CarrieAnneMoss Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The good kid Kale (Shia LaBeouf) loves his ma and pops. After a terrible, grisly tragedy, the kid becomes an unstable and volatile jerk -- punching teachers and being a spoiled brat to his struggling mom. He gets 3 months of house arrest for the teacher assault, and after ma (Carrie Anne Moss) gets tough, taking away all of his expensive toys, Kale starts spying on his neighbors. He falls for the cute, new neighbor Ashley (Sarah Roemer) -- who looks like Ellen Pompeo and spends much of the movie showing off her assets. But not all of Kale's window entertainment is fun. He starts to think that his other neighbor, Mr. Turner (David Morse), might be a serial killer on the loose. Getting the help of Ashley and his best friend, Ronnie (Aaron Yoo), Kale decides to spy.

While it all sounds like it could make for a fun flick, Disturbia is only disturbing in how not scary it is, and how many simple changes could've been made to make the thriller palatable. Sure, the film has good parts -- I particularly loved his party payback that involved reorganizing his stereo and turning up the iPod as a nice, romantic song played. But beyond that, the film is a sloppy movie trying to be Rear Window, Cherish and Say Anything.

I can suspend a lot of disbelief for a film, but sometimes, you just shouldn't have to. When watching a film about voyeurs, you should at least get the basics -- a kid who knows how to spy. Time after time, Kale and his friends spy during the evening, all the lights on and not one curtain drawn. He learns nothing each and every time someone catches him spying -- he doesn't pull the curtains; he doesn't turn off the lights. Instead, he stands in his window, illuminated by a number of lamps, openly spying on people. And this is the same kid who later re-wires a camcorder. Right.

Carrie-Anne Moss has never made even the slightest impact on me in a film. She's a competent enough actress, but I can't point to a single performance she's given that I remember a thing about. She's an attractive enough woman, but I don't think I'd give her a second look on the street. She keeps getting good parts, though, and it sounds like she's just snagged another. She'll be joining Kevin Zegers, Callum Keith Rennie and Cameron Bright for Normal, a drama about the aftermath of a deadly car accident. I know what you're saying, "Who, who, and who?" Zegers played Felicity Huffman's son in Transamerica, Cameron Bright is the spooky kid who did great work in Birth, and Rennie plays Leoben Conoy on Battlestar Galactica.

In Normal, Moss will play "a mother filled with rage and unable to recover from the death of her teenage son in a car crash." Bright plays her twelve year-old son. Rennie plays "a literature professor trying to overcome his guilt from the accidental killing." Zegers plays "a young thief involved in a taboo love affair with his stepmother whose life becomes intertwined with the other characters." Normal is written by Travis McDonald and Carl Bessai, and directed by Bessai. If you're eager to be underwhelmed by Moss, she can be seen on the big screen right now in Disturbia -- reviewed by Scott here, this summer in the buzzed about zombie comedy Fido - reviewed by Kim here, and some time soon in Guy Ritchie's ABC crime series Suspect, which Monika told you about here.

Take a big splash of Rear Window, a tiny pinch of Fright Night and ... a guy stuck in his home thanks to a house arrest anklet ... and you've got Disturbia, an impending thriller that MIGHT have been half-decent if the brand-new trailer didn't give away all the good stuff.

Shia LaBeouf stars as a young man sentenced to three months of house arrest, so he does what any normal guy would do. No, not movies or books or Xbox ... he starts spying on the whole neighborhood! And since one of the guy's neighbors is played by David Morse, you just know there's going to be a big dose of no-goodness goin' down in suburbia.

The liberally borrowed plot structure and spoiler-happy trailer aside, I can still admit a small sense of anticipation for this movie. I've always been a big David Morse fan, plus Carrie-Anne Moss is also part of the equation. Moreover, the director is D.J. Caruso, whose last three movies were Two for the Money, Taking Lives and The Salton Sea -- two of which I enjoyed quite a bit. (The goofily-titled Disturbia opens on April 13.)