Word: hitchcock
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...there room in modern cinema for individual vision and talent? Can a film ever be a wholly personal project? Not within this paradigm. Even if one looks at the films of the "auteurs" of the last century, one will find collaboration as a foundational ingredient. Fellini, Bergman, Hitchcock, Scorsese, etc.: all have been able to create collaborations between artists of singular vision (What would Fellini be without Giulietta Masina? What would Scorsese be without the great screenplays of Schrader and Pileggi?) The genius of these directors comes from their powers of orchestration and coordination. In general, films are mass conglomerations...
...attitudes with a computer and molecular smart bombs. An ingenious bio-tech love triangle ensues, as does the hunt for a sadistic killer with an acetylene torch. Then it's back to the top of Lady Liberty for the climax, a breakneck update of the finale to Hitchcock's 1942 tingler, Saboteur...
...refer all interested readers to the brilliantly remastered version of Hitchcock's 1954 thriller Rear Window, in which a bored and bedridden Jimmy Stewart (in a full-leg cast after a run-in with a racecar) witnesses what he thinks is a murder: his salesman neighbor's wife disappears the night that the salesman makes several early-morning trips out of the apartment, carrying a suitcase, in the rain. The movie itself is shot entirely from Stewart's vantage-point at his rear window and is a fascinating exploration of voyeurism, inference and 1950s haute couture...
...course, there's a reason Hitchcock didn't use "Window Overlooking the Path Around Lowell House" instead of the movie's New York tenement. Here there are no suspicious Aryan costume-jewelry salesmen, few wives, no wardrobe like Grace Kelly's, no Yorkshire terriers and no soundtrack to speak...
...British Secret Service agent known as The Eye (Ewan McGregor) is on the trail, and soon in the thrall, of a lovely mankiller (Ashley Judd). This murky mystery steals from Lolita and from many Hitchcock films (notably Vertigo)--but learns nothing from them, nor from its source novel, the complex thriller by Marc Behm about a detective with a daughter fixation, and a young murderess in search of a father figure. Read the excellent book, skip the incoherent movie, and wish its two attractive leads better luck next time. Odds are they can't have worse...