From Deep In The Cold Case Files-Nicole Kidman’s “Secrets In Their Eyes” (2014)-A Film Review

From Deep In The Cold Case Files-Nicole Kidman’s “Secrets In Their Eyes” (2014)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne 

Secrets In Their Eyes, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, 2014    

Stories about “cold cases,” usually cold murder cases never solved have a certain fascination. Certainly the genre has found a niche on television and as here with the remake of a film originally out of Argentina Secret In Their Eyes in cinema. This one as usual takes on the story line of a police procedural and how with persistence the case is finally wrapped up. There is an interesting interplay between Ray, now working as private security contractor but formerly an FBI agent, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, Claire formerly a star Assistant D.A. now a budding D.A. and Jess, now and then an investigator in the Los Angeles D.A’s office, played by Julia Roberts. They are bonded by a case that had been “closed” for some thirteen years.        

Here’s the pitch. Jess’ daughter and light of her life was murdered and thrown in a dumpster but back then the prime suspect was let go for lack of evidence and the fact that he was a snitch at a mosque during the height of the war on terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. They felt they had him dead to rights with a photograph taken at an office picnic with this guy, Marzin, looking intensely at her daughter but like I sadi he walked even after his tangled with Claire. Ray, who had vowed to never stop trying to find the killer, thirteen years later comes up with a clue which he feels will solve the case finally and give Jess some solace. Jess had become totally distraught over her lost although she was cool to the idea of re-opening the case. Ray keeps thinking he has this guy Marzin but each time he comes up empty. See Jess knows something that neither Ray nor Claire know about the fate of Marzin. See the film to see what she knows. Oh yeah there was a little case “love” interest between Ray , a black man and Claire as Waspy white woman which did not go anywhere back in the day but seemed to have matured a bit thirteen years later. But the key here is Jess so keep your eye on the bouncing ball.

Westward Ho!-Australia-Style-Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s “Australia” (2008)-A Film Review

Westward Ho!-Australia-Style-Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s “Australia” (2008)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Australia, starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, 2008 

I suppose I am not supposed to talk about it under some bogus agreement Sam Lowell made with the current boss but I will test the waters while I am still here. Still have a job. Finally I have gotten a goddam assignment that doesn’t belittle my intelligence, belittle the intelligence of anybody except maybe “stable genius” Donald Trump. (I know, I know you are not supposed to mix politics with movie reviews but I couldn’t resist the comparison after what I have had to endure the last few months and my time is short here anyway from the look of things). Finally have gotten away from a steady diet of super-hero flicks, Batman, Superman, Ironman, those clowns, whose collective plotlines wouldn’t fill a whole page unless I did my puffing-out magic. Got those silly assignment as “punishment” called “broadening my horizons” by certain influential parties. (I do still have the right to characterize the nature of the work without recrimination, don’t I?) So I bled over the carpets a little and drew if not a great film then an adequate one to sink my teeth into Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman’s great blue-pink  Australia Western night film, ah, Australia (those Aussies know how to promote themselves).       

Funny except for the Aussie English accents and local slang words like “sheila” for woman, the names of the major cities, the time frame of the film just before and during World War II with the Japanese breathing fire on Australian ports, the  positive spin on the native population, the Aborigines, the weather and seasonal differences since Australia is as they say “down under,” and the stuff the ranch hands and citizens drink for hard liquor this film could have been a classic cowboy movie set in the America Wild West before the taming in the late 1800s. And that is the riff I think that the film-makers were trying to play off of in this one what with the desperate cattle drive through the desert making one think of John Wayne trying to get the herd to market in Rio Bravo, the “good injun” coming  to manhood through some rites of passage (read here Aborigine) versus the bad gringo white bastard land grabber trying to grab the neophyte landowner’s land, the feeding at the public trough with Army meat contracts and the shoot ‘em up stuff every few minutes.       

That might be what the film-makers in their cinematic dreams were looking for but this film is really about two things. The “cat and mouse” game played by that neophyte land-owner rancher Lady something from England played by the handsome and still at times eye-catching Nicole Kidman and the everyman every cowboy man “Drover” played by the beautiful, no, that is too good a description for him, pretty boy Hugh Jackman. From the minute Lady eyes Drover and he her you know, you can bet six, two, and even that they will be messing up some sheets before this one is over, well before it is over. The other point is an interesting look at what in old time American Westerns would never be looked at except as an aside-at best-at what coming of age means in Native cultures. We have come a long way from the idea that “the only good injun is a dead one” in relationship to Native cultures in the struggle to tame the west-America or Australia.       

The latter idea is pretty straight up with a precocious youth and a wizen wise old man of the earth showing the way that the culture gets passed through (and in the clinch saving some gringo asses as well). That leaves the boy meets girl thing, man meets women, in this one via the common struggle of Drover and Lady to save her inherited ranch from bankruptcies, unscrupulous cattle barons, and deadly “land hungry” upstarts. Like I said the stars were aligned and Lady and her Drover man  hit the sack not without prior and subsequent differences as befits to culturally different characters (he had had an Aboriginal wife whose death was a result of white racism in not getting her medical treatment and she had shown up without a clue shortly after her husband had been murdered by parties at first unknown but later proven to be that land-grabbing son of a bitch ). So now you have the “skinny” as old Sam Lowell who apparently has lost a step or two with that silly pact with the devil site manager used to like to say in the days when he wrote reviews hot and fast.