The Eye

"The Crawling Eye," "Cat's Eye," "The Hypnotic Eye," "Dead Eye," Red Eye," "Blind Eye," "The Magic Eye," "The Evil Eye," "The Glass Eye," "Popeye," "An Eye for an Eye," "Eye of the Stranger," "The Hills Have Eyes," "The Beast With a Million Eyes," "Evil Eyes," "Deadly Eyes," "Night Eyes," "Snake Eyes," "Terror Eyes," "Cats' Eyes," "Black Eyes," "Dark Eyes," "Deadly Eyes," "Eyes of Laura Mars," "Eyes of a Stranger," "The Man With No Eyes," "Eyes Wide Shut," "For Your Eyes Only," "Eye Only Have Ice for You,".... No, wait, don't stop me; I'm having fun, even if I'm getting a little giddy.

You get the idea. There must be hundreds of movies with "Eye" or "Eyes" in the title, most of them horror flicks. So why not yet another one, this time with a title that shows remarkable conciseness; it's simply "The Eye." No beating around the eyebrows (or browbeating) with this title; it gets right to the point. Of course, like so many horror films these days, this 2008 release is a remake of an Asian picture, one that the Hong Kong-born Pang brothers made in 2002 called "Gin Gwai" (or "Jian Gui"), which translated means, as I understand it, "Seeing Ghosts." I like "The Eye" better. The title, I mean. More succinct.

OK, enough of this goofiness. Let's get down to some serious silliness. The first thing you've got to do to enjoy "The Eye" is accept Jessica Alba as a blind concert violinist. Yeah, I know what you're thinking--a disabled nuclear scientist maybe or a deaf neurosurgeon, but a blind violinist is a stretch. You'd be right. She was more convincing in "Dark Angel," "Sin City," and "Fantastic Four." Here, we've got to extend her a good deal of patience and good will to get through.

Alba plays Sydney Wells, a young woman who lost her sight when she was five years old. Now in her twenties and a successful musician, Sydney decides it's time for a cornea transplant--new eyes. Ah, if only she'd seen "Mad Love" ("The Hands of Orlac"), she'd have known that you don't go around transplanting body parts that once belonged to troubled people. At least in the movies you don't.

No sooner does Sydney get her new eyes than she begins seeing things moving in the shadows. She reaches out, but they're not there. One of the things she sees is the person in the hospital bed next hers, just after her operation; only the person has just died and has already been moved. Then she begins seeing whole new rooms around her, entirely new landscapes that aren't really there, and the recurring vision of a blazing fire. She even sees a strange face in the mirror in place of her own.

The eye specialist who tries to help her adjust to her new sight, Dr. Paul Faulkner (Alessandro Nivola), thinks she's hallucinating. On the other hand, it's hard to trust him as he appears to have been watching too much "House." Instead of diagnosing her problem in a reasonable manner or recommending her to a good psychiatrist, he basically just yells at her.

Likewise, Sydney's sister, Helen (Parker Posey, wasted in a role that provides her maybe two lines), refuses to accept that Sydney's visions could be anything more than imagination, vivid nightmares brought on possibly by Sydney's new ability to see for the first time in years.

Is Sydney dreaming? Or has she inherited memories of the eyes' former owner--"cellular memory" as it's called. Why is she seeing dead people? Where are Bruce Willis or Haley Joel Osment when you need them?

"The Eye" moves along like almost every Asian horror movie you've ever seen, remake or not. It relies heavily on slow atmospherics rather than genuine suspense or even overt shocks, although there are several instances where the directors, David Moreau ("IIs," "Back to Saint Tropez") and Xavier Palud ("IIs"), do try to startle us with sudden loud noises and entities jumping out seemingly from nowhere. They're effective for the moment, but they cannot replace a sustained tension, which the film fails to produce.

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Meet The Browns [2-disc Special Edition (w/DIGITAL COPY)]

I "get" Angela Bassett. But I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand what makes Tyler Perry popular. I just don't get the racial stereotypes and caricatures. In "Meet the Browns," Bassett throws herself into it as if she were doing something serious and important, like "A Raisin in the Sun." The rest of the cast, meanwhile, thinks they're doing "Nutty Professor II: The Klumps." The better Bassett's performance gets, the more it underscores how this feels like two movies trying to be one. I know that Perry wrote, directed, and produced "Meet the Browns," but it still feels as if Perry bought the rights to a Lifetime made-for-TV drama and as an afterthought added the zaniest elements from his 2004 stage play.

