Vertigo

So I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo the other night. This summer has been a regular Hitchcock retrospective for me, as I think I’ve seen a majority of his movies over the last couple of months. I have to say that Vertigo is my least favorite of those I’ve seen up to this point. That having been said, this is the first time I’ve seen Vertigo, and I’ve found that in the case of most of Hitchcock’s movies that I’ve enjoyed them more the second time around. But for some reason, I suspect that this won’t be the case with this one.

Overall, Vertigo was a disappointment. James Stewart plays a San Francisco detective, recently retired from the police force because he now suffers from vertigo. His fear of heights was brought on by an incident in which a fellow officer dies from falling off the roof of a building. An old college buddy looks him up and wants him to keep tabs on the man’s wife (Kim Novak). The man suspects his wife might be possessed by the spirit of her grandmother, and he fears that his wife will follow in her grandmother’s footsteps and take her own life. So he wants Stewart to trail his wife to see if he can find out if she really is channeling her dead grandmother. Inevitably, Stewart begins to fall for her, and his life goes downhill from there. The movie takes some twists and turns after that, but giving out more information is giving a little too much of the plot away.

My first complaint is the title of the movie. While Stewart’s vertigo does factor into the plot, and arguably at key moments, for the most part his affliction is non-existent. Not a big deal, you may argue, but if you are going to call a movie Vertigo, that kind of implies that it may factor into the movie more than a couple of times. A minor complaint I realize, but it was an irritant for me nonetheless. And while I’m on the subject of irritants, here’s another. What was the deal with Kim Novak’s eyebrows? She is supposed to be this gorgeous woman that Stewart’s character begins to fall for. But every time I looked at her I couldn’t take my eyes off the giant black monstrous collections of hair above her eyes. Her eyebrows were huge, and the fact that they were jet black compared to her bleach blonde hair made those suckers really stand out. Maybe that was in fashion back in the late 50’s (although I doubt it), but they are just distracting today.

I guess my biggest beef is that this movie had so much potential. Overall all of the elements are present for a great movie, but somehow they just don’t seem to fit together all that well. And that’s not a dig on Hitchcock. From a technical standpoint, the movie is perfect. The man knew how to make a movie. In this case I think it was the story that dragged this movie down. I suspect had the screenplay been tweaked just a little bit more, this would have been a far superior film.

Blood Work

Well, I caught Clint Eastwood’s latest, Blood Work, the other day. Not a bad idea for a film, and for the most part it wasn’t all that badly done. But there were a couple of glaring exceptions, one of which nearly wrecks the film. First, and this is probably not an annoyance to most, was the inclusion of comedian (and that is a term I use loosely) Paul Rodriguez as a big-mouthed annoying detective. Admittedly, he is perfectly typecast as big-mouthed and annoying, but he was just too much for me to take. Every time the guy showed up on the screen, I knew I was in for another lesson in how to do everything wrong as an actor in a major motion picture.

But the big issue in this movie was the fact that I had the killer figured out from about halfway through the movie. And no, I’m not a genius or psychic, it is just one of those movies where you get that feeling as soon as the character walks onto the screen that that person is going to be trouble. OK, yes I know, in every movie involving a murderer, there is at least some chance of guessing who it is, even if it isn’t obvious. But in this case, the producers obviously thought their killer was a bit too easy to figure, so they included a scene to throw we the audience off the track. Normally smart, but I this case, if you had been focusing on the killer from early in the film, and this scene temporarily threw you off like it did me, then you would have been really distressed to learn that you had fooled at the end of the movie. Fooled really isn’t the best word here. Cheated is more like it. Because, without giving anything away, the scene (designed to throw us off) in which the then-unknown killer interacts with Eastwood’s character, is a scene that the killer couldn’t possibly have involved in. Confused? So were the writers of this movie. Essentially they added a scenario to the movie that wasn’t logically possible. I suppose they could have explained it away somehow, but they didn't. Which says to me that someone was hoping that the audience was going to be paying more attention to their popcorn than what was going on up on the screen. I know my reasoning sounds more than a little confusing, but I want to avoid ruining the movie for anyone.

Bottom line. Blood Work would have been a better movie had someone involved noticed this glaring leap in logic.