upquist

I watched "Rear Window" again last night. Seeing it again only serves to confirm this growing sense I've had for quite a while. It's the feeling that, actually, for all his innovation, Hitchcock, by today's standards was a sloppy, inattentive, rigid and formulaic director. His movies cause me more annoyance than anything else.

The egregious and prolific cinematic "goofs" in this movie are beautifully itemized elsewhere on this site. It was the same sort of embarrassing inattentiveness in "North by Northwest", "The Birds" and many other Hitchcock movies. He would miss little details from scene to scene which are much less frequent in movies directed by today's top-tier counterparts.

Hitchcock's well-known abhorrence for outdoor shots resulted in the creation of painfully artificial indoor sets - to the point of looking rank amateur.

I'm sure he thought his camera angles at critical moments of his movies contributed to the dramatic intensity of the scene: the camera looking down into the shower in "Psycho", the camera looking down again at Stewart as he is approached by Raymond Burr - it gets repeated in several movies. By today's standards, frankly, the shots are rigid, routine, predictable and boring.

Hitchcock's principal actors are interesting which, I suppose, is why he used them again and again. But many of the other relatively minor characters in his movies are wooden, silent, under-developed and under-utilized to the point of being quite dispensable. They are nothing more than interchangeable props: the two thugs in "North by Northwest" for example or the honeymooners in "Rear Window" illustrate my point.

Nope, I've made-up my mind on this: compared to a Spielberg or Ron Howard, Hitchcock, for all of the praise he has received comes across to me as a so-so director who really didn't have the eye for detail and precision required of directors today and expected by their more technically sophisticated audiences.

I fell for the hype surrounding this movie and decided to see it with two friends. Other than serving to remind me that I should get a haircut next week and that maybe it's time to switch to a different shampoo, this movie failed on all levels. Not even the music was original. In fact, when you have to import James Bond themes to support the plot, you know you are in the midst of a train-wreck.

This two hour plus embarrassment was interminably boring, the plot was too complicated, the characters - every one of them - were disgusting, amoral creatures, the dialogue and the directing were uneven - the whole of it was just awful. And the hair! The men's styles made my skin crawl.

Because I was with other people, I couldn't just get-up and leave; had I been alone, I doubt I could have lasted more than about 30 minutes into the film - it was that bad.

Don't believe the critical accolades; this film is a dud, a loser, a piece of junk and an utter waste of 135 minutes of your life.

I've seen "Her" and this movie - one after the other - and I draw parallels between them. In both we observe what Leon Festinger called "cognitive dissonance" among fundamentally selfish people who seem to know only how to take love from those around them. Tragically, they appear to lack the ability to give love back in any recognizable way.

It leads to Joaquin Phoenix' character in "Her" wringing love out of a computer operating system just as, in this film, Violet finally resorts to pitiful succor from a housekeeper for whom she previously harboured little human compassion.

Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper - everyone really - contributes brilliantly to a superb ensemble piece set against the stark, almost primordial background of Osage County. Here there are few distractions permitting one to escape from coming to grips with the equally primordial reality of the human condition. Everything is stripped away to its essence. We see a dysfunctional family for what it is played out for us as if it were a Greek tragedy. Indeed, just as the Greeks wanted us to do, we see just a bit of ourselves in this film. Does anyone not admit to seeing that small part of us which has never grown up beyond the needs of suckling baby - painstakingly etched against this austere setting by the portrayals of each character in the movie?

Films like "Fargo" or "Brokeback Mountain" and, of course, this one, all having similar backdrops, all do well at focusing our attention on the human drama. The veneer of civilization barely conceals the psychically lurking undercurrent of deep and disturbing desires, needs, wants, passions and agonies with which we must all contend, measured against greater or lesser sanguinity.

At the very end of the song "John Wayne Gacy Jr.", composer Sufjan Stevens writes:

And in my best behavior

I am really just like him

Look beneath the floorboards

For the secrets I have hid

I thought of those words as I watched this movie and I wondered how many of us have the courage to say to ourselves, "These characters may be odious but what they are portraying is real and there is a small part of each them in every one of us".