May 28, 2007
disturbia
Having very little to say about Disturbia other than "Not-That-Bad goes a long way of late," we'll borrow the formulation of our movie date, who noted that the resetting of the Real Window story to the suburbs meant, at a basic material level, that there were fewer things for Shia Le Boeuf to peer toward from his bedroom window — requiring in turn that the panoplistic scopophilia had to be satisfied by a variety of, how you say, "techno-windows": monitors hooked and not hooked to remote lenses, cameras, cellphone screens, and etc.
The distinction between a window and a monitor as regards (so to speak) looking at the world has been one very much on the mind of Hollywood (et al.) for a while; one needs only consider the founding confusion of The Matrix, and what seeing really might be. The concept of ideology figures; so does simulation, and McLuhan's light on/light through distinction. What's striking about Disturbia is the extent to which this is simply not a big deal; for the most part, in this film, all windows are windows. In that regard its logic is less that of simulation-anxiety, but of marketing convergence, in which the phone, iPod, computer monitor, television and etc all function as of-a-kind destinations for content, or for the-world-repackaged-as-content. In this movie the content is one neighbor is hot and the other one totally sucks.
14) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
13) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
12) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
11) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
10) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
9) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
8) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)