Collateral, Auto Focus, The Ghost and Mrs Muir

As Dannette notes, Collateral is really all about Fox. At least, from an acting perspective it is. Visually, it's all about Mann's never ending love affair with style, flash, and light. LA hasn't looked this good since To Live and Die in LA. I'm still not sold on the idea of HD video as an ideal medium. It's limitations worked well for George Lucas, but for a film like this, it adds a bit and it detracts a bit. The plot: Never mind that you can see where it's going from the first 10 minutes -- and that you knew most of it from the trailer. There are some surprising plot devices along the way. And little moralizing. No moralizing can match Paul Schrader's work. Auto Focus is another entry in the brimstone-and-damnation-Schrader-style genre. The most ridiculous was the Comfort of Strangers. Luckily, Auto Focus is a better movie: More fun, more meaningful, more stylish, and much more balanced in terms of where we begin to get an inkling of the heroes foibles and where they end. But yet again, once can't help walking away from the film with Schrader's whisper in one's ear saying "he deserved it". Pu-leaze! Upside: Yet another reason to dislike Hogan's Heroes. Finally watched The Ghost and Mrs Muir. Sad that such a classic film received such a middling treatment on DVD. Whites are blown out at times. Shadows get muddy. Focus and sharpness is all over the map. I have to admit that it's not exactly my type of romance -- this is no Big Sleep -- but it is easy to see why it's been a charmer, and certainly the "happy ending" is unlike most that are out there. That's no small triumph, considering the system under which (and the time during which) it was made.