Os Mortos Não Mentem

I first saw Gotham in 1989 and then in 2001 and it stood up well: Gotham is on the one hand an ironic tribute to hard-boiled detective movies, but it chooses to keep its irony under the surface rather than over-the-top, telling a susupenseful and carefully unfolded story with real twists and turns even as it tosses the occasional wink taht we've seen the set-pieces before. There is real suspense as we watch Tommy Lee Jones get in way over his head--he takes it well enough when he discovers, early on, that he is indeed dealing with a malicious ghost--but from there on he is forced to watch with his own investigators detatchemht as he fall in love with this ghost, going down hill physically and every other way step by step--at the end, he is faced with a battle for his soul as serious as Sam Spades faces at the end of "Maltese Falcon"--and, even at the end, the wry humor returns to wrap it all nicely up. By the way--keep yuour eye out for spooky oddities at ther corner of your vision--they are there!

I really enjoy this quirky, sensual film, but even after several viewings, I am still a bit confused about the plot. It's not one of those bizarre films where you shake your head and say "what?", but rather one that keeps you going up and down different alleyways. Tommy Lee Jones is very sexy and perfectly cast as the rough and tumble private eye hired to get a man's dead wife off his trail. But, is the wife really dead? What is fantasy and what is reality? Virginia Madsen is drop dead gorgeous, no pun intended. She and Tommy Lee Jones have a very hot sexual chemistry between them. This is the only movie with the formidable Mr. Jones that I have seen him engaged in a passionate, nude love scene. This alone is worth renting the movie. It's not great, but it's very old-fashioned, gritty film noir, and extremely sexy, and definitely not predictable.

This film was probably better if viewed when it is not one a.m. in the morning but the BBC in their wisdom decided to relegate a classy film like this to the slot around midnight. In fact if it had not been on straight after Highlander I probably would not have watched it. If I hadn't I would have missed a treat. Tommy Lee Jones was at his brilliant best as the private dick hired to find a man's dead wife. I did miss a bit in the middle which did not help but I was a little confused for quite a while about who was and who was not dead. Maybe that was the entire point of the film. But the film does carry an important message "The dead can't lie. It's something I've learnt."

If now Oscar-winner Tommy Lee Jones were allowed to delete all memory of one of his previous films, no doubt he would choose this incredible mess of a thriller to cast into oblivion. He plays a private dick who is hired by a rich husband to settle some matters with his ex-wife, who is holding some jewelry of his in her possession. Only that the woman apparently has been dead for a decade! He takes the case thinking of making easy money with a crackpot client, but the woman appears to be alive and well and even very seductive (Virginia Madsen, no less), all qualities painfully lacking in the film, which is slow, poorly acted (evidence of a great lack of enthusiasm on the side of Tommy and par for the course for Madsen)and disconcertingly ambiguous, undecided between a solid thriller of unexpected final twists (which it has not) and a run of the mill ghost-story that had traded horror for sensuality. Really dreadful.

"Eddie Mallard" (Tommy Lee Jones) is a down-on-his-luck private detective who is about to be evicted from his office for failure to pay his rent. Needless to say, he is surprised when a wealth man by the name of "Colin Bruce" (Charlie Rand) walks into his office and offers to pay him a considerable amount of money to simply convince his ex-wife "Rachel Carlyle" (Virginia Madsen) to agree to leave him alone. But what really stuns Eddie is when Colin tells him that Rachel has been dead for ten years. Now, normally any private detective with an ounce of integrity would turn down the job because their prospective client is obviously insane. But being that he is in serious financial straits Eddie takes the job anyway. However, once he finally meets Rachel things begin to take a horrifying turn from that point on. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that this was a strange film which at times didn't seem to flow well from one scene to the next. Even so both Tommy Lee Jones and Virginia Madsen played their parts quite well and--strange as it was--I enjoyed this film for the most part and have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.