'Invasion' Proved My Point About Remakes

---

---

I have a definite opinion about remakes.

Usually, they aren't improvements on the originals. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Oh, I concede that technical advances in filmmaking have made it possible for a remake to be better than the original. But even in the 21st century, remakes are rarely, if ever, improvements.

I offer, as Exhibit A, "The Invasion," which premiered on this day in 2007.

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that "The Invasion" was "the fourth, and the least, of the movies made from Jack Finney's classic science fiction novel." I don't feel qualified to agree or disagree with that statement since I haven't seen all three of the previous incarnations. But Ebert's assessment surely affirms my own of remakes.

I also have a definite opinion about Nicole Kidman, the female lead of "The Invasion." I like her. I liked her the first time I can remember seeing her — in "Dead Calm." And I have liked other movies in which she appeared — "To Die For," "The Others" and "Eyes Wide Shut" come to mind. So does "Moulin Rouge," for that matter.

But Kidman has had about as many misses as hits in her career, especially in recent years, and I would put "The Invasion" on that list.

And it isn't necessary to see the other three film versions of the story to reach that conclusion, either.

All four movies do have a few things in common — primarily, the extraterrestrial invasion. The first couple of movies were transparently titled "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The third was named, simply, "Body Snatchers."

(Returning — ever so briefly — to the plausibility angle, Ebert asked, "Do you expect a movie titled 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' to be plausible?" It is a fair question, and my answer, after careful reflection, would be, "Yes. It doesn't have to be completely plausible — which is good since it is hard to imagine how it could be. But there needs to be enough plausibility to allow the viewers to suspend considerable disbelief.")

As I presume it was with each movie version of Finney's novel, "The Invasion" opened with the arrival of alien spores on Earth. In the only version I saw previously (and I have heard it was the same in the other two), these spores took the form of pods that encased their victims. They changed that a bit in "The Invasion" — the spores apparently attached themselves to a space shuttle that crashed following re–entry and scattered its debris from Dallas to Washington (that's a pretty impressive debris field). The debris was contaminated, and anyone who touched it became infected. When the victims fell into deep sleep, the infection seized control of them entirely.

Replacing the pods in "The Invasion" was a kind of film that covered the victim while he/she slept.

No one really seemed to notice what was happening at first. Oh, there were reports in the news of some strange virus in the U.S., and there were more dire reports from abroad. But, like most people, Kidman (a Washington–area psychiatrist in the movie) went about her daily routine, oblivious to what was happening until one of her patients, a victim of domestic abuse (Veronica Cartwright, who appeared in the 1978 version of the story), told her, "My husband just isn't my husband anymore."

---

---

Now, given the conversations those two were sure to have had in the past, it would be plausible for Kidman not to understand that Cartwright wasn't discussing abusive behavior — but rather the zombie–like behavior of those under the influence of the aliens. Her husband was one of them. The viewers never saw that character when he wasn't under the aliens' influence, but they knew it the first time they saw him sitting in Kidman's waiting room.

He had the look.

If you ever saw "The Stepford Wives," you would recognize the look — flat, dull, emotionless. Bloodless. Soulless. Measured in words and actions.

Kidman's character had to become proficient at the look, pretending to be one of them in order to maneuver around the city without drawing attention. That required her to maintain total outward neutrality no matter what was happening around her.

---

---

Absent any real plausibility, "The Invasion" suffered when it asked viewers to accept some pretty preposterous things.

Like, for example, the fact that a medical researcher (played by underrated actor Jeffrey Wright), a colleague of Kidman's love interest (played by Daniel Craig), was able to discern all kinds of information about this previously unknown virus from a single sample — in a couple of days. He was also able to determine how to eradicate the virus. Cancer researchers who watched this movie must have been jealous.

That would have been enough as far as I was concerned, but then there was a scene when Kidman and her young son were trying to get away in a car that was set afire by a Molotov cocktail. After it was struck the car could be seen virtually engulfed in flames, and I am pretty sure the windshield was broken when the vehicle was hit, but the car kept going, even seemed to accelerate, toward the occupants' appointed rendezvous with a helicopter.

