Film Review: Flightplan

Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster and Peter Sarsgaard (Val Kilmer’s dopey sidekick in The Salton Sea), centers around a widowed mothers desperate struggle to find her lost daughter aboard a transcontinental flight.

Jodie Foster tends to freak me out. She’s been a 12 year old hooker in Taxi Driver and an alien communicator in Contact. She was incredible in The Accused (1988), although I thought her peak was the original Silence of the Lambs. Before seeing this movie I was wondering how this would compare to the best films of her career. Flightplan marks her return from a 3-year acting hiatus.

The film starts with a sobering shot of Foster staring into the camera, looking as pale and crazy as ever. The shot introduces the broken spirit of her character, mourning the loss of her late husband who left behind a loving wife and 6 year old child. They’re leaving Berlin and going to NYC to start a new life together.

Not long after departing, Klye Pratt (Foster) wakes from a short nap on the plane to find her daughter not where she was lying. This instantly sends her into super-panic mode, where she begins to search the plane as casually as she can manage. Foster does a tremendous job instantly raising the tension and pace of the film. What follows is a frenzied journey through the bowels of the worlds largest commercial airliner in search of the only thing that Kyle Pratt has to live for.

This could’ve really been done poorly if certain precautions weren’t made; and actually, some of them weren’t. The stress and tension created by the film in the first 45 minute is remarkable, but last half of the movie sadly fizzles. When the tension is prematurely diffused, the final 20 minutes of the film feel like an uneventful wait for the inevitable to happen.

8/10 for the 40 or so minutes of excellence

February 20, 2006|

Film Review: Proof

Proof movie

Proof, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, and Jake Gyllenhaal, centers around the stuggle to determine where genius turns to madness.

Hopkins falls into the roll of the mathematical genius turned crazy old man as Robert and Paltrow falls in as the only slightly crazy daughter Catherine, struggling to come to terms with the state of her life and deteriorating sanity. Jake Gyllenhaal is a scholar mathematician (geek) drawn to both of them for different reasons. Most of the movie is dedicated to watching Catherine slowly lose it, which is fairly unsettling considering this is the first time I’ve ever seen Paltrow attempt a role like this. The casting seems as backwards to me as Cameron Diaz as Cusack’s wife in Being John Malkovich – and maybe that’s what makes it most interesting. Hopkins gives a flawless performance as the genius & insane wily-white-haired old man still in love with the Dewie Decimal System. His long winded and eccentric rants are mesmerizing, and the highlight of the film. Gyllenhaal plays an enamoured student of mathematics as anxious to get inside Roberts mind as to find his way into Catherine’s heart.

I’d gauge the pace of this movie somewhere between slow and really slow – most of the time when it doesn’t feel like an original formula it feels like the merging of things that have been done before. Like a cross between A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting (without the chemistry between Robin Williams and Matt Damon), it’s interesting but never entirely new or exciting.

7.5/10

February 12, 2006|
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