Saturday, September 10, 2011

In The Electric Mist

2009, 117 min., R
IMDB says...A detective in post Katrina New Orleans area has a series of surreal encounters with a troop of friendly Confederate soldiers while investigating serial killings of local prostitutes, a 1965 lynching and corrupt local businessmen.

The 73rd Virgin says... Predictably good acting in a predictable swamp mystery. I wish James Lee Burke would find some plot device other than hideously murdered young women. Tommy Lee Jones doesn't seem all that Louisianan to me, but he's still good to watch. Kellie Macdonald brings her "No Country For Old Men" accent over from Texas for one last run-through before heading back to Scotland. I didn't expect much from Mary Steenburgen after all these years, but she's fine as Robicheax's wife.

The dream sequences with Levon Helm as General Hood probably worked better in the book, which I've never read. Here, they seem a little too literal.

Director Bertrand Tavernier is a big name, but this doesn't feel like a big name movie. In the end, this feels like a bunch of Jones' friends decided to knock off a Burke mystery in a hurry, and they did all right, not great.

1 comment:

  1. I thought it was a slow film, soda, without the slightest care. From the beginning we show the plot of a slow and with too many names that occur in the viewer a tremendous confusion that we lose the thread constantly.
    With characters that we have stuck with a shoehorn, forced. We did not empathize with them at any time. Not to mention their empty and bland dialogue that at times seemed like a laugh and no apparent sense (do not add anything to the tape).

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