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Under discussion:

Trouble the Water  (2008)

Kim Roberts happened to buy a $20 video camera just days before Hurricane Katrina hit her home city of New Orleans. The day before the storm hit, explaining why she was using the camera to record everything in sight, Kim was already talking apocalypse: “I’m showing the world that we still had a world, before the storm come,” she said, from behind the lens. “It’s like the Lord is upset, angry with New Orleans. And I don’t blame him.”

Roberts’ amateur video footage of her neighborhood shot before, during and after the storm is sprinkled throughout Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s documentary Trouble the Water, which just won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The footage itself has been billed as “harrowing,” but in practice most of it is too muddy and unfocused (literally on both counts) to make much of an impact. That said, the professionally shot material, of Roberts and her husband’s struggle to rebuild their lives after the storm, tells as powerful a story about the New Orleans diaspora as I’ve seen on film, from an angle unfamiliar. It plays out like a love story, with the Roberts’ turning their backs on their city in times of crisis, only to realize that their hearts are there after all.

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Under discussion:

Dog Day Afternoon  (1975)

High Noon  (1952)

12 Angry Men  (1957)

Nick of Time  (1995)

The Insider  (1999)

Timecode  (2000)

Phone Booth  (2003)

Gigli  (2003)

88 Minutes  (2008)

Dali & I: The Surreal Story  (2008)

I know star power isn’t what it used to be, but doesn’t it seem like we still give Al Pacino more credit than he’s worth? Despite his receiving an Oscar fifteen years ago, the guy hasn’t been a completely dependable actor in more than two decades. And yet a lot of people write about his upcoming movies as if they could maybe, possibly, hopefully be on par with the actor’s ’70s work. I’m not denying that he’s excellent in a few films of even the past ten years (particularly The Insider), but let’s not forget he was also in Gigli, so it isn’t like he’s making the same smart choices he was making as a younger man.

And now here’s 88 Minutes, another movie that attempts to give us a thrilling plot in real time, a la 24. But despite such a gimmick working with old films like High Noon and 12 Angry Men, when it’s presented as a gimmick, and clearly as the only reason a movie is made (as in the cases of Nick of Time, Timecode and Phone Booth), it always comes off as forced and (obviously) gimmicky. But at least Pacino is in it, right? Eh, maybe if American moviegoers still gave a damn about marquee names. Maybe that’s why 88 Minutes was released to many foreign markets six months to a year ago; star power is still marketable in many places outside the U.S. Meanwhile, Sony is finally dropping the thing here on April 18.

I can’t say that I would never see a movie just because Pacino is in it (I can’t wait to see him as Salvador Dali in Dali & I: The Surreal Story, only because the idea is half-genius, half-ludicrous), but even my nostalgia for a seemingly real time movie like Dog Day Afternoon (it’s not in real time, but it feels like it) can’t get me to see 88 Minutes just for him. And there doesn’t appear to be much else that’s appealing about the generic frame-job film either.

Under discussion:

The Bourne Ultimatum  (2007)

I know I’m late, but I just finally saw the last of the Bourne movies this week, and I just had to comment on the casting of Albert Finney in The Bourne Ultimatum. Was it intentional to employ an actor that would be so confusing to viewers who would easily mistake him for Brian Cox, an actor who appeared in the first two films? It’s worth noting that our first look at Finney’s character is in a photograph, and so the ability to recognize him as a different actor than we’d previously seen in the series is less than if we were introduced to him in person.

As little as I figure out what purpose it serves, I think the lookalike casting had to have been a conscious decision. After all, who hasn’t mistaken the actors for one another at some point in time? When Cox first became a heavily used character actor, I mistook him for Finney. And according to a five-year-old Page Six write-up, Cox gets wrongly identified as Finney all the time (”But I’m much better looking,” he says). It wasn’t surprising that I have found countless reviews of The Bourne Ultimatum, as well as forum comments, that acknowledge the confusion regarding Finney’s appearance in the sequel. Unfortunately, I can’t find any discussion of the film that attempts to give a reason for the casting choice.

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