrie and the Llewelyn Davies family sparks both an imagined world and a quiet rebellion against the stuffy forces of respectability,... More Info about this DVD DVD Release Date: Released the 22 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $14.99 Your Price: $9.99YOU SAVE $5!
Buy it
Even when his trademark twist-ending formula wears worrisomely thin as it does in The Village, M. Night Shyamalan is a true showman who knows how to serve up a spookfest. He's derailed this time by a howler of a "surprise" lifted almost directly from "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim," an episode of The Twilight Zone starring Cliff Robertson that originally aired in 1961. Even if you're unfamiliar with that Rod Serling scenario, you'll have a good chance of guessing the surprise, which ranks well below The Sixth Sense and Signs on Shyamalan's shock-o-meter. That leaves you to appreciate Shyamalan's proven strengths, including a sharp eye for fear-laden compositions, a general sense of unease, delicate handling of fine actors (alas, most of them wasted here, save... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Bryce Dallas Howard - Joaquin Phoenix - Adrien Brody - William Hurt - Sigourney Weaver Director(s): M. Night Shyamalan DVD Release Date: Released the 11 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $29.99 Your Price: $23.99YOU SAVE $6!
Buy it
With a plot that might've been lifted from The X-Files, nothing is quite what it seems in The Forgotten, a psychological conspiracy thriller with Julianne Moore doing fine work as a grieving mother whose nine-year-old son was killed in a plane crash. At least, that's what she's been led to believe, but when even her husband (Anthony Edwards) tries to convince her that she's delusional and never had a child, things start to get very spooky indeed. Dominic West (from HBO's superb series The Wire) plays a similarly traumatized father, and when they witness some very strange events--and a mysterious man (Linus Roache) who might be indestructible--this glorified B-movie potboiler directed by Joseph Ruben (best known for Dreamscape and The Stepfather)... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Julianne Moore - Dominic West Director(s): Joseph Ruben DVD Release Date: Released the 18 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
List Price: $19.94 Your Price: $15.95YOU SAVE $3.99!
Buy it
