It’s an odd occasion when a small, publicly-financed Canadian movie offers more sheer escapist bang for your buck than a Hollywood thriller made for ten times the budget. The little Canadian film—upgraded by its U.S. buyers with some studio spit-and-polish—is How She Move. It’s a dance movie with wit and soul, starring newcomer Rutina Wesley as a Jamaican Canadian teen blazing a choreographic trail out of the ghetto. The Hollywood thriller is Untraceable, starring Diane Lane as an FBI cyber-crime detective pursuing a serial killer in Portland who murders his victims live online. In How She Move, Wesley dances on the roof of a car; in Untraceable, Lane is hung by her heels in a basement dungeon. Both films are formulaic. But How She Move is infectious fun, with characters who find a way into your heart. As much as I love everything about the luxuriously middle aged Diane Lane, upside down or sideways, I found Untraceable so stupid and dull to be almost unwatchable.
Untraceable This grim, grey suspense drama is just the ticket to make the dead of winter feel even more depressing. It starts out with some promise, though. As FBI agent Jennifer Marsh, Lane appears to enjoy her job—surfing the Internet and entrapping online fraudsters, while flirting with her pedophile-tracking office mate (Colin Hanks). It’s nice to see a middle-aged sleuth “play” a computer with rock’n’roll relish typically restricted to young male nerds. For a while, it’s engrossing to watch her type and surf through a cadence of websites on the big screen, while the dialogue pops with cyber jargon, like the medical mumbo jumbo in ER or the forensic babble in CSI. This is a world where, if somebody’s talking about being infiltrated by “a back-door Trojan,” it’s not an act involving a latex contraceptive. But the novelty soon wears thin.
Played by Joseph Cross—who looks like a teenage Tarantino—the movie’s villain is a bitter young man who imprisons his victims in a basement torture chamber. He rigs them up to diabolical contraptions that are triggered by hits to his website (www.killwithme.com), which web casts the murders live. The more people who log on, the faster the victims die: a man who’s strapped to a bed frame and bleeding to death is injected with increasing doses of anti-coagulant; another has sulfuric acid pumped into his bath as the web hits mount. . . you get the picture.
Like the villain’s devices, the script’s fancy narrative software is shackled to a creaky operating system—old-fashioned schlock horror formula. The filmmakers try to creep us out with ghoulish torture scenarios, then rap us on the knuckles for getting a kick out of what we’re witnessing. Ah, just like those accomplices logging onto killwithme.com, we are complicit in a Culture of Violence. The double-edged blade of porn and moralism.
But the only danger I felt in the movie was being bored to death. The plot has gaping holes. Don’t ask me about the computer stuff—the villain’s ability to leapfrog from one exploited server to another while remaining untraceable—which some bloggers dismiss as ludicrous. What drove me nuts were the more conventional tropes. (spoiler alert!) The heroine’s fate hinges on a scene where she nervously approaches her car, gun in hand, suspecting the bad guy might be hiding in it, looks inside—and neglects to check the back seat. What was she thinking? What were the filmmakers thinking?
Director Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear, Fracture) contrives a bleak visual style. The movie is shot as an alien grid of desaturated blues and greys, riddled with aerial shots of buildings and bridges—the city as circuitry. But in light of the script, the tone is just pretentious. Sure, the Internet is scary, but this is just another movie about bad things that happen in the basement. As for Diane Lane, she maintains a fine, hair-trigger intensity, soldiering through reams of crap dialogue with stoical focus. But as I watched her maintain credibility against all odds, I couldn’t help feeling that she deserved better.
How She Move
This feel-good fable has a few eye-rolling moments of its own, plot points when the plausibility metre veers into the red. But because it’s a dance movie, not a thriller, the lapses are more forgivable. Despite a predictable script and cliched dialogue, Canadian director Ian Iqbal Rashid (A Touch of Pink) draws strong performances from his cast, notably lead actress Ruyina Wesley, and Melanie Nicholls-King, who delivers the drama’s coup de grace as her Jamaican mother. Even if Rashid had to sacrifice some local references in recutting his film to satisfy its American distributor, he strikes a nifty balance of local grit and Hollywood gloss. Granted, the story’s Canadian identity has been somewhat obscured, but its immigrant Caribbean roots are unique and unmistakable.
