Out of Blue

This movie is like buying the best ingredients and making an awful cake of it. Actors are fine. The plot line is interesting and promising. They grab some very fascinating and potent subjects like Existence and absurdity of life, Schrödinger's cat, stardust... The twist is there. But put all together it simply does not work.

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.

This movie seems to have split audience and critics down the middle which is why a 5 rating is probably correct. There is not much of a story here, its a basic police procedural about a female homicide cop trying to solve the riddle which is the death of a professor. Its maybe a tad overlong at an hour and 50 mins. The cast and acting are spot its just that the story takes a while to get going and there is alot of weird visuals and symbolism between the colours red and blue throughout. Is this another movie I have to read a critique of before I understand whats going on? What happened to movies you can go watch and experience the full story in the 90 mins? Anyway the tone is somewhere between a David Lynch lite without too much weirdness and one of Darren Aronofskys earlier movies minus the emotionally harrowing content. And thats maybe the issue with this movie, stuff happens with alot of nice visuals but it lacks an emotive punch. Worth watching if you like that kind of thing but it wont win over a mainstream audience, one for people who like challenging cinema with good cinematography.

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.

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.