acoolsha

General entries


The Lodger 22 February 09

Section: article

Categories: distraction / dvd

I’m beginning to see why I hardly made entries here in acoolsha.org for so long. Besides the fact that most of the films I rent I only watch for about 15 minutes, many of those I do watch to the end are so weak they don’t warrant mentioning.

Pseudo-Puzzle films

Hollywood writing committees are constantly scrambling to come up with puzzle-scripts that are intended to keep the audience wondering and even discussing the film afterwards. It lends them a kind of pseudo-meaning.

But the writers are as arbitrary as they need to be to create this impression and they don’t answer to any internal logic other than that. They can place the parts as they like, and attempts on the part of the audience to do detective work on the story are wasted energy. This movie was an example of that laid bare.

The movie does draw extensively from the Jack the Ripper case, the book by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes and the 1927 film by Alfred Hitchcock. If it hadn’t, it would have had no pretense of a center to hold it together.

  • Title: The Lodger
  • Directed by: David Ondaatje
  • Writing credits: David Ondaatje, supposedly based on the book by Marie Belloc Lowndes
  • Starring: Alfred Molina, Hope Davis, Simon Baker, Shane West, Donal Logue
  • Year: 2008