Secret Window and Starsky & Hutch



In Secret Window Johnny Depp plays Mort Rainey, a writer going through a divorce. He's hiding out in his remote cabin by a lake when a stalker (John Turturro) shows up at his cabin, claiming that Mort stole his story. As the stalker gets more bold things get more surrealistic, until we question whether anything we're seeing is really happening.


"How did my vacuum cleaner get up there? That was one heck of a party!"

The opening shot of Secret Window literally goes through the looking glass, so it's no surprise when it turns out that some of the events of the movie are happening only in Mort's head. I was just waiting to find out which parts in particular were fantasy, and even then there were some helpful blackouts that made it easy to guess.

What did surprise me about Secret Window was how much of it I'd already seen. Secret Window is an adaptation of a Stephen King novella (and from what I can tell, fairly faithful to the source), and so much of King's oeuvre has now been adapted that King's recycling of plots, characters and themes is leaking into the movies. So the first part of the movie plays like a cross between Misery (1990) and The Dark Half (1993), with a writer being stalked by a symbol of his own success, and the second part pretty much rips-off another very famous King book/movie, but for the sake of spoilers I won't say which one. To top it all off the final shot of Secret Window plays like something from a Children of the Corn movie, almost as if the filmmakers knew they were stuck being derivative, so they might as well go all the way.

There is one very good reason to see Secret Window, and that's Johnny Depp. He's now three for three in his most recent movies for giving performances that greatly embiggen the movies he's in, though Secret Window doesn't have much to offer other than Depp, while Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) would have been good (if not as good) movies without him.

Starsky & Hutch is similarly a mediocre movie made more entertaining by star power. The 1970s TV show was certainly nothing great, with the human characters usually being overshadowed by the custom paint job on Starsky's 1974 Ford Torino. This new movie, with Ben Stiller as Starsky and Owen Wilson as Hutch, serves as an origin story for the characters, and an affectionate parody of 1970s cop shows.


I suppose for the sake of accurately representing the movie I should have a picture of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson, but I'm sick of looking at their ugly mugs. Please enjoy this picture of Carmen Electra and Amy Smart instead.

As a comedy, Starsky & Hutch is the kind of movie that the term "hit or miss" was coined to describe. The movie goes a long way to make a joke about "New Coke," and I laughed, partly because the joke was funny, partly because it was such a stretch. There's also a funny bit where the cops discuss whether or not a certain person can be called "Big Earl" if he's just regular sized. But for every bit that I found funny, there were a bunch of scenes that weren't very funny at all, like a strange joke about a Korean kid who throws knives and a scene featuring a disco dance-off. Embiggening this movie is Owen Wilson. He does the same schtick he does in every movie, but I still find it funny.

Posted: Sun - March 14, 2004 at      

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