Best movie ever!

A Disappointing Continuation

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

BLINDSIDE is a dull Canadian thriller that boasts a leading role for the typically great Harvey Keitel, who is the only decent thing about it. Keitel plays the proprietor of a sleazy hotel, one of those characters who comes with a great deal of baggage. Some ruthless mobsters ask him to spy on one of the clients, which he does, but he ends up overhearing a planned murder and is forced to act. Unfortunately, this film suffers from a confusing storyline where very little happens and various sides are working against one another. There's the occasional burst of sudden violence but it's mainly dark and dreary, lacking in the suspense needed to make it work.

I came to this site to gain some clarity regarding the ending, which was not only abrupt, but confusing. Thus far, no satisfaction in that regard. The movie wasn't bad at all. The lead loudmouth gangster was a bit unbelievable... over the top, and seemingly miscast for the part. Keitel is a fascinating actor, although there were long stretches where his character said little or nothing at all. Lori Hallier and a young 25 year old "Lolita David" (as she was billed in this movie) were easy on the eyes. I found it odd that his motel guests didn't come to the front desk to pay their rent... he would knock on their doors and collect. And, apparently, they didn't have to pay in advance. They could even be a few weeks behind, and he wouldn't boot them out. Strange. Dark, moody, slow-paced. If I could have made some sense out of the plot twists near the end, I might have given this 7 stars.

Here is a movie that really does not know what it wants to be. The triple-crossing gangster narrative might conceivably make some kind of sense if you applied yourself to it I guess. But who cares? Whenever Harry Caul, I mean Harvey Keitel, is on screen, the movie is a brooding surveillance procedural with dark overtones of tragedy and loss; when he's not, the movie is an overdrawn melodrama bordering on farce. All the 'clever ideas' - the surveillance tape in the hi-fi store, explaining the corpse at the RIDE checkpoint, the yelling at Santa Claus - make the Keitel stuff seem even more alienated, while simultaneously making the menacing criminals look like utter buffoons. Not that Michael Rudder's lead thug needed any help; his sneering grandstand routine makes you want to avert your eyes and plug your ears. And anyway why does everyone keep conducting their highly sensitive conspiratorial dialogues at top volume in public places like shopping malls and porcelain museums? Rudder and conspirator Alan Fawcett even rent adjacent rooms, but there they go trudging out to the gas station. Everyone was clearly so awestruck at having Keitel on set that they forgot to call upon him to act; he mostly just stands there, except for one scene where he throws an inexplicable hissy fit on Lolita Davidovitch and then they go camp out in a used car for no good reason. The most unforgivable botch yet from Paul Lynch, who was handed a mismatched bunch of parts and crafted them into...a mismatched bunch of parts.

Harvey Keitel plays Penfield Gruber, once a prominent researcher in the field of surveillance science, who has lost his status as a result of his wife's messy suicide and is to be found as owner/manager of a run-down Toronto motel (he sports a goatee and smokes a pipe apparently to convince viewers of his past when fortune smiled). A narcotics dealer pays Penfield to surveil a business rival who resides in the motel and since Gruber routinely spies upon his clientele anyway, through access of the TV monitors, his new assignment does not require much creativity; however, in the course of his observing, he discovers that a murder is being planned to occur among his tenants, other than those purveying drugs. By capturing his findings on tape, Penfield is thrust into the middle of a savage gang war, all the while becoming romantically involved with the incipient homicide target, the film sagging into a patchwork of interrelated complications and betrayals. Director Paul Lynch places emphasis upon use of closeups, helpful in this case as the work is largely shot not only at night, but during very murky night at that, and watching Keitel in turn blankly studying his video recording of his wife's death by sleeping pill overdose, potentially voyeuristic as it may seem, is actually rather mild since Keitel's reading of his part is remarkably devoid of feeling, ostensibly due to his character's history of misfortune. Shelved for nearly two years, in all probability because its storyline is consistently unfocussed, the production does benefit from capable editing by Stephen Lawrence and interesting turns from Lori Hallier as Penfield's drastically targeted lover and Lolita Davidovich as a strip teaser with a heart of gold.