I had to wonder how would it be plausible for someone to keep driving with flames all around like that? I mean, I was never any great shakes at science when I was in school, but you don't have to be a physics major to imagine what would happen to someone who tried to keep driving under those conditions.

Sorta like someone trying to continue driving with one flat tire. Common sense tells you it won't end well.

---

---

Then there were things that required specific knowledge of how they do things in Washington to comprehend how off the charts the plausibility factor had become.

For example, in Washington the law prohibits any building in the city from being taller than the Capitol — yet the movie clearly showed the helicopter landing on top of a (nonexistent) D.C. skyscraper.

I know how Hollywood loves to run a good thing into the ground, but trust me, this story has been driven deep into the ground. Let's move on to something new, shall we?

In the Twinkling of an Eye -- or the Twitching of a Nose

---

---

Jack (Will Ferrell): So were your parents in the witch business?

Isabel (Nicole Kidman): Both of them. My mother fixed the 1986 World Series.

---

I had pretty high hopes when I heard that a movie based on the Bewitched TV series was being made. I was a fan of that show when I was a child, and I have admired Nicole Kidman (who was tapped to play Elizabeth Montgomery's role) for many years.

Now, I'm not really a fan of movies based on TV shows. Occasionally, they turn out OK, but mostly I have found them to be huge disappointments. It's fair to say that my enthusiasm for the Bewitched movie was tempered.

But I like Nicole Kidman in much the same way that I liked the original Samantha. I thought she was a good fit for the role.

You know what? I still do. I had other issues with the movie. So did film critic Roger Ebert, who conceded that he didn't watch much prime–time TV and had never seen an episode of Bewitched. "When you see 500 movies a year," he wrote, "you don't have a lot of left–over yearning for watching television. In the evenings, you involve yourself in more human pursuits."

Ebert found the movie "tolerably entertaining," and so did I. Since much of it incorporated scenes from episodes of the original series — sometimes word for word, as I recall — I gather he would have found the series entertaining as well. But he had the same problem with the movie that I had — it threw together too many scenes from episodes of the series that had no unifying theme or context — other than whatever flimsy pretense was used to loosely link things together.

"Many of its parts work," he observed, "although not together. Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman are funny and likable, but they're in a plot that doesn't allow them to aim for the same ending with the same reason. It's one of those movies where you smile and laugh and are reasonably entertained, but you get no sense of a mighty enterprise sweeping you along with its comedic force. There is not a movie here. Just scenes in search of one."

That seems like fair criticism to me.

---

---

As I say, I like Kidman, and I think she was a good choice for Samantha. But there was some real chemistry between Elizabeth Montgomery and the first Darrin (Dick York) that transcended the transition to the second Darrin (Dick Sargent), who clearly was never as comfortable with Samantha as his predecessor, midway through the series' run.

That was material for one of those inside baseball kind of jokes in the movie. Ferrell observed that, on the TV show, Darrin had been so insignificant that the producers changed actors playing the role midway through the series' run — "and no one noticed!" But the series wouldn't have survived for four more years if not for the reservoir of good will the show's fans had for Montgomery. If she was even remotely convincing in her relationship with the second Darrin, the viewers would accept him without question. She was, and they did.

And the movie needed to be mindful of that. The movie wouldn't work if there wasn't the same kind of chemistry between Samantha and Darrin as there had been on the TV show — and there wasn't. Kidman and Ferrell could read the same lines that Montgomery and York did 40 years earlier, even re–create entire scenes, but they wouldn't work without the chemistry.

Kidman needed a different Darrin. I like Ferrell, too, but he needed a different Samantha. As Ebert observed, they were never really on the same page.

