Out of Blue

First, Patricia Clarkson is her marvelous self. Don't tell me she doesn't know how to act or produce a solid character. This is indeed a mystery. Some of the flashbacks won't make sense until the end. This movie is slow and methodical. If you're looking for chase scenes or the big "gotcha," your not going to find it. There are plenty of tracks to go down. Most lead to dead ends but have you thinking it's the right one. It's not a box office hit, but it certainly is worth watching on DVD or wherever you get your movies.

I watched the whole thing. Partially out of boredom, but also because it was weirdly interesting to see the full measure of a real piece of crap that had some fine ingredients used so poorly the final product is almost camp.

Despite knowing "a" to be true for all of us, I have to say that it is "b." Can both be true? Can both be superpositioned like the state of that cat in the box? "Out of the Blue" proves this.

Seriously, enough of Schrodinger's cat lite meets Chekhov's gun; Amis is barely a humorous fellow, but there is some humor in his novel "Night Train" on which this utterly awful film is based. Some of that humor at least may have made this tolerable -- but we don't even get that.

Leave the box unopened, the cat resting, and skip this mess.

Adapted from a not very good novel, Night Train by Martin Amis.

This existential noir mystery would had been better in the capable hands of someone like David Lynch.

Patricia Clarkson plays hard boiled detective Mike Hoolihan. A man's name for a detective operating in a man's world of New Orleans.

Mike is investigating the death of Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) an astrophysicist shot in the head in the observatory she worked at.

Rockwell was the daughter of a decorated Vietnam war veteran and businessman, Tom Rockwell (James Caan.)

The suspects range from her colleagues, boyfriend, her father to a one time notorious serial killer. It could also just be suicide.

With all the mumbo jumbo of time and space, we see that Mike is losing her sense of self. The death of Jennifer has had a pronounced effect on her.

The film loses all coherent sense as it goes along and it just gets more uninteresting. A shame as somewhere there was a good film trying to break out if only it had a better livelier script.

Top detective Clarkson is called in to investigate the shooting of a young physicist. Heavily affected by the ambiguity of the murder and the victim's beliefs she starts questioning her own life.

This is deadly slow and every line uttered suggests much in the way of deep and double meaning. It's is an ambitious trip of the mind with a fine central performance by Clarkson and to do this is surely a noble aspiration. It is though very confusing and ultimately doesn't work on an ethereal level or as a thriller. Good try though.