I don't expect too much of Hollywood thrillers these days. They're too formulaic, too predictable, too tame, too Ashley Juddy and Morgan Freemany. Every time I watch one, it feels like I've already seen it. They have the same plots, the same twists, the same cops and bad guys. But I love the genre, so I keep going back.

I'd read a couple of good things about Mr. Brooks, but really didn't expect much from Mr. America 1988 aka Kevin Costner, the botoxed Demi Moore and pseudo-comedian turned hack-actor Dane Cook. Maybe it was my low expectations, but I thoroughly enjoyed this film. For a modern Hollywood thriller to keep me engaged, not ask me to switch my brain off every 3 minutes, and actually still make sense by the last twist; it's a minor miracle.

What worked best for me about this film was William Hurt playing Mr. Brooks evil-conscience. He sits in the back seat of the car, suggesting nasty things for them to do. Costner's Brooks wants to be a good upstanding man, and when we first meet him, he's receiving Man of the Year honors from the Portland Chamber of Commerce. He's a good husband and father, a successful business, and has been able to curb his murderous tendencies for the past few years. But apparently Hurt's Brooks has had his eye on a particular victim, the old urges win out, and the serial-murder known as the Finger Print Killer goes back to work. He's a little rusty though, and kills a young couple in front of a wide open window.

His sloppiness soon comes to haunt him in the form of Dane Cook's Mr. Smith, who blackmails Brooks with some photographs of the murder scene. But Smith doesn't want money, he wants a taste of murder and forces Brooks to take him out with him on his next kill. This is really the meat of the film, I love how Brooks takes Smith under his twisted wing and shows him how a professional serial killer works, all the while playing a sadistic cat and mouse game. Writer/Director Bruce Evans even manages to get a decent performance out of Cook. He has an important role, and if his Mr. Smith doesn't work, the film fails. There's also a decent subplot about Brooks' daughter possibly being a serial killer herself. The weakest link is Demi Moore's on-the-edge detective. (Is there any other kind?) She's not that bad, just cliche'd, and there's a fairly useless storyline about her bastard ex-husband, that slows down the film.

Overall the film really works; it's well made, nicely shot and edited, and competently directed and acted. Most importantly the screenplay works, it doesn't dumb things down, or have twists that come out of nowhere to ruin the film. William Hurt and Kevin Costner are great together as the two sides of Brooks' ego. Mr. Brooks is the rare, modern Hollywood thriller that doesn't make you feel stupider for watching. - Grade: B (Seen on 7/3/08)

This film is an incredibly ridiculous supernatural thriller, that falls apart the minute it’s over, as you start to fill in the badly done pieces. It works okay for a while, good enough to keep you watching and wanting to know how it ends. But once some of the film’s mysteries start to unravel, you feel dumber for continuing to watch it. The film only works because of some blatant plot-holes and leaps in logic, that don’t make sense even in a world where Sandra Bullock’s life jumps back and forth between days of the week.

At the beginning of the film Sandra’s told that her husband has died, obviously it’s a horrendous day for her family and she goes to bed much worse for the wear. However the following day, she wakes up to her husband being alive again, and thinks her memories are nothing but a bad dream. But again she wakes up to a dead husband, and suddenly she’s going off the deep end, winding up the day by being committed to a mental hospital. Again she wakes up to her husband being alive. She starts to unravel the mystery of what’s going on, hoping that she can save her husband from dying.

She learns that she has a couple more days to figure out how to stop it all from happening. There’s one unintentionally funny scene where she ponders if he’s worth keeping alive, after she learns about his affair. Which pales in unintentional hilarity, to when she first confronts the fact of her husband being dead, sending his beheaded noggin rolling into the street; my favorite scene in the film. I’ll admit I was a bit interested in how it would come to an end, if it was in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy, something that’s always intrigued me. But once the groaner of an ending played out, and the credits started to roll, the film destroyed any sense of logic.

Premonition is a thriller for those who’ve never unraveled a mystery, and don’t want to spend a second past the end of a film, thinking about what they’ve just seen. Sandra Bullock dramatically over-acts her way through the whole film, ranging from hysterical tears to hysterical terror; her husband played by Julian McMahon, never sells himself as a real guy, I kept thinking he was going to jump into maniacal villain role. The filmmaking is typical Hollywood slickness, but with no real artistic or intelligent touches. But it’s the script that truly fails, with ridiculous scenes full of unrealistic dialog and actions, ending with a huge cheat. (Which I’ll discuss below) – Grade: D (Seen on 6/19/08)