And I wasn't particularly wild about the supporting cast, either. For me, Michael Caine never really worked as Samantha's father (played by Maurice Evans in the TV show). And I had some trouble accepting Steve Carell as Uncle Arthur. I suppose that really was a tough one to cast, though. I mean, who could improve on Paul Lynde?

But my real problem was with Shirley MacLaine as Endora, the role played by Agnes Moorehead on TV. Now, I admire much of the work MacLaine has done over the years, but, frankly, I have found her recent work to be a little too flamboyant, and she really let her freak flag fly in "Bewitched." Not that Moorehead wasn't a little over the top at times; the role certainly called for some of that. But MacLaine was a little too over the top for me.

---

---

So, what we were left with was, as Ebert observed, an entertaining big–screen homage to a beloved TV series — but nothing that seemed likely to spawn a "Bewitched 2." I doubt that very many people in the audience left the theaters in 2005 hoping that a sequel would be coming along in 2006 that would let them know how things were working out between the new Samantha and Darrin.

Sadly, it is what I had been conditioned to expect — from previous attempts to make successful TV series into movies. Perhaps a little better than most, and, to be fair, "Bewitched" the movie did have some elements of creativity that the others did not. So it showed flashes of what might have been. I hoped for better.

I didn't get it.

'Eyes Wide Shut' Was Psychological More Than Sexual

---

---

Some people think "Eyes Wide Shut," which premiered 15 years ago today, was a fitting finale for director Stanley Kubrick.

Some folks don't.

I saw many trademark Kubrick touches in the movie, and the story was very much in his style — if Kubrick had a style. His movies differed so much in content from each other that I suppose it really isn't accurate to refer to his style in any context other than camerawork.

He could do comedy, he could do satire, and he could do drama.

He had something of a reputation, and so did the source material for his movie, an Austrian novella, "Dream Story," that was published more than 70 years earlier. "Eyes Wide Shut" dealt with the thoughts and personal conversions a Manhattan doctor experienced after his wife told him she had fantasized about having an affair.

Kubrick died shortly after the completion of filming.

I've never read the book so I don't know if the two are described in it as attractive or plain. I suppose it doesn't matter too much in a book, where a reader can imagine characters to be anything that isn't spelled out for them by the author.

It is different in a movie. A character's appearance leaves little to the imagination in a movie. If the book isn't specific — and even if it is — the viewer has to accept the appearance that is given in the movie. Through casting, acting, direction, even story revision, all of the heavy lifting is done for the observer; his/her images will be those created by the writer(s), director and actors.

In casting his movie, Kubrick put two actors in the roles of the husband and wife whose reputations for sexually charged performances preceded them — Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. At the time, they happened to be real–life spouses, which probably raised their level of intensity in the movie. They split up a couple of years later.

---

---

Anyway, the talk before "Eyes Wide Shut" made its debut was that it was going to be a sexy movie. Given the nature of the trailers that had been showing in theaters, that is certainly easy to understand.

But it occurred to me as I watched it that Kubrick may have taken a page from Alfred Hitchcock's playbook.

Hitchcock was known for his cameo appearances in his movies; when it was brought to his attention that audiences had been watching for his cameo and didn't settle in for the story until they saw him, Hitchcock began positioning his cameos earlier and earlier in his movies.

In Kubrick's case, audiences were expecting nudity so my guess is that he tossed them a crumb. The audience saw Kidman changing clothes for a party very early (and very briefly) in the movie.

To me, it was as if Kubrick was saying, "OK, there's the nudity. Now, let's focus on the story."

As nearly as I could tell, the story was about jealousy and obsession.

(I've seen this movie six or seven times, at least. I'm still not sure what it was trying to say. It seems to be saying something different each time I watch it.)

That wasn't the end of the nudity, of course.

In fact, the story was about sex and titillation — as well as jealousy and obsession — and nudity, too, but the nudity didn't tend to take the viewers where they probably thought they were going. It may seem like a strange dichotomy, but sex and nudity don't necessarily go hand in hand in the movies — especially a Kubrick movie. Nudity in "Eyes Wide Shut" was treated almost casually. So was sex, for that matter.

