Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart in PANIC ROOM (2002) – A thinking woman’s movie

The following is my entry in The Girl Week Blogathon, being hosted Nov. 16-22, 2015 by the blog Dell on Movies. Click on the above banner, and read a variety of bloggers’ tributes to their favorite movie actresses and heroines!

There’s an interesting book titled Brave Dames and Wimpettes, in which novelist Susan Isaacs posits that most modern movie heroines still use old feminine wiles instead of brainpower to get what they want. Urgently recommended viewing for Ms. Isaacs would be Panic Room, one of the best thrillers of the early 2000’s.

The movie’s heroines are Meg Altman (Jodie Foster), a recent divorcee, and her young daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart, essaying one of her first movie roles at the tender age of 11). They’ve just moved into a three-story Manhattan home of the kind to be found more easily in movies than in Manhattan. The prime draw of this house is its “panic room.” In the event of a burglary or similar emergency, the resident locks himself inside this room and uses its separate phone line to call the police.

On their very first night in the house, Meg and Sarah find out just how good to be true this room is, when three unruly burglars break in. It happens that the house’s previous owner left a few million dollars behind in the house, and wouldn’t you know it, the money’s in the same panic room where Meg and Sarah lock themselves. Oh, and for good measure, Meg didn’t have a chance to get the separate phone line hooked up.

Yeah, I know, this whole set-up could happen only in the movies. But before the thrills are unleashed, the movie takes the time to set up the relationship between Meg and Sarah, and it’s nicely done. Because we get to know them for a while, we have a stake in their peril.

And believe me, these are not two women who sit around screaming and waiting for some moronically written boogie-men to kill them. Simply because the marvelous screenplay by David Koepp (Jurassic Park) allows these women to think, they manage to stay one step ahead of the burglars, who eventually find themselves cowering as much as those wimpettes Isaacs writes about.

Except for some overly swooping camera movement at the beginning, David Fincher’s direction is as perfectly taut as you could hope to find in a thriller.

As for the lead actresses — what a wealth! With her interplay with Foster and her remarkable subtlety, even in 2002 it looked as though Kristen Stewart would be…well, the next Jodie Foster.

And what is there to say about Foster? I find her one of the most beautiful women in movies, simply because she makes intelligence sexy.

Watching a seeming no-brainer like Panic Room is like expecting an ice-cream cone and getting a dinner at Four Seasons.

MURDER IS MY BEAT (1955) – Film-noir with characters you care about

(WARNING: Major spoilers abound!)

It’s a dame, of course. In film-noir, it’s always a dame.

Detective Ray Patrick (Paul Langton) has literally trekked through a mountain of snow to bring in a murder suspect, Eden Lane (Barbara Peyton). He brings her in, the case against her is air-tight, and Ray’s detective work earns kudos for his department. But of course, Ray isn’t satisfied, because he thinks the dame got a bum deal in court just to close the case.

As it so happens, Ray is chosen to escort Eden to her prison sentence on a train ride. And as it even more so happens, Eden looks out the window and just happens to see the very man she’s been accused of murdering. Of course, Ray’s first instinct is to believe that Eden is pulling a stunt to get out of her prison rap. But Eden sobs and continues to plead her innocence. And, well, hey…if you were a lonely cop, and you were hired to keep tabs on a prisoner who purrs and looks like Barbara Peyton, how long would it be before you melted into a puddle on your passenger seat?

This is a taut and very satisfying film-noir thriller. Director Edgar G. Ulmer, who made his noir reputation a decade earlier with the almost existential Detour, seems to have finally fought faintly the old ennui and relaxes a little here. Not to give too much away, but he and screenwriter Aubrey Wisberg find it in themselves to give their toughened characters a bit of humanity, which helps the audience to extend a lot of goodwill towards this movie’s Detour-like low budget.

Visit Murder Is My Beat to enjoy its allegiance to noir tropes, and stay for the surprising stake you’ll end up having in its bad-luck-ridden characters.

PANIC ROOM (2002) – A thinking women’s movie

There’s an interesting book titled Brave Dames and Wimpettes, in which novelist Susan Isaacs posits that most modern movie heroines still use old feminine wiles instead of brainpower to get what they want. Urgently recommended viewing for Ms. Isaacs would be Panic Room, one of the best thrillers of the early 2000’s.

