Change Your Image
bfindlay-1
Reviews
Proof of Life (2000)
Good Crowe, Ryan, Morse
Despite the obvious ending being reminiscent of "Casablanca," which is a great film, "Proof of Life" held up for the most part with A LOT of action--guns, muscle, and physical cruelty. Crowe is mostly always good, but Ryan surprised me in this. I found her multi-dimensional, able to shake the cutesy business that she usually plays, and really good as a quite desperate wife who has some issues with her world-hopping engineer husband. Morse was believably chauvinistic early on (before the kidnapping), and quite remarkably believable as a desperate hostage. Crowe was solidly heroic, not a Humphrey Bogart, to be sure, but certainly someone whom Ryan as Alice would remember for a long time. Certainly Terry and Alice never had "Paris" to remember, but there were good vibrations between them as Crowe plotted to save her husband.
Hotel (2001)
Not great but not bad
I viewed the last half of the film alone, since my wife angrily left the room, saying, "This is pure trash." Certainly there were failures in the film--the complexity of watching and listening to four screens at once, the disconnectedness of the "plot," etc. But there was a level of experiment that was commendable, to say the least. I was occasionally reminded of some of the more difficult moments in a Fellini film. The acting, for the most part, was strong, although some characters were intentionally two-dimensional. The use of Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi" was an interesting nuance, and in some ways the "tone" of "Hotel" matched the mood of Webster's original.