Word: rubens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Ruben did interrupt the flow of the film when he overplayed the early moments of tension. If the whole audience knows from the start that Culkin plays an undercover killer, then it's none too tricky to produce tense moments auguring imminent disaster. Ruben dwells on each scary mask, toy gun, and childish threat, until Culkin's every mouthful at dinner appears redolent of latent monomania...
Indeed, director Joseph Ruben conspires to keep the spotlight on the young prodigies and off everyone else. The adults (Wendy Crewson, David Morse, Daniel Kelly, and Jaqueline Brooks) are competent and unobtrusive. The filming emphasizes realism and immediacy instead of effects; this reviewer didn't even notice a soundtrack. The direction was notable for its minimalism...
DIRECTOR: JOSEPH RUBEN...
...Joseph Ruben's apparent mission in life is to turn the commonplaces of family dysfunction into worst-case scenarios. Everyone at some time or another imagines comfortable domesticity going radically wrong. Ruben gives this uneasy feeling -- that we all may be no more than a mischance or two away from reading our names in a tabloid headline -- grabby if sometimes almost comically simple life on the screen. In Ruben's The Stepfather, that eponymous figure turns out to be -- his stepchildren guess it! -- a serial killer. In Sleeping with the Enemy, Julia Roberts' character fakes her own death trying...
That's what's good about Ruben. He doesn't mess around with nuance. He sticks to the psychological basics and the most primitive scare tactics. Nothing distracts him from arriving, via the shortest possible distance, at some not exactly subtle but inescapably gripping point. It ain't art. Nobody's ever going to call him the new Hitchcock. But there's something admirable in his disdain for high, fancy stepping, his heedlessly efficient drive to put us in touch with the primal ooze of our worst imaginings...