The movie’s heroines are Meg Altman (Jodie Foster), a recent divorcee, and her young daughter Sarah (Kristen Stewart, essaying one of her first movie roles at the tender age of 11). They’ve just moved into a three-story Manhattan home of the kind to be found more easily in movies than in Manhattan. The prime draw of this house is its “panic room.” In the event of a burglary or similar emergency, the resident locks himself inside this room and uses its separate phone line to call the police.

On their very first night in the house, Meg and Sarah find out just how good to be true this room is, when three unruly burglars break in. It happens that the house’s previous owner left a few million dollars behind in the house, and wouldn’t you know it, the money’s in the same panic room where Meg and Sarah lock themselves. Oh, and for good measure, Meg didn’t have a chance to get the separate phone line hooked up.

Yeah, I know, this whole set-up could happen only in the movies. But before the thrills are unleashed, the movie takes the time to set up the relationship between Meg and Sarah, and it’s nicely done. Because we get to know them for a while, we have a stake in their peril.

And believe me, these are not two women who sit around screaming and waiting for some moronically written boogie-men to kill them. Simply because the marvelous screenplay by David Koepp (Jurassic Park) allows these women to think, they manage to stay one step ahead of the burglars, who eventually find themselves cowering as much as those wimpettes Isaacs writes about.

Except for some overly swooping camera movement at the beginning, David Fincher’s direction is as perfectly taut as you could hope to find in a thriller.

As for the lead actresses — what a wealth! With her interplay with Foster and her remarkable subtlety, even in 2002 it looked as though Kristen Stewart would be…well, the next Jodie Foster.

And what is there to say about Foster? I find her one of the most beautiful women in movies, simply because she makes intelligence sexy.

Watching a seeming no-brainer like Panic Room is like expecting an ice-cream cone and getting a dinner at Four Seasons.

JAWS (1975) – Four decades later, it still has bite

Three moronic sequels have not dimmed the power of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. In fact, the sequels have only made the extraordinary qualities of the original more pointed. The shark was never the point; the characters were.

The movie’s plot sounds quite similar to the many rip-offs which followed. A beach is terrorized by a shark; the police chief (Roy Scheider) wants to close the beach down; but the tourist-conscious mayor (Murray Hamilton) won’t have it; tourists become so much appetizer while the mayor wallows in guilt; and finally, someone kills the sucker.

But again, it’s the way in which the shark is built up as a movie villain that had contemporary critics comparing Spielberg to Alfred Hitchcock. We never see the shark in full until movie’s end. More often, we get simply the shark’s actions. And they’re scary enough, as when the shark tears off the end of a pier where some bounty hunters were waiting to catch him.

Conflicting legends have grown up around the movie. One story has it that Spielberg, on the verge of establishing himself as a movie maverick, agreed to direct the movie only on the condition that the shark not been seen until the movie’s second half. The other story is that Spielberg intended to show the shark all along but had continual mechanical problems; as a result, the actors had plenty of time to improvise and get “into” their characters. Whatever the reason, the movie builds up as a model of suspense.

And as a result, we get to know what makes the three primary shark-hunters tick. There’s Police Chief Brody, whose first view of the shark inspires the classic understatement, “I think you’re gonna need a bigger boat.” There’s macho Captain Quint (Robert Shaw), whose hardening was partially the result of his being on-board a ship that sunk into shark-infested waters (which he describes in the movie’s famous monologue). And there’s oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), who quickly throws in the towel on Quint’s machismo contest by parodying it (when Quint crushes a steel can with his bare hand, Hooper crushes a styrofoam cup).

Ever since Spielberg hit it big 40 years (!) ago, Hollywood has gone mad with special-effects follies. But as moviegoers (and Spielberg) have always known, special effects are a success only if you care about the characters first. Jaws still serves a textbook example of special effects giving payoffs to well-developed characters.

I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Spielberg!

THE JACKAL (1997) – This movie should not have seen the light of day

I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never seen The Day of the Jackal, the highly acclaimed 1973 thriller that was the inspiration for the movie The Jackal. Having said that, it’s still quite easy to see where the updated version falls short.

The original movie was about an international assassin who methodically plans to kill France’s General DeGaulle. Starting with that scenario, let’s outline how the newer movie has been thoroughly Hollywoodized.

