Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Friday, May 24, 2013

MIKE'S MURDER (1984)

Writer/helmer James Bridges never quite recovered from the one-two punch of this artistic flop and his follow-up pic, the commercial, but cruddy PERFECT/’85. Here, he was trying for a French-styled thriller, more Claude Chabrol than Hitchcock, set in the midst of the High/Low intersecting worlds of ‘80s L.A. drug culture. Debra Winger’s a young bank exec whose on-and-off affair with a drifting tennis pro ends after his casual drug dealing escalates with fatal results. Winger finds she can’t turn the page without knowing what the hell happened and winds up learning some dangerous facts. It’s a great set-up, if only Bridges had the technical chops to pull it off. But a vague narrative tone needs precise shots; and Bridges is no Antonioni, there’s not a memorable image in the pic. Worse, a lack of chemistry between ‘Missing Mike’ and Winger makes her character look dim instead of blinded by a failed romance. (Too bad, Mark Keyloun has the necessary fast-fading pretty-boy insipid looks, but the guy just can’t act.) And a big thriller-diller climax, though reasonably effective, feels tacked on, less Hitchcockian than WAIT UNTIL DARKish/’67. Though it does give an unlikely grand piano a non-symbolic role to play.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The trailer hints at intimate (i.e. European) sex scenes missing from the final cut. No doubt, co-editor Dede Allen (under studio orders?) tried to make this a bit less artsy.

DOUBLE-BILL: You can imagine how this might have worked by watching Robert Altman’s THE PLAYER/’92.

No comments: