Classic Movie Review Stir of Echoes

Stir of Echoes (1999) 

Directed by David Koepp 

Written by David Koepp 

Starring Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Erbe, Kevin Dunn, Illeana Douglas 

Release Date September 10th 1999 

Published August 21st, 2023 

Stir of Echoes is such a great title. It's both esoteric and evocative. It creates a sense of history being brought swirling back to life but not fully. It's the perfect title for this movie about the echoes of the recent past resounding into to the present and leading into a terrifying and sad future unfolding before Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon), his wife, Maggie (Kathryn Erbe), their son, Jake (Zachary David Cope), and the tight knit neighborhood that welcomed this family with open arms. 

Six months ago, just before Jake and Maggie moved into their new rented home in closely knit Chicago neighborhood, a young girl went missing. Her name is Samantha Kozac and she's been written off as a runaway by most. Samantha was mentally challenged and this has also been used as an excuse to dismiss her disappearance. Samantha is almost entirely unknown to Jake and Maggie even as they've been brought wholly into their new neighborhood home. 

Jake is a failed musician supporting his family by working as a telephone lineman and bitterly lamenting his life. Maggie is far more content, loving her husband and raising their son Jake. For his part, Jake is a happy little boy who likes to indulge in talking to imaginary beings. At least, that's what it would seem from the outside. In reality, Jake has an innate ability to speak with the dead. Moreover, he's been speaking with Samantha Kozak, though his parents are not aware of this. 

Meanwhile, Jake has a strained relationship with his wife's sister, Lisa (Illeana Douglas). Lisa is a free spirit who is not a fan of grumpy, bitter Jake and isn't afraid to say so. Lisa fancies herself as a hypnotist in training and when challenged about her new profession at a neighborhood party, her conflict with Jake comes to a head. Jake challenges Lisa to hypnotize him and after a little hemming and hawing, she agrees. Taking Jake deep into his own subconscious, Lisa plants a suggestion for Jake open up more and be more receptive to the world around him. 

Find my full length review at Horror.Media 

Movie Review 10 Things I Hate About You

10 Things I Hate About You (1999) 

Directed by Gil Junger

Written by Karen McCullah, Kirsten Smith 

Starring Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Larisa Oleynik

Release Date March 31st, 1999 

Published March 5th, 2023 

It is a genuine effort that I have to make to like 10 Things I Hate About You. It's, honestly, a chore. I want to love this movie. I know that I did love it when it was released in 1999. But, I was also a relatively young film critic with a serious crush on Julia Stiles and a desire to be Heath Ledger. To say my objectivity was compromised would be very fair. Watching it again as the classic for the March 6th, 2023, episode of the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast, the chore of trying to be someone who likes 10 Things I Hate About You really presented itself. 

10 Things I Hate About You stars Julia Stiles as Kat Stratford. Kat is the 'Shrew' who must be 'Tamed' in the Shakespearean sense, the film is a loose adaptation of the Bard's Taming of the Shrew and the filmmakers really, really, want you to remember that. Awkward dialogue exchanges and obvious name conventions make the forced effort to underline Shakespeare thuddingly obvious if you aren't willing yourself to ignore the awkwardness. 

Kat has developed a reputation for beating up the boys at her High School. She refuses to date anyone as she sees the High School boys as beneath her. The story of 10 Things I Hate About You kicks in when a pair of boys begin to vie for the affection of Kat's sister, Bianca (Larisa Oleynik). When Bianca approaches her father for permission to date he decides that Bianca can date only when her sister decides to date. Knowing Kat, that may not happen until she leaves for college. 

Armed with this information from Bianca, nice guy Cameron (Joseph Gordon Levitt) and High School bad boy Joey Donner (Andrew Keegan), launch a plan. They will pay someone to seduce Kat into dating. After After being turned down by a series of guys who put over Kat's reputation as a ballbuster of a most literal sort, the schemers settle on Patrick Verona (Heath Ledger), a student with a reputation of his own. It's rumored that Patrick has been to jail, he's spent time in a mental institution and, he ate an entire duck. 

If anyone is crazy enough to try and date Kat Stratford, it's Patrick Verona. The plan works but, of course, Patrick falls for Kat and when Joey figures out that Cameron is more likely to get a date with Bianca than he is, the plan goes awry in the most obviously expected fashion. There truly is no mystery or even a shred of suspense to this plot. Kat is going to find out that Patrick was paid to date her and she's going to be hurt by that. How the movie resolves that plot is deeply unsatisfying despite a strong, tearful effort by a very game Julia Stiles. 

Read the full length review at Geeks.Media 

Documentary Review Mr. Death

Mr. Death (1999) 

Directed by Errol Morris 

Written by Documentary 

Starring Fred A Leuchter Jr. 

Release Date December 29th, 1999 

Published August 4th, 2003 

I used to be one of those “eye for an eye” types. A guy who was adamantly pro-death penalty. Then last year as I watched the death row in Illinois dismantled by its outgoing Governor, stories began to come out about four innocent men who were nearly put to death by electrocution. I came to the realization that if even one innocent man goes to his death at the hands of the state, then that blood is on all of our hands.

The death penalty is way too flawed a concept to be continued in this supposedly civilized country. Of course, you could never convince Fred A. Leuchter Jr. of that. Leuchter is an engineer who earned the nickname Mr. Death because of his proficiency for repairing antiquated death chambers. Leuchter is the subject of the documentary Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr. by Errol Morris, the man who directed the thrilling documentary Fast Cheap and Out of Control.

Mr. Death was actually supposed to be merely a chapter of Fast Cheap and Out of Control, a simple 30 minute segment on this unassuming little man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of inmates. However, once Morris began to look a little deeper into Fred Leuchter's unusual life, a new subplot emerged. A quirky profile of a death chamber repairman turned into a story about the Holocaust and one small man's desperation to be loved and accepted by anyone, even if it was a group of Neo-Nazis.

Fred Leuchter Jr. grew up in the New Jersey prison system. His father was a guard and young Fred would often join his father at work. Spending his days hanging out with guards and inmates, he learned the tricks of the criminal trade like hot wiring cars. He also had an experience not many teenagers can claim, he was strapped into the electric chair. It was a life changing moment for Leuchter, it began his unusual fascination with the implements of state sponsored death.

The documentary begins as it was likely intended to in its initial conception, a series of interviews with this strange shy little man who built lethal injection machines, and repaired electric chairs, gas chambers and even gallows. As Leuchter explains directly to the camera, he was appalled by the conditions of the electric chairs and set about using his engineering skills to develop a more efficient killing machine. 

In graphic detail, Leuchter recounts the gruesomeness of the old style electric chairs, the way they charred the flesh, set the condemned on fire, and popped their eyes out of their heads. Leuchter claims his inspiration was humanistic. He was interested in making death as comfortable as possible for the condemned, though he doesn't seem very convincing. The sense I got was that he was a guy who found a unique niche for himself and took to it quite readily.

Whatever your opinion of Leuchter and his business, he does at first seem to be a simple pragmatic businessman. He had a wife and family. His business, however macabre it is, was enough to comfortably support his family.

Then a strange thing happened in the life of Fred Leuchter. He was subpoenaed to appear in court in Canada on behalf of a man named Ernst Zundel, a historical revisionist on trial for printing a pamphlet that the Canadian government claimed was a call to violence and hatred. Zundel's revisionist history of World War II included the contention that the Holocaust never happened.

What does this have to do with Fred Leuchter? Zundel hired the expert on death chambers to determine whether the German internment camps actually had gas chambers. On Zundel's dime, Leuchter, his wife and a camera crew traveled to Auschwitz and committed what can only be described as a crime. With his wife as a lookout, Leuchter went into the chamber and began chipping away pieces of the wall and floors. His intent, to take the samples back to the U.S and have them tested for cyanide, the Nazi's poison of choice.

Fred Leuchter's "investigation" however was quite flawed. He did not bother to explain to the American lab that tested his samples what he was looking for. The tests as they were conducted could not have possibly found cyanide. As the scientist who performed the experiment explained, cyanide does not penetrate deeply into the walls; it barely registers below the surface. Because the gas chambers had been exposed to the elements for nearly 40 years, when Leuchter gathered his samples the degradation of the samples rendered the experiment useless.

These massive screw-ups did not stop Leuchter from testifying that he did not find any evidence of cyanide and it was his opinion that Auschwitz did not have a gas chamber. Despite Leuchter's "expert" testimony, Zundel was convicted. Because of his findings, called The Leuchter Report, Fred became popular amongst neo-Nazi groups who adopted him as a spokesman. Leuchter basked in the attention, the standing ovations of glad handing Nazi's who called him a genius.

When Leuchter returned to his regular life, he found that the States that had contracted with him to fix their death chambers were no longer in need of his services. His report that made him so many new friends was not surprisingly off putting to politicians who don't want to be in business with a man who calls Nazi's friends. Of course, Leuchter believes it's a Jewish conspiracy, but he says he is not anti-Semitic.

Maybe he's not truly anti-Semitic, in the documentary he does seem to come off as a little naive and slow. It is as if he believes he just did a job and why should that bother anyone? He can't imagine why anyone would find his views on the Holocaust offensive.

Errol Morris appraises his subject from a far. Unlike some filmmakers, Morris is content to remain completely off camera. He doesn't even contribute a narration, allowing his subject to narrate with his answers to off-screen questions. Morris has an interesting visual style, very crisp photography mixed with archival footage and the amateur footage that Leuchter compiled on his trip to Auschwitz.

There is nothing entertaining about Mr. Death but it is oddly fascinating. Watching this strange little man as he struggles to understand why he's not taken seriously, why he can no longer find a job, and why his wife left him. Even before his trip to Germany, he struggles to understand why people look at him funny, why people find his job so creepy and weird. He's not self-conscious, just confused.

Movie Review The Matrix

The Matrix (1999) 

Directed by The Wachowskis 

Written by The Wachowskis

Starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie Ann Moss, Joe Pantoliano 

Release Date March 24th, 1999 

Published March 24th, 2019 

Keanu Reeves returns to the big screen this weekend in the new science fiction flick Replicas. That film has Reeves playing a scientist crossing ethical boundaries to use cloning technology, or something of the sort, to bring back the wife and child he lost to a car accident. The premise is interesting but the trailer includes an attempt to pretend critics like it by boasting in ads about a “92%” rating on RottenTomatoes.com that simply does not exist. As of this writing, Replicas has only one critics review, a negative review, in Spanish. 

