The only thing Hitchcockian about this alleged thriller is its omnipresently bad blue-screening, recalling rear-projection distractions of yore. Harrison Ford slaps a piece of bologna into a greasy envelope and mails it in fourth class past a series of lazy setups and bloated, disinterested villains that makes 1994's Disclosure look like The Matrix. Speaking of the mid-Nineties, there are times when Firewall feels like some sort of time shifting experiment wherein Irwin Winkler directs the script for Panic Room in the style of The Net, replete with listlessly unconvincing techno-speak and borderline-Socratic expository dialog. If these comparisons don't make much sense, it's because the movie is muddled and doesn't seem all that interested in its premise—or any premise beyond Ford's backend, really. The venerable action figure officially enters his late period here. If Indy 4 ever alights, it may be (or, perhaps, may it be) his swan song. Grade: F
Artist: Brendan Benson. Album: The Alternative to Love.
Artist: Feeder. Album: Pushing the Senses.
Artist: Katie Melua. Album: Just Like Heaven.
Michael Winterbottom's po-mo meta-adaptation of the titular novel is good for a few laughs thanks to an ingratiating cast and a pace that's simultaneously leisurely and spare. That said, this is at best an upgraded variant of the Jarmusch school of wankery or, more generously, a glorified episode of Extras. It's not cinema. Grade: B-
Artist: The Spinto Band. Album: Nice and Nicely Done.
Max Barry's would-be futuristic satire reads like a failed screenplay, replete with generic action sequences populated with dumb, spiteful characters. Its setting is thinly conceived and curiously dated, as if the hyper-capitalist day-after-tomorrow it presents exists only to excuse the author's unconvincing social speculations. He certainly doesn't seem inspired by the time-shift in any operational way. The novel's views on technology and media are so retrograde that, apart from its improbable corporate contortions, it may as well have been set in the early Nineties. The belabored, fake surface-cool is further undermined by idiosyncratically dull, repetitive prose and a persistent, almost dysthymic over-reliance on deus ex machina that would be laughable if it weren't so irritating. This is a bad book. Readers who think otherwise should probably steer clear of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, whose effortlessly superior explorations they would likely find upsetting or alienating.
Artist: Cat Power. Album: The Covers Record.