For more on the film, and how it got retooled for a mainstream American audience, go to my magazine piece, which includes an interview with the director: How She Move that 49th Parallel.
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Jiving the formula: ‘Untraceable’ & ‘How She Move’
Brian D. Johnson | January 24, 2008 | 19:46:17 | Permalink
brian.johnson@macleans.rogers.com
Untraceable
This grim, grey suspense drama is just the ticket to make the dead of winter feel even more depressing. It starts out with some promise, though. As FBI agent Jennifer Marsh, Lane appears to enjoy her job—surfing the Internet and entrapping online fraudsters, while flirting with her pedophile-tracking office mate (Colin Hanks). It’s nice to see a middle-aged sleuth “play” a computer with rock’n’roll relish typically restricted to young male nerds. For a while, it’s engrossing to watch her type and surf through a cadence of websites on the big screen, while the dialogue pops with cyber jargon, like the medical mumbo jumbo in ER or the forensic babble in CSI. This is a world where, if somebody’s talking about being infiltrated by “a back-door Trojan,” it’s not an act involving a latex contraceptive. But the novelty soon wears thin.
Played by Joseph Cross—who looks like a teenage Tarantino—the movie’s villain is a bitter young man who imprisons his victims in a basement torture chamber. He rigs them up to diabolical contraptions that are triggered by hits to his website (www.killwithme.com), which web casts the murders live. The more people who log on, the faster the victims die: a man who’s strapped to a bed frame and bleeding to death is injected with increasing doses of anti-coagulant; another has sulfuric acid pumped into his bath as the web hits mount. . . you get the picture.
Like the villain’s devices, the script’s fancy narrative software is shackled to a creaky operating system—old-fashioned schlock horror formula. The filmmakers try to creep us out with ghoulish torture scenarios, then rap us on the knuckles for getting a kick out of what we’re witnessing. Ah, just like those accomplices logging onto killwithme.com, we are complicit in a Culture of Violence. The double-edged blade of porn and moralism.
But the only danger I felt in the movie was being bored to death. The plot has gaping holes. Don’t ask me about the computer stuff—the villain’s ability to leapfrog from one exploited server to another while remaining untraceable—which some bloggers dismiss as ludicrous. What drove me nuts were the more conventional tropes. (spoiler alert!) The heroine’s fate hinges on a scene where she nervously approaches her car, gun in hand, suspecting the bad guy might be hiding in it, looks inside—and neglects to check the back seat. What was she thinking? What were the filmmakers thinking?
Director Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear, Fracture) contrives a bleak visual style. The movie is shot as an alien grid of desaturated blues and greys, riddled with aerial shots of buildings and bridges—the city as circuitry. But in light of the script, the tone is just pretentious. Sure, the Internet is scary, but this is just another movie about bad things that happen in the basement. As for Diane Lane, she maintains a fine, hair-trigger intensity, soldiering through reams of crap dialogue with stoical focus. But as I watched her maintain credibility against all odds, I couldn’t help feeling that she deserved better.
How She Move
This feel-good fable has a few eye-rolling moments of its own, plot points when the plausibility metre veers into the red. But because it’s a dance movie, not a thriller, the lapses are more forgivable. Despite a predictable script and cliched dialogue, Canadian director Ian Iqbal Rashid (A Touch of Pink) draws strong performances from his cast, notably lead actress Ruyina Wesley, and Melanie Nicholls-King, who delivers the drama’s coup de grace as her Jamaican mother. Even if Rashid had to sacrifice some local references in recutting his film to satisfy its American distributor, he strikes a nifty balance of local grit and Hollywood gloss. Granted, the story’s Canadian identity has been somewhat obscured, but its immigrant Caribbean roots are unique and unmistakable.
For more on the film, and how it got retooled for a mainstream American audience, go to my magazine piece, which includes an interview with the director: How She Move that 49th Parallel.
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