(Full spoiler mode.) So the film ends with Sandra crazily driving after her husband, trying to get him to stop his car before the spot where he’s hit by a truck. She ends up stopping him at the exact place where he was killed and as he tries to pull a u-turn, his brand new car breaks down in the middle of the road, leading to a truck driving straight through him and then nonsensically exploding. Those ridiculous events aren’t even the problems I had with it, because at the beginning of the film, she’s told by a cop that her husband has died. Yet she’s on scene when it happens. Why doesn’t the cop know that or even recognize her? Time is only mixed up for her. They also blatantly cheat another thing in the time-line. There’s a “shocking” shot where her daughter’s face is suddenly mangled. They show later that she accidentally ran through a sliding-glass-door, but in the time-line which they set for the movie, it happens before they learn that daddy is dead, in fact daddy shows up at the hospital. But at the very beginning of the film, when they find out he’s dead, her face is perfectly normal. They should have found another way around this, by shooting her only from the back or something, instead they simply cheat. Not that it would have made this crappy movie any better.

Nobody can build a thrilling scene like Brian De Palma. He creates an incredible mix of photography, music and editing, that builds unbelievable tension. At the beginning of his career, critics claimed he didn't do much more than rip-off Hitchcock. (If you're going to steal from someone, you might as well steal from the best.) If you take Hitchcock's perfect sense of terror, add in a dash of over-the-top violence and sex, you get a good De Palma film. He was at the top of his game in the late 70's, early 80's, creating such classics as Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Scarface. In the middle of these films, he directed Blow Out, a film that never received the sort of attention these others did. After seeing it for the first time, I understand why.

A very young John Travolta, plays a sound engineer for a low-budget horror producer. He's out one night recording ambient sound effects, when he witnesses a car crash over a bridge. He jumps into the river, saving a girl from the back of the limo. Dying in the accident, was a senator, who had ambitions to become president. Soon Travolta is contacted by the secret service, and told to keep the girl's involvement under wraps. He begins to dig into what really happened. Through his sound recordings and photos taken of the accident he begins to unravel a much larger conspiracy.

The rest of the film doesn't live up to the ending, and Blow Out is certainly one of the lesser De Palma films, especially when he was at the height of his skills. It's not a total waste, it has a couple of well built scenes, I can think of no other film-maker that will show you the same scene multiple times, from a few different angles, so on each viewing you learn something more about what really happened. It's a fascinating skill, but there are better uses of it, in better films. - Grade: C

Instead of Blow Out, and many of his classic films, I'll recommend another of his lesser films, at least by other's standards, for a lesson in how he puts his unique vision to work: Body Double. It's a better made film, keeping you intrigued throughout the film, full of sex, violence and the suspense he's known for.

I was slightly intrigued by the trailer for this film. It looked fairly original, at least it wasn't a sequel, remake, or adaptation; which is fairly rare for a genre picture these days. David S. Goyer directing it also made me want to see it; even though he's responsible for the abomination that was Blade: Trinity, by far the worst of the series. But he's written some good sci-fi/action films in the last few years; Batman Begins, the first two Blade's and one of my all-time-favorite films Dark City.

Nick, played decently by Justin Chatwin, seems to have the world by the balls; he's very smart, good-looking, and well liked. But he's got a chip on his shoulder, his father's dead and his mother is ultra-controlling. He has a plan to get away from it all. He's been accepted into an art college in London and is planning on leaving the country without telling his mother. But before he gets the chance to leave, he pisses off the wrong person.

And this was my main problem with the film; the reason I could never buy into it. The person he angers enough to beat him almost to death, leaving him stuck in this state-of-limbo, which is the premise of the film; is this cute 90 lb. girl. Sure they stick her in a skull cap, dark clothing, and a pissed-off demeanor for the whole film, but I could never buy her as this ultimate-badass; she's a leader of a gang of thugs, she bullies everyone around her, she out-runs the police, and so on. It was like all these films where they stick the beautiful girl in glasses and all expect us to see her as the dork, only we're supposed to believe she's this total hard-case.

I appreciate that they were trying something different with this film. I can't remember seeing a film, where the lead character tries to figure out the mystery of his own disappearance. That's what made me want to see the film in the first place, but ultimately it wasn't that well executed and not all that interesting. At first it's sort of interesting to see Nick, walking unseen among the living, trying to figure out a way to get people to find his body. But it gets old after a while, the plot seems stuck in place for too long. That mixed with the phony-bad-ass-girl, made for an under-inspiring film.

I can see how this film might have its fans. It is different and fairly well made; an audience is out there for it. I think it's aimed at a teen audience, and who knows, I may have loved it then, maybe it would have made me feel smart for "figuring it out". But now I can't recommend it.