Month: December 2007

In theaters.

Mysteries—everything from detective stories to police procedurals to tales of random people stumbling upon crimes—have been a guilty pleasure of mine for years, but serial killers have always been my least favorite type of subject. They don’t interest me because their motives are all but incomprehensible. They’re not functioning as normal people. Every fictional serial killer (I can’t pretend to know anything about the real ones) lives in his own universe, with obscure, arbitrary rules that don’t make much sense from the outside. In short, a serial killer is crazy, and his madness bores me.

I mention this because, intellectually, I don’t think Sweeney Todd is a bad musical or a bad movie, but emotionally, it leaves me so unmoved, so indifferent, that I giggled through half the film. Maybe Johnny Depp’s performance is too opaque, maybe Tim Burton’s direction is too garishly gothic, but to be fair, maybe it’s just me.

Both on DVD.

I didn’t see Infernal Affairs in the theater—few Americans did; it played for a matter of days on just a handful of screens nationwide, no doubt to fulfill contractual demands connected to the purchase of remake rights—but I read about the Hong Kong thriller, Netflixed it as soon as it became available on DVD, and absolutely loved it. The smart, relentless plot, the exquisitely crafted parallels, the powerful central performances—it was already great, and I cringed to think of it being remade.

So when that remake, The Departed, came out in theaters last year, I ignored it, despite its great cast, despite the good reviews, and despite the fact that Martin Scorsese had directed it. Seeing The Departed, I feared, would be a betrayal of Infernal Affairs, which I already served as an overeager missionary. (“Ignore the DVD case! I know it’s cheesy, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the movie. Which is great! Tony Leung! You saw Hero, right? No? Well, he’s amazing. And everything intertwines so perfectly. It’s so much fun! Really! So you want to borrow it? Oh, The Bourne Identity? Well, yeah, that’s fun, too, of course, but it’s on TV all the time. You sure you don’t want to watch Infernal Affairs instead?”)

But TiVo recently recorded The Departed on its own, and I came down with a miserable cold (which, incidentally, is why it’s taking me so long to get anything written), and I thought, what the hell. It’s Martin Scorsese. Infernal Affairs will understand.

And now I’m torn. Having seen the American remake and revisited the Hong Kong original, I have to admit that The Departed is sleeker and more polished that Infernal Affairs. (To be fair, few directors can go toe-to-toe with Scorsese.) But just as back-to-back viewing forced me to face some of the flaws of my beloved cops-and-criminals flick, it also illuminated some of the original’s strengths.

In theaters.

I wanted to love Juno. You don’t see that many movies with a young female protagonist, particularly one who isn’t monomaniacally obsessed with boys, and this one has such an appealing cast, such promise. I wanted to love it, and I didn’t. Even setting aside the hype, Juno is a disappointment.