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By Cole Smithey
‘Premonition’
Movie Trailer
Ageless beauty Sandra Bullock
gives her typical automated performance
in a superficial cross between
the recent “Déjà
vu” and Bullock’s own excruciating
last movie “The Lake House.” Time
folds back and forth in various
permutations as suburban housewife
Linda Hanson (Bullock) awakens
to discover that her husband Jim
(Julian McMahon) has been killed
in a car accident, except for
the times that she awakens to
discover that he’s still alive.
Clues about Jim’s fate mount alongside
bizarre events, such as Linda’s
eldest daughter becoming horribly
scarred after running through
a plate glass window, or watching
Jim’s coffin brake open when it’s
dropped on the ground moments
before his funeral. The non-linear
plot becomes an annoyingly repetitive
device that stalls before the
final act stitches the narrative
puzzle together. Admittedly, there’s
a guilty pleasure in watching
any Sandra Bullock movie because
of the commercially generic choices
that she makes at every level
of production and performance.
Composer Klaus Badelt (“Pirates
of the Caribbean”) teases you
early on with an evocative score
that, like everything else in
the movie, will fall short of
its perceived aim. Early in their
relationship, Jim gives Linda
a substantial three-bedroom house
as a perfect place for them to
raise a family. As with “The Lake
House,” the dwelling functions
as an emblem of compatibility
whose foundation is tested under
supernatural conditions.
Fast-forward to nearly a decade
later and the couple has two little
girls, and the family is living
the life that all SUV manufacturers
want us to abide by. Still, tragedy
strikes after Linda listens to
a telephone message from Jim where
he professes his love for their
daughters before dropping the
call, ostensibly to talk to a
woman whose voice we hear in the
background. His voice sounds depressed,
as if he may be considering suicide,
and his manner spurs the dramatic
tension. A police trooper visits
to inform Linda of her husband’s
death after a big rig jackknifed
on the highway. Where many women
might faint at such news, Bullock’s
Linda remains stoic until she
wakes up shocked to find Jim drinking
coffee in the kitchen. The surreal
episode transforms Linda into
an investigator searching every
cranny for clues that might enable
her to preserve her husband’s
life. Prescription pills left
in a sink drain, an unfamiliar
woman at Jim’s funeral and a torn
phone book point Linda toward
a secret that will divulge her
own involvement in the disaster.
Already in a vacuum-sealed role,
Julian McMahon (“Fantastic Four”)
carries his death-warmed-over
persona too far. There isn’t a
whiff of chemistry between he
and Bullock. When the couple argue
about the wilting state of their
marriage, a contagious apathy
flies off the screen. There’s
such a streak of artificial misery
that runs through the movie that
you can’t help but laugh when
Linda finds her way into a church
for comfort. Screenwriter Bill
Kelly’s theme-spewing priest coaches
Linda with platitudes about her
wretched existence, and brings
the movie to a screeching halt
in the name of backpedaled exposition.
The most irrelevant plot point
involves the dreadful accident
that Linda’s daughter suffers.
With garishly stitched cuts all
over her face, the secondary character
co-opts the story as a grotesque
victim of her mother’s vacillating
sanity. From a visual standpoint,
the girl becomes the monstrous
embodiment of an ailing marriage.
But the accident implicates our
protagonist Linda as a negligent
mother who may also be a subconscious
murderer.
There’s no pretending that “Premonition”
is anything more than a cheap
knock-off of every other M. Night
Shyamalan-influenced Hollywood
thriller. It doesn’t matter if
the husband dies or if the daughter’s
face is scarred because the melodrama
here is so rotten that the riddle
is moot. Nevertheless, Sandra
Bullock is the girlish tomboy
that grew up to forge a cottage
industry of mediocre cinema. Her
movies somehow improve when they’re
screened on airplanes or in foreign
countries. So what if you come
out numb. CV
ZODIAC
Movie Trailer
A sweeping scope of social convergence
is magnified to the tune of Three
Dog Night’s “Easy To Be Hard”
that plays moments before the
Zodiac killer’s July 4, 1969 attack
on a young couple in a lover’s
lane parking lot. The tragic event
sets into motion director David
Fincher’s methodical adaptation
of Robert Graysmith’s “first-person
diaries” about the search for
the notorious “Zodiac” serial
killer that terrorized the Bay
Area in the late ’60s and early
’70s. With Alan Pakula’s “All
the President’s Men” as his guiding
beacon of contagious obsession,
Fincher conducts the police procedural
with masterful economy that eloquently
accumulates facts gathered by
various police departments and
by two members of the San Francisco
Chronicle’s editorial staff. Towering
performances from Jake Gyllenhaal,
as staff newspaper political cartoonist
Robert Graysmith, and Mark Ruffalo
as famed homicide Inspector David
Toschi, carry the film’s precise
tension to its gratifying but
uncertain conclusion.
David Fincher has said that
with “Zodiac” he wanted “to make
the last serial killer movie.”
That lofty aspiration translates
into a strict avoidance of the
subject’s intrinsic potential
for exploitation by approaching
it as a newspaper story wrangled
over by preoccupied detectives
and journalists. Fincher meticulously
crafts the true-crime mystery
as a social phenomenon that touched
the lives of many and ruined the
lives of a few.
In the years since his last
films (“Fight Club” and “The Panic
Room”) Fincher seems to have abandoned
his cinema of cruelty in favor
of a more restrained goal. “Zodiac”
brings his distinctively meticulous
talent to the fore as he prompts
intellectual and emotional responses
from the audience without allowing
for a second of distraction. But
there is more. The level of performance
he obtains from his ensemble of
actors is otherworldly. Crucial
too is the aural landscape that
permutates the engrossing fact-finding
mission at hand. Composer Davie
Shire (“All the President’s Men”)
contributes invisibly with a masterful
score that displaces our central
nervous systems. There is an unobtrusive
perfectionism in Fincher’s telling
of a difficult story. He knows
where reality and cinema meet,
and when to push the boundaries
of each. CV
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