Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Richard Gere is the big name in this film, and yet, I find myself saying...
... I really, really, really want to see this film.
I love this script. Creepy. Worked on me the same way THE SIXTH SENSE did when I first read it. There’s something really beautiful and strange and powerful about the way the whole thing comes together. The ending that Mirth complains about in his spoiler-filled review below was in the original script, and if I’m not mistaken, it’s based in part on actual events. Weird-ass impossible to prove actual events, but nonetheless...
For those of you who don’t want to read the spoilers, he liked it. A lot.
I saw a test screeing of the new Richard Geere flick "The Mothman Prophecies" tonight. They told us we were the first audience to see it and to watch out for temp f/x and color timing, but I'll be damned if it didn't look like a near-perfect print.
But on to the review: to be brief, it was pretty fuckin' awesome. The pacing, the acting (and I *hate* Richard Geere), the fantastic directing -- all second-to-none. Only the writing suffered slightly during the film's final couple of minutes...
BIG FUCKING SPOILER AHEAD The entire film seemed to be leading up to Richard Gere's death, but at the last minute he survives for no particularly good reason, other than one suspects that the Hollywood machine demanded it.
SPOILERS END.
The basic story has been altered somewhat from the book and the true(?) event that the film's based on, apparently (I haven't read it myself) - no longer does it take place in West Virginia in 1967: now it's set in West Virginia modern-day, which I have to admit didn't bother me in the slightest - it made the characters a bit easier to relate to and I doubt we're losing much in terms of "historical accuracy," if you'll excuse my pesimism.
The film opens up with the tried-and-true cliche of the gloriously happy couple (Gere and a surprisingly charismatic Messing) that are, of course, torn apart by tragedy when Messing crashes their car one night. Funny thing is, it's not the car crash that kills her -- it's the brain tumor that no one knew she had until a catscan that Messing insists upon. And, oh yeah, there was that funny moth-shaped thing that they almost ran into on the road...
Anyway, after Messing bites it and some more exposition, Richard Gere, still imbittered and single two years later, takes a trip to Richmond, Virginia... and unexpectedly finds that he's driven to Pointe Pleasant, West Virginia instead.
Considering that Pointe Pleasant is 400 miles out of his way and that he made it there in just under an hour, and not to mention the fact that a local resident with a shotgun (Will Patton, excellent as always) is convinced that Gere has been knocking on his front door every night for the last three nights at exactly two-thirty am each time, Gere is more than a little bemused by what exactly it is that's going on here.
From here on out things only get weirder, with strange phone calls in the middle of the night, town residents seeing alien-looking creatures, and general spooky doings and going-ons. If this all sounds like a bunch of stuff you've seen before in the X-Files, you'd be right.
But here's the catch: this film is nonetheless really, really, almost spectacularly good. Richard Hatem's script is adept at giving us just enough mystery to draw us in without resorting to the usual cheesy sci-fi "it's all just a conspiracy why don't people really believe THE TRUTH" kind of thing that the X-Files so overdid (no, there's not even a *hint* of a conspiracy here - it's way too clever a script for that); it's creepy and intriguing and intelligent and doesn't resort to using pop culture references every five minutes to make us "identify" with the characters; this one's written and played straight-up with none of that self-referential tongue-in-cheek horror crap that we've all grown so sick of in the last few years. Director Mark Pellington (who did the so-so "Arlington Road," with a great first half and a horrible last half) proves himself incredibly adept not merely at building and maintaining atmosphere within the piece but at making us truly interested in Gere's plight -- Gere's desperation to find an answer to the Mothman visits becomes a twisted kind of metaphor for his inability to cope with his wife's death. Here Pellington proves himself to be amongst an elite group of music video directors turned filmmakers who actually know that sometimes subtlty is the better part of valor when making a film, a group that includes the likes of Spike Jonze and David Fincher -- he's stylish, yes, but he knows how to use style in moderation, to aide rather than destroy the story he's telling. The 13th Street review of the script said "imagine if David Lynch directed the X-Files," and while that's not a bad description of the style employed here, if anything this movie reminded me in the very best of ways of M. Night Shyamalan's "Unbreakable". Pellington and Hatem show the same knack here for building tension out of seemingly normal scenes that made that film work so well.
Just as an example of the kind of subtly creative things Pellington put into the film, during one of the scene transitions we see a storefront filled with television sets, one of which is broadcasting an interview with Gere's character. Slowly, we begin to realize that the set right next to it is displaying an extreme close-up of Debra Messing's eye from the hospital room (don't ask me to explain it, but this same shot of Messing's eye serves as an important motif to the whole flick), and, if I'm not mistaken, the other sets are playing out other parts of the movie as well - some not yet seen. And even the casting of Messing as the soon-to-be-dead wife earns high marks in my book - Messing's certainly a better-known actress than Laura Linney (the main female character in the flick), and by casting her in the smaller, arguably more important to the storyline role, we have a character who, despite being in only a couple of scenes before she pops off, we really care about.
Everything about this film - save, of course, for the very very ending - down to its pitch-perfect temp soundtrack (which climaxes with Radiohead's "Everything in its Right Place," a song which I hope they don't lose and that pretty accurately reflects the film's mood) is dead-on right. This might be just a rough cut, but even the pacing was spot-on. I can't imagine this not being a big hit when this comes out in February...
...I just hope that it *does* come out in February. I heard more than a couple of people in the audience voicing the very same concern aloud that started floating about within my head around the film's half-way mark - namely, will the studio pull (or worse, change!) the film in light of "recent events"? One of the prohecies recieved in the flick involves a passenger jet crashing... and later on, when Gere visitis a Dr. Leek in Chicago (which, by the by, I assume is meant as an injoke - the author of the book the film is based on is named John Keel), a tale is told of a prophecy involving a building that gets bombed... and, later still, Linney delivers a quite moving mini-monologue about how planes will always crash and people will always die, and we just have to move on and deal with it... Nothing particulary offensive to a normal human being, mind you, but who knows what those Hollywood types'll make of it. Here's hoping they'll know great fucking work when they see it, and leave it the hell alone...
Except for that damned ending.
--Mirth
Hey, NRG, what’s with telling every single audience that they’re “the first ones to see the film”? You do that for everything. It’s a joke at this point. We get BEAUTIFUL MIND reviews from months apart, and both groups are told they’re first. Same thing with MOTHMAN PROPHECIES. Trust me, Mr. Farrell... sometimes it’s okay to be second.
"Moriarty" out.