One of the focal points of that play was a bombastic character named Madea, played dinner-theater over the top (like most of the characters) by Perry himself. Madea makes an appearance here too, with Perry also handling the role of Joe, but the film version mostly showcases Bassett and the fictional Browns (real-life spouses David and Tamela Mann). When the story follows Bassett's character--a single mom named Brenda Brown who lives in Chicago's projects--it feels serious and heartfelt. But despite Bassett's efforts to elevate the material, it also smacks of melodrama--a familiar story that heads straight for the emotions and thrives on stereotypes. Bassett adds soul and earnestness to her character, but that still doesn't keep Brenda from being a cliché. She's the typical good mom trying to make ends meet with different fathers for each of her three children, one of whom is a teenaged basketball star with drug-dealing friends. All you have to do is remember your Chekhov--If there's a gun in the story, either it's going to go off or not, and if it's not going to be fired, why is it in the story?--and you know there's going to be at least one crisis that's the result of those bad friends. But things are too hunky-dory in the Browns' world. Even after the crisis, we get a quick and total return to normal, as if nothing happened. Chicago is the violence capital of the world, lately, but the projects never looked so attractive. It's also the quickest undermining of a crisis that I've ever seen in a film. Another head-snapper is that Brenda looks and dresses awfully Marie Claire for a single mom who doesn't have the money to pay her electric bill. But none of it is enough to make you forget how familiar her character is, or how often we've seen the smooth-talking basketball recruiter (former L.A. Laker Rick Fox) who tries to ingratiate himself with Brenda in order to land to her talented son, Michael (Lance Gross).

Perhaps the biggest caricature comes with Brenda's best friend, a Latina named Cheryl (Sofia Vergara) who dresses like a hoochie and can't talk without unleashing a barrage of verbal attitude. Then there's the Browns. The over-the-top Browns. We get to meet them the same time that Brenda does: after her father dies, and her half-siblings send her bus tickets Georgia so she and her brood can attend the funeral. Why would she want to go, when she never even met her father? Well, her Latina friend suggests, maybe her father was loaded and she might get the money to solve all her problems here in Chicago. Then, in what's positively the worst bit of editing I've ever seen, suddenly Brenda and her children are getting off the bus in Georgia. Huh? It's almost like those old Warner Brothers cartoon jump cuts, where one minute Elmer Fudd grabs Bugs by the ears in the field, and then as he drops him the backdrop and scene changes suddenly so it's an interior and he's dropping the wascally wabbit into a big iron kettle. And what a stew these folks from Chicago have been dropped into.

The Brown siblings are a bunch of ill-mannered, borderline buffoons who bicker a lot and can't wait for the reading of the will so they can see what Daddy left them. Someone irritates you? Just push 'em on top of Daddy's grave at the funeral. There are some familiar faces here, like the always believable Margaret Avery ("The Color Purple"), along with Frankie Faison ("Coming to America") and the irrepressible Jenifer Lewis ("The Preacher's Wife"). If you isolate all of their performances, they're just fine. But put them all together, and it's too much to take, as so many family gatherings are. How Brenda gets the warm fuzzies around this clan is a mystery to me.

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Family Ties [TV Series] [Season 4]

For a while, "Family Ties" was as "in" as big hair and shoulder pads. Like "The Cosby Show," it was an Eighties' staple that gave viewers likeable characters who were more than just excuses for jokes or standard sitcom plots. Viewers discovered the show its third season, when it finished Number 5 in the Nielsen's as the second highest rated sitcom. The Cosby clan finished third. The following year-this season-"Family Ties" would finish second to "The Cosby Show" again, only this time they were ranked Number 1 and Number 2.

Viewers loved the Keatons almost as much as they did the Huxtables. Steven and Elyse Keaton (Michael Gross and Meredith Baxter-Birney) were former flower children who gave birth to children of a different decade: Alex (Michael J. Fox), a Young Republican who only thinks about money and personal success; Mallory (Justine Bateman), a shallow-thinker whose only interests are fashion and boys; and Jennifer (Tina Yothers), an athletic sibling who's the centrist of the family. This season there's also Andrew Keaton, who was born the end of the third season.