Make no mistake, though, there was lots of nudity — and there was some sex, too — but it was interesting that the next time the audience saw Kidman (only about a minute later), she was doing something decidedly not erotic (although some might argue that it was intimate) — sitting on the toilet — while Cruise put the finishing touches on his appearance.

And they were conversing in the way that married people do. She asked about her hair. Did it look all right? He said it looked great. She said he hadn't looked at it — so he did and repeated his compliment.

The night after the party — which was a nice blend of significant moments and red herrings — Cruise and Kidman fired up a joint and engaged in some candid conversation, in which Kidman told Cruise she had fantasized about having an affair — with an anonymous naval officer she had seen during their vacation in Cape Cod a year earlier.

---

---

Kidman felt drawn to him, like a moth to a flame. "If he wanted me," she told Cruise, "I would give up everything." She expressed relief that one day he disappeared and never returned. It meant she wouldn't have to make such a choice.

That mental image really lit a fire under Cruise, and he embarked on a two–night odyssey through New York's sexual underworld.

The odyssey took him to many places, and he didn't have to look too hard to find opportunities to be unfaithful to Kidman. Such opportunities found him.

He dabbled in them, was tempted by them, nearly succumbed to them at times.

I guess this was the thing about "Eyes Wide Shut" that I found especially fascinating — Cruise's transformation from a kind of stuffy yet high–minded sort to a no–holds–barred sexual adventurer, all because his wife had told him that she had fantasized about having an affair.

And yet ...

He never gave in to the temptation.

At one point, while making arrangements for a costume to wear to an orgy (which was hosted by an unidentified secret society), Cruise met a young girl (Leelee Sobieski), the daughter of the owner of the costume shop. When Cruise came back the next day to return the costume, the shop owner strongly implied that his daughter was available for sexual favors.

(Some people think Sobieski, who was 13 when filming began and 16 when it ended, bears a resemblance to Helen Hunt, who was one of the most popular actresses in Hollywood at the time. I could see hints of a young Hunt in Sobieski's face in "Eyes Wide Shut," but, overall, as she has grown older, I see less and less of it.

(I guess that was consistent for me. I once worked with a woman who told me she was a dead ringer for Julia Roberts. I didn't see that, either.)

Other interesting angles of the story:

Sydney Pollack played the wealthy patient who hosted the first party and was revealed to have been one of the guests at the orgy. Originally, Harvey Keitel was cast in that role, but he dropped out — as did Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was cast to play Marion, the daughter of one of Cruise's old friends — because of another commitment.

Marion's father was dying, and Cruise was summoned to his side. In the movie, Marion tells Cruise she loves him and kisses him. Marie Richardson played the role instead.

Some movie reviewers classified "Eyes Wide Shut" as an erotic thriller. It was even marketed that way. But that really was misleading.

The final product was really more of a psychological thriller, partly because of things that were done in the editing process.

Apparently, the sexual content was even more graphic than people saw on their movie screens, but, to avoid an NC–17 rating, certain techniques were used to mute it.

That was done after Kubrick had died. Who knows if he would have agreed to what was done?

Of that attempt to mute the content, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "[I]t is done well, even though it should not have been done at all. ... 'Eyes Wide Shut' should have been released as [Kubrick] made it."

Sounds a lot like the argument I made against "colorizing" black–and–white movies. A movie is a work of art, and the director is the artist. Since the advent of color in the movies, it has always been an artistic decision whether to use it — although the cost played an important role in that decision for many years.

The content of a movie is even more of an artistic decision so I agree with Ebert. The edits should not have been done at all — even if leaving the film as it was meant an NC–17 rating.

The Calm Before the Storm

---

---

I liked Roger Ebert's lead paragraph in his "Dead Calm" review: "The key image of 'Dead Calm' is of two ships drawing near each other in the middle of a vast, empty expanse of ocean. The emotions generated by this shot, near the beginning of the film, underlie everything that follows, making us acutely aware that help is not going to arrive from anywhere, that the built–in protections of civilization are irrelevant and that the characters will have to settle their own destinies."

