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Reviews
A Blueprint for Murder (1953)
Entertaining, but not top notch noir.
If noir is at its best when giving us believability in slightly unbelievable situations, this one falls a little short of the standard. We've got cool as ice upper crust citizens here figuring to murder family members as if they were all from some neighborhood where life was cheap, while hardly batting an eye. The acting is good, and Jean Peters and Catherine McLeod are especially fascinating females, but the plot just has a few too many holes in it. IMO, this sort of thing works better when a movie is taken from a novel, a narrative that some previous writer has thoroughly worked out and thought through. And who is the sexy gal in her slip gracing all the posters, like Jean Peters would probably refuse to do? Eye-catching, to be sure, but what has she got to do with a movie that has probably less sexual action in it than a girl scout camp in the middle of a hot summer night? Overall, substandard for the genre, but an hour's entertainment for addicted noir buffs like me, so don't let anything I say keep you from enjoying it............Garman Lord
Red Lights (2012)
Much ado about nothing
Unfathomable, not just the movie, but why it was made. Full disclosure; I'm a believer in the supernatural and psychic phenomena, but in a way that seems to baffle believers and skeptics alike whenever I try to explain it to anybody... almost as baffling, in fact, as this movie. This movie kicks off with some A list cast members and an intriguing premise or two, but then just systematically gets into more and more trouble and falls apart the farther it goes along. The two stars I give it are merely for the two stars in it, Weaver and De Niro, whom I happen to like. It's all about supposedly objective scientific investigation into a ridiculously powerful and versatile psychic who can bend your spoons, think images into your Polaroid camera and levitate himself while performing psychic surgery on your guts, (spoiler alert; skip this paragraph) who is evidently a fraud, but the scientists can't prove it, because they are all more or less frauds themselves, hag-ridden with their own secret motives and psychic superstitions. In one of the most nonsensical denouements in film history, the one person who couldn't possibly be psychic turns out to be the only one who is, despite the fact that he doesn't know he is! This movie is like something made from a script that was trashed as unworkable, but then some rich producer's middle schooler nephew copped the script from the recycle and rewrote all the parts that weren't goofy or video-gamish or sensational enough, and got to shoot the movie himself for a bar mitzvah present or something. The eponymous "red lights" is the term for things about a psychic demonstration that look suspicious to investigative debunkers, but why they call them "red lights" (instead of, maybe, amber lights?) is never explained. Early on, the debunking team lead a bunco squad bust of a phony mind reader/faith healer, sending him up the river for a good stretch... but on what charges? Oh yeah, that. What exact laws the guy may have been breaking are never explained. And why anybody would ever even give a $h!7 in this day and age? That's never explained either.
Coming out of the gate, before Robert De Niro turns up, Sigourney Weaver looks like the best thing the movie has going for it, but then they kill her off in the early going for no apparent reason, and the whole pant-load plot load falls on what seems a woefully miscast Cillian Murphy. He tears into investigation of the De Niro character, world famous psychic Simon Silver, retired years ago but now back again like a Nightmare On Elm Street revenant, in a frenzied obsessive way that you hope will be cleared up by the ending.
(possible spoiler alert:) it isn't, really.
Electric and electronic gear keep popping along the way with annoying whoosh-bang techno sound effects, windows break for no apparent reason, and many darkly lit incidental scenes along the way range from the mysterious to the unintelligible. At one point, Murphy gets the crap brutally beaten out of himself by some goon in a men's room, again for no apparent reason. When I say brutal, I mean there's no way a person could have survived it, but Murphy not only gets up, but walks in on Silver's packed house theatrical act, blood-soaked from head to toe, for the preposterous final showdown.
A lot of skeptics these days who seem to believe that psychic phenomena are impossible should think again. This movie got made, didn't it? Obviously, anything is possible.