The plots are surprisingly driven by the characters' personalities rather than the standard sitcom recycled narratives--with the exception of the season opener, that is. In what's probably the weakest episode, the season opener was a 90-minute made-for-TV movie that was filmed on location in London. The Keatons, en route to Oxford, where Alex has been accepted, take a family vacation without the baby and get involved with spies. And so you have the smart humor of the show giving way to situational comedy of the most familiar sort: bumbling secret agents and equally bumbling Scotland Yard detectives. Throw in a Lord (John Moulder-Brown) who has been designated as Alex's roommate and who falls hard for Mallory, and you get a fairly silly show that fans will still enjoy watching because after all, these are the Keatons.

The show gets quickly on-track again, though. This is the season where Alex and Mallory find themselves in new opposites-attract situations, with Alex falling for a liberal art major named Ellen (Tracy Pollan, who went on to become Fox's real-life wife), and Mallory being wooed and wowed by a crude, blue-collar motorcycle-riding artist named Nick (Scott Velentine). And neighbor-friend Irwin "Skippy" Handelman (Marc Price) is still around to wish he were the one dating Mallory.

Here's how the other 24 episodes (not counting "Family Ties Vacation") play out. They're on four single-sided discs and housed in a standard-size keep case that has a middle "page" to hold two of the discs, with the episode guide printed on the inside cover (which, yes, you'll have to take out to read):

1-2) "The Real Thing," Pts. 1&2. Alex decides to date a good-looking coed he picked out of the Freshman yearbook, but ends up falling for her roommate instead. So much so that the success-conscious Alex even blows an essay exam.

3) "Mr. Wrong." No one in the family seems to like Mallory's new boyfriend, Nick, and they try to get her to see that he's not the one for her.

4) "Designated Hitter." Jennifer gets a love interest in this episode, but the tomboy blows it when she punches out a guy who's bullying her intended.

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Avida

The French surrealist comedy "Avida" is best appreciated as a series of darkly comic vignettes and not as a narrative whole. Frankly, it wasn´t until I read the back of the box that I became aware the film even possessed an ostensibly cohesive story, but its episodic nature was compelling enough to have kept my interest throughout its duration.

The plot, once understood, is summarized easily enough: a trio of zookeepers (Eric Martin alongside co-writers and directors Benoit Delepine and Gustave Kervern) kidnap a wealthy woman (French plus-sized model Velvet D´Amour) and her dog and retreat into the mountains.

But this is a movie where the main thrust of the story is incidental to its overall purpose, which is an exercise in satirical nonsense. The film may make perfect sense in the minds of its creators, but from a viewers´ standpoint, it´s more like sifting through dirt and occasionally finding a gold nugget.

The film´s proverbial nuggets are its moments of comedy and satire. Though the film is rooted in absurdity, it is not so awash in nonsense as to render it indecipherable. "Long live death," a character announces early on, setting the film´s macabre and ironic tone.

In one of the film´s great scenes, we witness a business-type make enter his modern home. He sits down and listens to music. Through several large windows in the background we watch one of the zookeepers (Kervern) try to manage the man´s guard dogs. A fire is started and the man´s technologically advanced home becomes a deathtrap. I won´t reveal the hilarious fate he awaits, but it is a very effective scene both in terms of physical humor (watching Kervern wrestle the dogs is a joy) and satire (see what reliance on technology gets you?) Also, the largely silent sequence is evocative of Jacques Tati.

Tati is not the only point of reference. There´s also the dream logic of David Lynch, the unrestrained fantasy of Crispin Glover (I speak of his work as a director), the early surrealism of Luis Bunuel (and his collaborator Salvador Dali, who is referenced here overtly), John Waters´ predilection to depict society´s outcasts (particularly having a fat woman as a major character) and the mountainous landscapes of Alejandro Jordowsky.

By listing all of these references, I in no way mean to characterize "Avida´s" creators as plagiarists. Rather, like many artists, they draw on what has come before them and make it their own. I wish that all of the film were as successful as the early home scene, or the black humor of the zoo scene (where visitors can eat the animal they´ve just seen), but a lot of the movie appears to be odd for oddness´ sake, which doesn´t do much for me. The last third in particular takes on a verbosity and languidness that do much to sap the fun out of the adventure.

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