Apple of My I

in-dreams06.jpgShe dreams of them. She fills her computer screen with digital drawings of them. One is left on a swing at her house. Snow White is poisoned by one in her daughter’s play just before the abduction. In her kitchen are dozens of them that she chucks into the kitchen sink, which then explodes with brown muck. She cannot escape them, but she also surrounds herself with them. Claire is torturing herself with the fucking apples. Overripe and finally fetid, Neil Jordan’s In Dreams goes very, very wrong as a thriller in its final act (and even wronger in its epilogue), but if you fall asleep the first time you see Robert Downey Jr.’s face, you might think you’ve seen something weirdly special. Actually, it is pretty special, but you need to dive below the silly surface.

Good Fortune

Writer/director Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief is a hoot, and I mean that both positively and negatively. It’s great to see a movie with such balls, and yet it fucks with the audience in a way that degrades it significantly.