That really summarizes things well. The ocean was a player in the movie — at times a barrier from both good and evil, at other times completely neutral, but always there. The lesson was clear — the rules of dry land do not apply on the high seas.

(Actually, in these days of the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 and the speculation that it may have crashed in the Indian Ocean, "Dead Calm" is not a bad metaphor. When it is said the plane apparently ran out of fuel in a remote portion of that ocean, it's worth remembering that scene to which Ebert referred.

(Technology has changed many things in the lifetimes of most of us, but it still has not overcome things like time and space. In an era when technology seems to bring everyone in the world closer together and that it really does seem to be a small world after all, it is folly to forget that there are still places in this world that are as unknown to us as the surfaces of distant planets — or that we humans are mere specks occupying this blue–green ball floating in space.)

I had never heard of Nicole Kidman before "Dead Calm" premiered 25 years ago today.

She had been in several movie and TV projects, but they, like "Dead Calm," were Australian projects. I don't recall many Australian movies that made it to the American market in the '80s.

Her co–star, Billy Zane, had had a few small roles in movies like "Back to the Future," but he hadn't received a lot of attention.

After I saw "Dead Calm," I knew who both were. Each received international acclaim. Deservedly so.

That was appropriate, I suppose, because their characters really didn't like each other. At all. It seemed to come so naturally from them that it didn't seem as if it could be acting.

Well, Kidman's character was sympathetic at first, but that didn't last. And Zane's character, well, he was psychopathic.

---

---

Even though she was a familiar face in Australia, Kidman was still young (21) and virtually unknown. Zane wasn't much older (23). Their ages really weren't important to the story.

They had to be that young, I suppose. Most older characters probably wouldn't be as plausibly hostile to each other. Oh, I suppose a few might be, but most older characters seem to have a kind of grandparent quality. They're more likely to bake cookies for you or take you fishing than to attack you.

Kidman had to be young to be a believable mother, I suppose — although women don't always become mothers when they are truly young, do they? I was the first child in my family, and my mother was nearly 30 when I was born. So Kidman's character could, conceivably, have been older — but I doubt that Zane's could have. And he would have gotten the best of most of the 30–something women I have known (none of whom had the energy to keep up with a toddler).

When the story began, Kidman's character and her husband (an Australian naval officer played by Sam Neill) lost their young son in a car crash. To help them recover from their loss, they took their yacht on a vacation to the Pacific, where, just when it seemed they were beginning to mend, they encountered a drifting schooner that was taking on water.

A man (Zane) rowed over to the yacht in a dinghy, explained that his boat was taking on water and that everyone on board had died of food poisoning. Neill's character was suspicious so he decided to go over to the boat and check out the situation. He left Zane with Kidman — when I first saw the movie, I thought at the time that was his biggest mistake even though everything seemed to be under control. Zane, apparently exhausted from his ordeal, was asleep, and the door to his cabin was locked from the outside. (I remember wondering at the time why the door locked from the outside.) My fear was confirmed as the movie played out.

Neill found the corpses of Zane's companions — and a video tape that suggested Zane had killed them all in some kind of maniacal frenzy. He tried to return to his yacht, but, by the time he got there, Zane had awakened, knocked out Kidman and sailed away. Neill really had no choice but to return to the ship and try to repair it.

He would spend most of the rest of the movie repairing the schooner and then trying to catch up to his yacht.

In the meantime, the still emotionally fragile Kidman tried everything to persuade Zane to turn around and go back for her husband. She even pretended, at one point, to be attracted to him (after she had exhausted her bag of tricks) and yielded to his advances.

---

---

But she hated him — and he hated her, too — and she was constantly trying to contact her husband by radio and figure out a way to get the yacht back to where he was.

Actually, I think the movie would have been a first–rate thriller if not for a few things that I just never could work my way around.

