Shia LaBeouf has that hard-to-explain Jimmy Stewart-Tom Hanks-Everyman quality that is so highly coveted by movie audiences and so rarely found. Rarer still to find such qualities in such a young actor. But LaBeouf—who has quickly risen from an interesting indie to medium-budget status actor to the next hot thing—has these likeable, guy-next-door traits in spades. Audiences will next see him at the helm of the Fourth of July alien-invasion blockbuster, Transformers, and he has just been announced to play Harrison Ford's son in the forthcoming Indiana Jones sequel.
But before full-fledged stardom descends, LaBeouf is testing his leading-man wings with the mystery-thriller Disturbia, which utilizes his decent-guy qualities. As the movie begins, Kale ( LaBeouf ) is on a bucolic fishing trip with his dad in the mountains but on the way home Kale's father is killed in a devastating car accident. A year after the car accident guilt, anger and depression have left Kale an embittered loner who's always getting into scrapes with the law. When he finally goes too far and punches out a nasty schoolteacher, a fed-up judge orders him to endure a period of house arrest. At first, Kale loves being home while his pretty but frustrated mother ( Carrie-Anne Moss ) heads off to work each day. He binges on junk food, cable, Web porn and video games until mama has enough and suspends his cable and Internet access.
Kale now turns onto a new game—one in which he becomes the nosy neighbor who spies on everyone and knows all their secrets. He also figures out the boundaries of his imprisonment—an inch farther outside the yard and his ankle bracelet will alert the authorities that he's out of bounds. Kale has one friend and, unfortunately, it is the supremely annoying Ronnie ( Aaron Yoo ) , a techie geek who loves to pull practical jokes on his incarcerated pal and is perhaps the most annoying sidekick in recent memory. When a new shapely blonde teenage girl, Ashley ( Sarah Roemer ) , moves in next door, they focus their spying skills on her. And what healthy teenage heterosexual male wouldn't? Ashley struts around in a bikini and doesn't think twice about disrobing in front of her uncurtained windows, but she's also no dummy and quickly figures out what Kale and Ronnie are up to. She starts hanging out with the duo, joking that they're on a stake-out—and soon they really are. They've seen TV news reports of missing girls found dead and the M.O. matches up with a suspicious male neighbor. Have our trio stumbled upon a serial killer in the midst of Desperate Housewives territory?
The rest of Disturbia, a modern update of the Nancy Drew-Hardy Boys mysteries—complete with raging hormones—finds our intrepid investigators trying to answer that question. The result is a somewhat enjoyable and somewhat dopey picture—a sort of teenage Rear Window ( with aspects of American Beauty thrown in for good measure ) . It's a nice little date movie for a not-too-demanding audience.
For an audience to enjoy Halle Berry's latest misstep, Perfect Stranger, however, their expectations must be dropped much, much lower. The movie, a tepid thriller that further tarnishes Berry's career, has such mixed-up characters that their motivations defy explanation. Berry plays an 'ace' investigative reporter who begins the film by presenting a closeted Republican senator with the news that she's gotten the senator's page to go on record about their gay affair and asks for a comment. But the senator pays off the paper and the story's killed. Now what? Well, an old acquaintance of Berry's hands her evidence that points to a kinky affair with a married advertising mogul ( Bruce Willis ) , and then winds up dead. Berry, with the aid of her sycophantic research assistant and computer whiz ( Giovanni Ribisi ) , decides to delve into the case and see if Willis is responsible. So far, so okay—but most of what follows is far, far from it.
Perfect Stranger, which proceeds in fits and starts and never really finds the proper pacing, gives validity to the long-debated existence of an Oscar curse. How else to explain yet another bad Halle Berry-driven movie, her third since her triumph in Monster's Ball?
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The late gay writer Gavin Lambert began his career writing film criticism and later wrote the screenplays for I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Inside Daisy Clover, among others. The last was based on his own novel about a teenager's abrupt coming-of-age within the Hollywood studio system back in the 1930s, a period that Lambert obsessed over. Aside from novels, Lambert wrote telling, definitive biographies of closeted gay director George Cukor, Norma Shearer and close friend Natalie Wood, among others. Lambert was a close friend of other gay writers of his period like Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles and Truman Capote.
In the mid 1950s, after visiting Bowles in Morocco, Lambert also wrote and directed his only film, the little-known Another Sky. A prim former English nanny, spinster Rose Graham ( Victoria Grayson, who resembles Gina Gershon and made only one other film ) travels to Marrakech to take a job as a paid companion for the middle-aged sophisticate Selena Prouse, and finds herself falling in love with her adopted country and a local street
musician. When the musician disappears, Rose becomes obsessed with seeing him one more time and embarks on a journey deep into the barren country to find him. The film utilizes little dialogue and is filled with powerful moments. ( The strange look on Rose's face—a mixture of pleasure and terror as she leaves her lover after they've made love, and wanders in a blur amidst the marketplace—is unforgettable. )
There are reminders of Black Narcissus, Summertime and, not surprisingly, The Sheltering Sky in the story but Lambert's talent for the medium is evident and, like Charles Laughton, makes one wonder why he never again directed a film. ( Perhaps, it was because the movie apparently didn't make much of an impression on filmgoers in its first and only run. ) Now this long-forgotten cinematic artifact has been digitally restored and is available on DVD from Facets Video. The disc includes an overview of the career of Lambert ( who died in 2005 ) and a short feature on the movie's restoration.
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