Daily Archives: January 24, 2022

The Trouble With Harry [BLOOD WORK]

From the Chicago Reader (August 9, 2002). — J.R.

Blood Work

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Written by Brian Helgeland

With Eastwood, Wanda De Jesus, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston, Tina Lifford, Igor Jijikine, Alix Koromzay, Dylan Walsh, and Paul Rodriguez.

Clint Eastwood’s latest slugfest, Blood Work, is ultimately just another Dirty Harry opus. And by now Harry has become boring, not because Eastwood keeps trying to redefine the character the public tends to remember him for, but because he doesn’t try to redefine the punk villains who keep Harry busy and dirty.

In Blood Work — not technically but generically and existentially a Dirty Harry adventure — the villain is a standard-issue serial killer. It’s a truism that there are more serial killers in movies than there could possibly be in life, and what keeps them mythic seems to have less to do with the world we live in than with the sadistic and infantile ways we like to think about that world. I have come to associate pleasure in cinema with the absence of serial killers, and the pleasure I associate with Blood Work includes everything that doesn’t relate to the silly one lodged near its center. Read more

Lie Lady Lie [HOUSESITTER]

From the Chicago Reader (June 12, 1992). — J.R.

HOUSESITTER

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Frank Oz

Written by Mark Stein and Brian Grazer

With Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, Dana Delany, Julie Harris, Donald Moffat, Peter MacNicol, Richard B. Shull, Laurel Cronin, Roy Cooper, and Christopher Durang.

I’ve seen previews of two summer comedies so far — Sister Act and Housesitter — that have elicited gales of hysterical laughter from their mainly young audiences. In both cases the hysteria and volume of the laughter seemed a bit out of proportion. The one-joke premise of Sister Act — that there’s something indescribably hilarious about nuns behaving slightly irreverently — smacks more of quiet desperation growing out of repression than of something to feel happy about. I suspect that if I were a Catholic I’d feel more offended than charmed by the complacency of this running gag, whatever Emile Ardolino’s efficiency as a director. There’s a certain darkness behind many of the laughs in Housesitter, too, but at least they relate to a zeitgeist I can feel part of.

The main comic staple of Housesitter, apart from the enjoyable physical clowning of Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn, is a theme I associate especially with the comedies of Billy Wilder: the baroque complications that grow out of elaborate lies. Read more