It could have been a great story about the resourcefulness of a woman who apparently knew little about sailing before the trip but managed to learn a great deal about it — mostly on her own (perhaps recalling instructions her husband once gave her but of which the audience knew nothing) — when her husband's life was on the line.

To make her way back to the schooner (the radar equipment indicated the distance between them was more than 40 miles), Kidman had to overcome Zane, tie him up and lock two doors that he would have to get through to reach her. Of course, he did, and she had to fend him off again, this time using a speargun.

Then, with no fuel left and daylight fading, Kidman managed to use the sails to maneuver the yacht to where Neill had set fire to the rapidly sinking schooner, watching it sink from some debris, and then fired a flare into the sky, all to signal his wife. He hoped — but couldn't know — she had seen it.

I found it a little implausible — but then I realized that, being the novice at sailing that she was and probably having been raised with a moral code that prevented her from killing another human, even in the extreme circumstance of oceanic isolation, it was an understandable response to the situation.

---

---

The first time I watched the movie, I asked myself, "Why didn't he take the dinghy?" As far as I knew, there was nothing wrong with it.

And I had to agree with Ebert. Kidman's character should have killed Zane instead of tying him up. She knew what he was. She knew he had left her husband to die, and he would probably do the same to her eventually.

I understood that she played along with his naive fantasy that they were a couple on vacation in the Pacific in order to survive. But, when she had seized control of the yacht and had the upper hand, she kept him as a prisoner. How long did she intend to maintain that? After she picked up her husband, would they make a beeline for the nearest port to turn him over to the authorities? You couldn't tell from the movie. Perhaps it was explained in the book upon which the movie was based.

At sea, as in space, no one can hear you scream. And every minute Kidman wasted fending off Zane cost her precious time. Still, she tied him up.

So that part didn't make sense to me.

But neither did the ending, when it appeared that Zane was out of their lives forever — only to pop up suddenly like the hand that comes out of the dirt at the end of "Carrie."

There were other inconsistencies, much more modest and easier to explain. And, in the end, I had to say the performances were genuine.

But I still felt it was a flawed movie in many ways, and not the least of its flaws was its over–the–top conclusion.

I had to agree with Washington Post critic Desson Howe, who wrote, "For much of the movie, you're enthralled. By the end, you're laughing."

A Hot War Story, a Cold Love Story

---

---

"All this while I've been packing ice around my heart. How will I make it melt?"

Nicole Kidman

---

"Cold Mountain," the Civil War drama that premiered 10 years ago today, is the kind of movie that can be frustrating.

It tries to tell a couple of stories at once. That's fine with me. I guess I was a weird kid. While most of my peers seemed to hate reading and went to sometimes extraordinary lengths to avoid it, I was the kind of kid who liked to read so much that I gravitated to lengthy books. My logic, I suppose, was that the longer the book, the more there was to enjoy.

As a teenager, I was reading books by James Michener, who was not only wordy but also tended to weave several stories into one. When it is done well, I have found it to be a rewarding reading experience. Consequently, the more the better. Same thing goes for movie plots, I guess.

But you can run into trouble trying to tell two stories at once.

As a war story, "Cold Mountain" did a good job of portraying the brutality and cruelty of war within the context of its times (as "Saving Private Ryan" did with World War II). The problem, though, is that director Anthony Minghella's movie also wanted to be a romance, and that is a tricky assignment.

It isn't impossible to achieve. It just requires a rather delicate balancing act. It was sufficiently thoughtful in its handling of war and the suffering it brought to not only the soldiers but the civilians as well.

But I didn't feel that it worked as a love story, mainly because the leads (Nicole Kidman and Jude Law) didn't really seem to have much genuine affection for each other. And that really was too bad because, above all else, I think, "Cold Mountain" was meant to be a love story. But it was aptly named because, all evidence to the contrary, Kidman and Law just didn't have much mutual chemistry.

