Almost, Not Quite

1. "Assault On Precinct 13." 30 years ago, John Carpenter directed a lean, efficient, no-real-stars low-budget thriller that still has a reputation as one of the better films of its kind. Now Hollywood has attempted to remake this story in a contemporary setting with modern day bells and whistles, and it works a fair amount of the time, but in the end? Almost, not quite.

For those unfamiliar with the premise: it's New Year's Eve in Detroit, and a localpolice precinct is nearly deserted... understandably, since it's going to close after that night. But when the skeleton crew present winds up taking in a busload of lethal prisoners because of a crash right in front of the place during a snow storm, and a group of rogue police show up determined that those criminals will NOT get to prison alive... well, you can imagine the chaos.

Ethan Hawke does a very credible job as the head cop, just authoritative enough without being more fierce and commanding than he could bring off, but he's burdened with the very cliched back story of "the cop who was spooked by a badly botched job years ago and has never been the same since"... how many movies have we seen with THAT one? Gabriel Byrne as the leader of the rogue cops sleepwalks through his performance. On the other hand, Laurence Fishburn is outstanding as the most fearsome of the jailed criminals, and when the desperate, beseiged cops inthe station decide they're desperate enough to free the criminals and give them guns so they can help defend the station,you don't doubt for a second that Fishburn would naturally assume command of the "bad boys." He brings an amazing sense of power and dignity to his role. The nearly all-male cast manages to find room for two women: a police woman who acts more like a prostitute, and an alleged psychiatrist who becomes a frightened little girl at the first sign of violence. And why is it that, if an action movie features two women in the cast, you absolutely ALWAYS know that one of them will end up dead? Is there some kind of law not permitting two women to make it alive to the end of an action movie?

The action itself is expertly handled: you really get the sense of claustrophobia and fear someone would feel being trapped in a situation like this. And it keeps mounting right up until the very last scene. In this aspect, at least, they've done Carpenter proud.
But there are just a few too many questions and problems to keep it from being the model of the efficient little contemporary thriller that it might have been. I suppose you COULD be satisfied just to realize that the film makers in this case at least appear to have TRIED to update the original film into something that works just as well for the 21st century. You COULD... but I wasn't quite.

2. "White Noise". Michael Keaton (where has he been?) stars as a widower whose late wife appears to be trying to contact him from the beyond through means of the static (or "white noise") of electronic devbices such as TVs, radios, etc. Turns out that he's not the only person receiving these kinds of messages... and, furthermore, it isn't only benevolent spirits trying to get through to their loved ones who are using these channels of communication.

Admission time: I absolutely do not believe that it is possible to communicate with the dead. Not through white noise, not through mediums, ouija boards, not even through the internet. I'm not a sceptic: a sceptic is one who has doubts. I have no doubts: it just cannot be done. HOWEVER, that does not mean I can't suspend my disbelief and enjoy a film on this subject: after all, my favorite TV show is "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", and I certainly don't believe in vampires. First, though, this would have to actually BE a movie, and it's really more like a new-agey infomercial merged with a bad CBS (or Fox) TV series.

How many shows have there been in the past few years ("Early Edition", "Tru Calling") about characters privileged with supernatural knowledge of future events who try to prevent "future" disasters? When Keaton's wife begins sending him visions of violent deaths that haven't quite occurred yet, the film turns into something exactly like a feature film adaptation of one of those shows. Any attempt at horror (which we'd been led to believe is what they were trying to do up until then) goes out the window as the movie becomes "CSI: Transylvania Meets Early Edition." Is this really something worth going to a theatre to see?
Well, maybe if you're into the kind of cheap pseudo spiritualism that so many phonies like to exploit the grieving with in books and late-night TV, you could enjoy the lectures about the meaning of life and death you get periodically. But while I have absolutely no problem at all with the concept of faith in many circumstances... sometimes it's the only thing we have to get us by... there are also situations where skepticism would be well advised until you see some solid proof, and this movie just leaps wholeheartedly, unquestioningly, into new age waters so deep you could drown in them.

There have been at least two other movies made in the past few years with a roughly similar premise: one of them, "The Mothman Prophecies", starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney, is exactly what you'd hope for in a movie like this: it doesn't take itself too seriously, and just provides you with a good scary time. If you think the premise of "White Noise" sounds intriguing, you'd probably be better off looking up "The Mothman Prophecies" and watching it instead.