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I violated one
of my prime rules tonight and saw a movie with Sandra Bullock.
I’ve never understood how this woman became a movie star.
Anyway, I went to see Murder by Numbers.
This movie is
worth seeing just to watch how truly bad an actress can be.
Bullock, as executive producer, did one smart thing.
She made sure she found a supporting actor who wouldn’t out
perform her. She accomplished
this task with aplomb by getting Ben Chaplin to sleepwalk his way through
the part as her partner.
She was
fortunate, also, in getting Tony Gayton to direct his own poorly written
screenplay.
He apparently went to a Hitchcock class once, or saw Vertigo and
Foreign Correspondent in a double feature, and tried to make them both at
the same time, all the while telling an updated version of Loeb &
Leopold.
Alas, all is not
lost.
The teenagers, two men and one woman, are superb.
The Loeb and Leopold roles are played by Ryan Gosling and Michael
Pitt and their teenage lover is played by Agnes Bruckner who is drop dead
gorgeous.
She’s so beautiful it’s almost worth the price of admission
just to watch her. Almost.
Unfortunately,
Bullock is on screen so much that there’s not much to enjoy.
Given yet another politically correct heroine who initiates all the
sex and just about everything else, her girly ineptitude in the final
confrontation is as ludicrous as the rest of the movie.
The sex between
Bullock and Chaplin is uninvolving; the relationships between Bullock and
everyone else, her partner, her boss, and the suspects are convoluted,
inconsistent and inexplicable.
If you want to
see terminally horrible acting by Bullock and Chaplin, and a poorly
written script poorly directed, this movie is for you.
However, I do believe that Gosling, Pitt, and Bruckner are so good
that they are worth suffering through Bullock, Chaplin and Gayton’s
writing and directing.
The
End
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