At one point, for example, Law deserted during the war and made a beeline for home. Was he driven by a burning, insatiable desire to be with Kidman? Not so you could tell.

Near the end of the movie, Law spoke to Kidman of his desire to be with her, but the words were flat without any tangible evidence of his love for her. All the audience got was a few voiceovers by Kidman reciting the letters she sent to him. Law's character never spoke of wishing to be with Kidman, and audiences never heard his thoughts so who was to know what went through his mind?

It was only when he spoke of those thoughts near the end of the movie that viewers got a glimpse into his motivation. Even Kidman seemed bewildered. "We barely knew each other," she said.

I liked Renee Zellweger's performance as the earthy Ruby who helps Kidman's Ada run her farm, and I liked what Dana Rowader wrote about it for AllMovie.com: Zellweger's performance, Rowader wrote, "may be considered by some as hamming it up or chewing the scenery; however, her character injects life into the film where it would otherwise have fallen horribly flat."

I'm not sure I agree with the notion that the movie "would ... have fallen horribly flat." I suppose that is a matter of opinion.

Apparently, the Oscar voters liked Zellweger's performance, though. They rewarded it with the statuette for Best Supporting Actress.

Rowader suggests, though, that performances by Zellweger and others "upstage the two leads." And I'm willing to concede there may be something to that.

There really is no question that the supporting cast had a lot of interesting characters (and intriguing choices to play them).

There was Donald Sutherland as Kidman's minister father, a generally wise and upstanding man — and, on the flip side of the religious coin, there was Philip Seymour Hoffman as an amoral preacher.

There was Natalie Portman as the war widow forced to raise a child on her own who sought comfort in the arms of a stranger (Law, trying to get home).

Portman's performance may have been the best of the bunch, even in what was a relatively small role. The audience didn't need to know the details of her suffering. They could see it in her face, in her eyes, and they could hear it in her voice.

They saw an example of her suffering when Union soldiers seeking food occupied her dwelling, tied her to a post outside and left her crying infant on the cold ground. It occurred to me as I watched that Portman's character must have thought she was cursed.

Perhaps she did.

---

---

Based on what I know of the Civil War, it seems to me that anyone who survived it must have thought he/she was cursed. As far as I could see, there really were no winners in a conflict that claimed so much blood and so much property.

As I say, as a war story, "Cold Mountain" was a strong statement.

But, as a love story, I have to admit that it left me cold.

'Birthday Girl' Suffered From Bad Timing

---

---

If a movie made its debut at the theaters 10 years ago today, such scheduling probably could be seen — in hindsight — as bad (but not intentionally so) timing, to say the least.

The promoters couldn't possibly have known about it ahead of time, but 10 years ago, of course, Muslim extremists hijacked and crashed four commercial airplanes, killing some 3,000 people in the process, and my memory is that Americans weren't doing much in the aftermath of that event — beyond going to work and coming home afterward.

At least, that would describe my daily routine for several months after the attacks.

I can't speak for everyone, obviously, but I know I wasn't going to see any movies in September 2001 — or in the following months — and my guess is that a lot of other people weren't going to the movies in the autumn of 2001, either.

That's just a gut feeling. But I remember that tourism in general was struggling (in fact, things got so bad that George W. Bush actually made a televised appeal for people to go back to amusement parks and other tourist attractions), and so were other forms of entertainment.

---

---

"Birthday Girl" may have gotten lost in the shuffle.

It hadn't started showing in theaters when the planes crashed into buildings in New York and Washington.

It did make its debut on this day in 2001 — but at the Venice Film Festival. It started showing in U.S. theaters in February, when much of the shock had worn off — but consumers were still somewhat wary.

The movie was made on a budget of about $13 million. To date, its revenue has been a little more than $16 million worldwide. That is comparable to the box–office performances I have seen from other films that were released around that time.

In early 2002, a lot of people still weren't comfortable in many public settings.