That said, even if Replicas is a bad movie as my instincts are telling me, I won’t hold it against star Keanu Reeves. After all, there is still John Wick 3 to look forward to this year and an all new Bill & Ted movie that appears to have a clever revival idea behind it is also still to come. Most importantly, Keanu will always be Neo from The Matrix. The 1999 sci-fi action blockbuster The Matrix heralded the beginning of the end of the era when blockbusters based on original ideas were all the rage and visionary filmmakers with new ideas appeared to have a place in Hollywood.

That era is over, likely brought to the close by the very visionaries, The Wachowski siblings, whose film, The Matrix, became the last of the great original franchises. Big budget originals such as Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending may have been the death knell for any original, big budget adventure without a built in audience, comic book, or novel, behind it but I don’t hold that against The Wachowski’s. I may hate both of those original flops but at least they were trying something original and bold.

In the era of the remake, reboot or comic book based blockbuster originality needs to be cheered even when it fails spectacularly as The Wachowski’s recent features have. Honestly, we should have a GoFundMe campaign or create some sort of ‘Too Big to Fail’ scam in order to fool studios into thinking those failures were hits so people like The Wachowski’s can get more chances to create something as bold and original as The Matrix was in 1999.

The Matrix stars Keanu Reeves as a part time drug dealer and full time office drone living a mundane existence. I called him a drug dealer but his trade is more in outlaw software that has the effect of getting people high. Neo himself has no use for such thrills. His life is lived in the secret places of the internet where, as a hacker, he tracks the strange movements of a vigilante named Morpheus (Larry Fishburne) whose hacking skills have led to rumors even Neo can’t begin to make sense of.

One night Neo’s work catches the attention of Morpheus and his cohorts and they reach out via Morpheus’s second in command, Trinity (Carrie Anne Moss). Trinity warns Neo that ‘Agents’ may be on to him, a warning that Neo or Thomas Anderson in his world, fails to heed. At his office the next day, Neo is cornered by Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) who threatens him if he won’t help the agents find Morpheus.

With the help of Morpheus, Neo makes a dynamic and improbable escape from the agents. When Neo meets Morpheus he is offered a choice that became and has remained a meme or metaphor for seeing the world in a different way. Neo is offered a Red Pill that will wake him up to The Matrix and reality and the Blue Pill which will allow him to remain in his current place in the world, ignorant of reality.

Neo, of course, chooses the Red Pill and soon awakens in a pod, naked and covered in goo. His brain stem has a plug in it and his lungs are being operated by a machine until he removes the plug in a scene of modest but highly effective body horror. Neo is picked up by Morpheus’s ship, the Nebuchadnezzar where he will recover and eventually be taught about The Matrix, the machine of which he was a prisoner.

In the real world, humans are batteries within a massive machine and reality is fed to them via the subconscious. To fight The Matrix, Morpheus and his crew hack the system and work to disassemble the machine from the inside, one part at a time. Morpheus believes Neo may be a mythical savior with the power to bend The Matrix to his will and bring an end to a war most of humanity doesn’t realize is being fought, a war between man and machine.

It’s been nearly 20 years since The Matrix arrived in theaters and the film still feels like a fresh commentary on modern society. In fact, a coterie of conspiracy theorists believe that our reality is trending more toward a Matrix-esque reality due to our ever-growing dependence on the online world. Much like ‘The Red Pill’ has become a meme that has been co opted in myriad different metaphorical forms, The Matrix itself remains a strong and singular commentary on modern society.

Part of what keeps The Matrix fresh is Keanu Reeves. While some consider Reeves’ blank slate performance to be flat and unaffected, I have always felt that the film effectively deploys Reeves’ perceived flatness. Reeves is a rather perfect audience surrogate. We can project upon his blank, open, face, our own personas and interpretations. Some might consider that a flaw in that he doesn't stand out and stand on his own but, for me, Reeves’ empty vessel quality is part of the film’s appeal.

Reeves is a terrifically physical actor whose wiry frame is not so muscular as to make him un-relatable but not so average that he isn’t believable as he transforms into a karate master in the world of The Matrix. Truly, Reeves is ideal casting for Neo as he can be what most of the audience wishes we were, a handsome, world saving, bullet dodging karate hero. If Reeves played the role with a great deal of charisma he’d risk standing apart from the audience rather than standing in for us.

While I wish Keanu Reeves had more movies like The Matrix on his resume than say, Destination Wedding or Replicas, at the very least he will always be our Neo, the hero so open to interpretation and impersonation that he is all of us and none us all at once. Will Smith was initially sought for the role of Neo as The Matrix was entering production but he would have been all wrong for it. Neo isn’t a quippy, believable, world-saving, comic book hero, he’s an Everyman and while Reeves may be super handsome, his blank slate has an every man quality that is iconically Neo from The Matrix.