First, the new version drags in the Cold War Russians–who, as movie cliches go, are now on a par with the Nazis. Some sort of Russian baddie (a drug dealer, I guess)–it’s not made very clear) is killed due to the efforts of Preston (Sidney Poitier), the FBI’s deputy director. The baddie’s brother enlists the aid of The Jackal to avenge his death by killing an American public figure.

In the hopes of building suspense, it’s left vague as to who is to be killed. To help uncover The Jackal’s planned target, Preston enlists the aid of Declan Mulqueen, an imprisoned Irish terrorist who used to work with The Jackal. Unfortunately, this tower of teror is played by Richard Gere with a slatternly Irish accent (he sounds like John Lennon with a head cold), and he ends up coming across as the friendliest terrorist you’ll ever meet.

To round out the miscasting, The Jackal, a feared assassin and a master of disguise, is played by…Bruce Willis?? Every time The Jackal changes his hair color or grows a mustache, it’s supposed to throw the FBI wildly off-track. But as usual, Willis wears the same smug sneer throughout the movie, so it doesn’t seem that he’d be hard to recognize. Consequently, Willis’s attempt to change his personas come off like a misguided episode of his old TV series “Moonlighting.”

Nothing in the movie makes much sense. At one point, Preston uncovers Mulqueen having a one-night stand with one of his female agents, and Preston doesn’t bat an eye. We’re given to understand that Mulqueen might jump ship to return to his native Ireland, but the movie doesn’t want to turn the audience against Gere, so this potential plot point turns out to be a red herring. And after spending two-thirds of the story telling us that the target is a particular American official, the movie suddenly offers Mulqueen a vague clue that tells him the target is someone different.

The movie’s publicity took great pains to convince us that The Jackal was not a remake. Well, it is a remake, but not of The Day of the Jackal. With its nasty Russians, a leading man whose Halloween costumes are supposed to pass as disguises, and a vague attempt at a soppy romance, The Jackal comes across as a retread of Val Kilmer’s The Saint, another movie retread that came out at about the same time. And given that movie’s terrible box-office figures, one wouldn’t think the public was crying out for more.

The only person who comes off decently is Sidney Poitier, who seems to project more fiery authority with each passing year. When he points a finger at the Russian baddie and barks, “That’s enough!”, you truly believe the man has been put in his place. The rest of the cast is quite negligible.

No, I haven’t seen The Day of the Jackal, but I have seen plenty of self-important thrillers, of which The Jackal is obviously an offshoot. Except for a couple of brief, nicely done set-pieces, the movie’s musical score gets more worked up about the so-called suspense than a viewer will.

TWILIGHT (1998) – Paul Newman, James Garner, and other veterans at their finest

Among the many virtues of the movie thriller Twilight:

(1) A successful modern-day film noir, full of world-weary gumshoes, the privileged rich, and lots of corpses. Newman plays Harry Roth, a retired detective who works as a live-in handyman for Hollywood stars Jack and Catherine Ames (Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon). Jack asks Harry to deliver a “package” (read: blackmail payment) for him, and once Harry gets involved, he can’t help nosing around. This sounds uninspiring at first, but it’s thought-out well enough to include labyrinthine plot twists, memorable supporting characters (James Garner is terrific as a retired-cop friend of Harry’s), and some crackling dialogue.

(2) An intelligent, witty story, written by adults, for adults. Co-writers Robert Benton and Richard Russo, director Benton, and star Newman pulled off a similar miracle a few years before with Nobody’s Fool, and they’ve done it again. The movie’s tone is confident enough to have a funny conversation just before a shooting begins. Any movie that can mix moods that well is a winner.

(3) A movie that feels “lived in,” allowing its viewers time to soak up its atmosphere. Even though Twilight is all of 94 minutes long, its leisurely pace put off a few critics who have been trained in MTV-style viewing. When a movie’s elements work this well, you don’t have to rush them.

(4) A sterling cast. Newman, Hackman, Sarandon, Garner, Stockard Channing, Reese Witherspoon, and “Breaking Bad’s” Giancarlo Esposito are superlative. My only regret about the movie is that one of my favorite character actors, M. Emmett Walsh, makes a great entrance and then gets shot before he utters a word.

(5) Paul Newman. As in Nobody’s Fool, Newman’s face is a movie in itself. And let’s face it–any movie that undresses Susan Sarandon and still leaves you more in awe of Newman’s 73-year-old form…