Spookless in Seattle
Michael Keaton is not to blame for the scratchy White Noise, the latest witch doctor shocker to creep into theaters. This movie is mostly static, but its glossy take on supernaturalism is less fuzzy than most of these pictures, and horror types are not looking for logic anyway. Dark, moody emotionalism drives this genre; the less coherent the plot, the more scary it's supposed to be.
Pity Geoffrey Sax, directing his first feature, for trying to make sense of Niall Johnson's script, which smuggles its brand of mysticism—ghosts communicating through electronic appliances—into scientific language and sends this clunker down the boob tube. Keaton plays an architect whose novelist wife (Chandra West) mysteriously dies in a car crash, only to start sending messages through the airwaves.
Desperately missing his second wife—his first wife (Sarah Strange) takes their kid (Nicholas Elia) conveniently off his hands for the scariest scenes—the distraught Keaton is drawn into the subculture of those who go for this garbage, including another grieving survivor (Deborah Kara Unger, channeling La Femme Nikita's Peta Wilson). Together, they watch television, listen to the radio and spend a lot of cash on technology in an attempt to decipher whatever it is the dead are trying to tell them. In the movie's scariest scene, and it's a cheap jolt, Keaton is called out to a lonely road during a storm, where he encounters a horrible accident with an overturned car that has skidded perilously close to dangling live wires.
From the beginning, any twelve-year-old can discern that not every voice is friendly and, since the electronic voice stuff is arbitrary, danger comes at any moment for any reason. It's a lot of hooey. A serial killer subplot, tied to a string of disappearances, does not help.
Director Sax lets tension build slowly and the shock moments—loud, brash and obnoxious—are kept to a minimum, thankfully without grainy shots and jerky movements. One keeps hoping for a plot to match Sax's polished style but the script and someone's dictate to dumb it down to gibberish prevails, and it's anyone's guess why Keaton's character doesn't break out a crystal ball to clear things up. He's a good father, an apparently successful architect, and he has developed a supportive relationship with his ex-wife, so it doesn't make much sense that he'd risk his life for a few seconds in the twilight zone.
Keaton's dead novelist wife isn't that interesting, and she is not around long enough to care what happened to her. A brief morning routine doesn't provide the context for a happily married couple whose loss of a spouse would drive the surviving partner to extremes and all that's known of her best-selling book is its sales, not its meaning or value in their lives, depriving her of a personality. Good performances by Elia as the kid, Strange as his mother and Mike Dopud as a cop are a mild stimulant.
Sax does not completely succumb to The Ring's stupidity syndrome, with its eerie nothingness replacing any semblance of plot, but he's left with an impossible task: making the most of a plot based on nothing.
Pity Geoffrey Sax, directing his first feature, for trying to make sense of Niall Johnson's script, which smuggles its brand of mysticism—ghosts communicating through electronic appliances—into scientific language and sends this clunker down the boob tube. Keaton plays an architect whose novelist wife (Chandra West) mysteriously dies in a car crash, only to start sending messages through the airwaves.
Desperately missing his second wife—his first wife (Sarah Strange) takes their kid (Nicholas Elia) conveniently off his hands for the scariest scenes—the distraught Keaton is drawn into the subculture of those who go for this garbage, including another grieving survivor (Deborah Kara Unger, channeling La Femme Nikita's Peta Wilson). Together, they watch television, listen to the radio and spend a lot of cash on technology in an attempt to decipher whatever it is the dead are trying to tell them. In the movie's scariest scene, and it's a cheap jolt, Keaton is called out to a lonely road during a storm, where he encounters a horrible accident with an overturned car that has skidded perilously close to dangling live wires.
From the beginning, any twelve-year-old can discern that not every voice is friendly and, since the electronic voice stuff is arbitrary, danger comes at any moment for any reason. It's a lot of hooey. A serial killer subplot, tied to a string of disappearances, does not help.
Director Sax lets tension build slowly and the shock moments—loud, brash and obnoxious—are kept to a minimum, thankfully without grainy shots and jerky movements. One keeps hoping for a plot to match Sax's polished style but the script and someone's dictate to dumb it down to gibberish prevails, and it's anyone's guess why Keaton's character doesn't break out a crystal ball to clear things up. He's a good father, an apparently successful architect, and he has developed a supportive relationship with his ex-wife, so it doesn't make much sense that he'd risk his life for a few seconds in the twilight zone.
Keaton's dead novelist wife isn't that interesting, and she is not around long enough to care what happened to her. A brief morning routine doesn't provide the context for a happily married couple whose loss of a spouse would drive the surviving partner to extremes and all that's known of her best-selling book is its sales, not its meaning or value in their lives, depriving her of a personality. Good performances by Elia as the kid, Strange as his mother and Mike Dopud as a cop are a mild stimulant.
Sax does not completely succumb to The Ring's stupidity syndrome, with its eerie nothingness replacing any semblance of plot, but he's left with an impossible task: making the most of a plot based on nothing.