While it tried to be a crime thriller, "Birthday Girl" was also a love story and a comedy — which tells you most of what you need to know. I felt it tried to be too many things, that it needed to focus on doing one thing really well.

It was a modern twist on the old "mail order bride" theme — the man who was looking for love (Ben Chaplin) made the arrangements for his Russian bride on the internet. His bride (Nicole Kidman) was very beautiful, but she had a dark and mysterious side that led to some rather serious problems.

I guess that was the biggest problem for "Birthday Girl" — the fact that, at its core, it was a romantic comedy that leaned to dark comedy — and tried, too often, to be a thriller.

Consequently, it always struck me as being out of balance — too much comedy in the first half of the movie, too much of a thriller in the second half.

If the writers had settled on which kind of movie they wanted, it probably would have been much more effective.

'The Others' Provided a Supernatural Thrill

---

---

"Sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living."

Mrs. Mills
"The Others" (2001)

---

I have a lot of admiration for Nicole Kidman.

I believe she has given some brilliant performances — even if she hasn't always had great material with which to work.

That wasn't the problem with the film that premiered 10 years ago today — "The Others."

"The Others" was a top–notch ghost story, and I thought Kidman did a great job of portraying an ordinary woman caught up in extraordinary circumstances but striving, nevertheless, to make everything seem as ordinary as possible.

That's a tall order when your children are so light–sensitive that they must be protected from sunlight at all times.

I suppose that should have been considerably more than a hint to Kidman's character that things weren't what they appeared to be — but if people behaved logically in ghost stories, there would be no ghost stories, would there?

---

---

Actually, I think 2001 was the year Kidman really emerged as a major actress, even though she had been around for quite awhile — and in some high–profile roles, too.

She had been showing up in movies for several years, but she really began to catch people's attention in her American debut in 1989's "Dead Calm," and she continued to get attention with roles opposite Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman and Michael Keaton. Then she seemed to break out as a star in her own right in 1995's "To Die For."

But then she vanished from the scene, re–emerging as Cruise's co–star in "Eyes Wide Shut." The next time folks heard from Kidman, she and Cruise were splitting up, and she embarked on the next phase of her career.

In 2001, Kidman returned to the silver screen with "Moulin Rouge!" (a musical), "The Others" (a ghost story) and "Birthday Girl" (a crime/love story), demonstrating her versatility.

She went on to co–star with Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore in "The Hours" and won an Oscar.

Her career has been sporadic in recent years, but I think she really became a major film star 10 years ago — and "The Others" had a lot to do with that. Now, she has reached a point where she can select her projects with more discrimination.

A lot of folks didn't really notice at the time, though. "The Others" had been in theaters only a month when the 9/11 attacks occurred, and, like just about everything else, it was overshadowed by that event.

I won't take time and space discussing the story in "The Others" because you might want to watch a good ghost story when Halloween rolls around in a couple of months.

But I will tell you it was set in the English countryside (aren't all really good, spooky ghost stories set in the English countryside — or something very similar?) around the end of World War II.

I've heard "The Others" compared — unfavorably — to "The Sixth Sense," which was released a couple of years earlier. The comparison isn't really fair. Both films deal with life and the existence of the afterlife, but I found more of a supernatural emphasis in "The Others" — and that meant a story that I found to be more thought–provoking. Not necessarily better, just more thought–provoking.

"The Sixth Sense," on the other hand, seemed to appeal more to the tastes of horror film fans — blood, gore, repugnant images, the stuff that makes you jump in your seat and gives you goose pimples and a definite chill down your back.

(Similarly, I guess, I always found the book upon which the movie "The Exorcist" was based to be better than the movie itself. The movie was obsessed with the flashy special effects of possession while the book delved more deeply into the subject of the rite of exorcism and religious issues.)

If you haven't seen "The Others" before, it has a real twist ending in store for you. You might — in fact, you probably will — need to watch it a second (or third) time to catch what you missed the first.

That is how it was with "The Sixth Sense" — and isn't it true of the best supernatural thrillers?