BEFORE: Adrien Brody carries over from "Backtrack". He's here for four films this week, and I'm still trying to determine if they're going to add up to something coherent or not. Right now the subject matter seems a bit all over the place.
My focus is on work right now, I worked at the theater yesterday and today, so I'm beat if I don't get like one day off in-between shifts, but I'll manage. I'm supposed to attend orientation for the new gig tomorrow, though I have not received an e-mail about that. I would think the night before the company would at least send out a reminder e-mail, you know, something to confirm the time and the address and a message to not come late. If I don't get anything in the morning I should probably call somebody, at least to check in.
THE PLOT: A reporter becomes involved with a mysterious woman while investigating her husband's death.
AFTER: It's not really clear what year this story takes place, the film was released in 2016 but it's based on a book that came out in 1996, so either answer is possible, or perhaps it's meant to be timeless. The characters are kind of using smart phones, but there's not a lot of texting or facetiming or any social media stuff at all, so that makes it tough to say. Also the lead character spends a lot of time going through video cards from camcorders, that kind of suggests 1996 rather than 2016 - like, who uses a camcorder these days when everyone has a video camera on their phone? Only everybody keeps forgetting to rotate the phone 90 degrees when they film something, we really need to start enforcing this, because otherwise your video ends up square or taller than it is wide, and that's no good, we need to preserve a film ratio closer to what's been the standard in movies, you know, like 1.66 or 1.75, that's a movie. 1.33 is ridiculous. It's a movie, not a poster!
But they really tried to nail the grittiness of living in Manhattan and/or being a reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper. Porter Wren has a column three times a week in a NYC daily - they don't say which one, but let's assume it's a tabloid and not the "paper of record" because he deals with stories from the street level. People who die in car crashes, burning buildings, that sort of thing. Missing people, too, there's reference to a lost girl that he found, but he doesn't like taking credit for that because he said it happened accidentally.
The newspaper he writes for has just been purchased by Hobbs, a publishing magnate, one who seems a bit foreign so let's assume that's a Rupert Murdoch reference. Porter attends a party thrown by Hobbs and there he meets Caroline Crowley, and he recognizes her from the headlines as her husband was a movie producer whose body was discovered in the rubble of a torn-down building. This leads her to ask Porter to investigate her husband's mysterious death, and it also leads to them having an affair (he's married and she's engaged, but that doesn't seem to stop them, yeah, that's kind of very NYC).
He starts going through Simon Crowley's video cards, flash drives and pen drives (they look like fancy ball-point pens, but they have a camera) and starts to get an idea about how weird, crazy and psycho-manipulative Simon was, especially to his wife. He wouldn't let her in the apartment after a trip unless she told him a secret, or he would dare her to do weird things so he could record them on film.
Meanwhile Hobbs finds out about the affair, and calls in Porter as one of his employees, and he believes that Caroline is blackmailing him with a video, he wants Porter to search her apartment and find the video. Which only then gets weird when he tells Caroline about this, and she says that she's not the blackmailer, but she also wants Porter to find that video card, because it's the only one missing from his collection, and you can assume it shows her doing something dirty. Probably she wants to find it so she can blackmail Hobbs, too.
OK, so Porter has to find this video for TWO people who want it, before Hobbs' goons beat him up again or threaten his family again. Porter keeps up appearances with his wife, but he's not just working for Caroline, he's also falling in love with her, because he can't have sex with his wife without thinking about death. Well, that is pretty prominent in most wedding vows. Porter visits Simon's elderly father in a nursing home, and he finds another camcorder there, but that doesn't have the video card he's looking for, either. But perhaps there's a clue on it about who does own the video card in question. Porter then has to make a decision, should he watch the video to see what's on it, and then should he give it to his boss or the woman he's having an affair with?
The decision he makes gets him a key, and he believes that the key opens up the basement to the demolished building where Simon's body was found. What secrets might he find there? More videos? Hidden cameras? Sex tapes? I have to say, this is all sounding very urban and NYC, they kind of nailed that vibe. Having a tabloid reporter with a wife who's a surgeon, two kids and also a girlfriend on the side whose husband got off on videos of her having sex with other people, yeah that's pretty much modern day NYC in a nutshell, right? And don't even get me started on the story about Caroline and her step-father...ain't there no decency left?
There's also something very sort of classic 1930's Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler about this, even though they usually don't make that sort of film noir movie any more. Reporters are kind of like old time detectives, in that they come by after a crime and try to figure out exactly what happened, also Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe were similarly known for usually ending up in bed with their platinum blonde widow clients, so it's good to see that some things haven't changed.
Directed by Brian DeCubellis
Also starring Yvonne Strahovski (last seen in "The Guilt Trip"), Campbell Scott (last seen in "Nonnas"), Jennifer Beals (last seen in "Luckiest Girl Alive"), Steven Berkoff (last seen in "Barry Lyndon"), Linda Lavin (last seen in "The Back-Up Plan"), Frank Deal (last seen in "Eighth Grade"), Stan Carp (last seen in "The Family"), Madison Elizabeth Lagares, Thomas Bair, Theis Weckesser, Alex Echeverria, Chinasa Ogbuagu, Janhi Brown, Karin Collison (last seen in "The Comedian"), Arlene A. McGruder, Raul Aranas (last seen in "Burn After Reading"), Will Beinbrink (last seen in "Cellular"), Maria-Christina Oliveras (last seen in "Time Out of Mind"), Grace Rundhaug, Kevin Breznahan (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Venice"), Allegra Cohen, Oscar J. Castillo, George Pogatsia, Colleen Dunn (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Maureen Isern, Michael G. Chin, Nancy Cullen.
RATING: 5 out of 10 songs written by the director (they're, umm, not good)
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