Weekly round-up

Amelia Earhart flies again
and some tedious torture

OFFENSIVE, AWFUL, STUPID: The Collector

by MARK SLUTSKY and
CHRISTOPHER SYKES

Amelia
The whirlwind life and mysterious death of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart should provide enough drama for a 10-part PBS miniseries, let alone a single biopic. And that’s not mentioning the gossip! The first woman to traverse the Atlantic flying solo (second only to Charles Lindbergh—lending her the dated and rather troubling moniker “Lady Lindy”) was catapulted into the kind of fame that would make Britney Spears nervous.

Married to PR man and chief strategist George Putnam (played here by a visibly aging Richard Gere), rumours abounded that Earhart was not only sleeping with commercial aviation pioneer Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor, who steals a kiss in an elevator, with the rest of the affair just implied) but with many of her fellow female flyers, a detail that’s never even hinted at here.

Director Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) hedges far too many of her bets in this passionless biopic, choosing to tiptoe around any controversy in an attempt to canonize the fearless feminist. She did a nice job getting Hillary Swank to take on the role—the two-time Oscar winner looks uncannily similar to Earhart—but then falls into biopic dialogue purgatory with what must be the driest, least interesting script of the year.

Cross cutting between her rise to fame in the early 1930s and her fatal 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe, Nair commits the most egregious of biopic crimes to link the two eras: the faux newsreel. Such a shame to see Amelia’s life story crash and burn in Nair’s hands. (CS)

PLANE BAD: Amelia

The Collector
A truly offensive and awful and stupid horror movie from first-time director Marcus Dunstan, who, with co-writer Patrick Melton, was responsible for penning the latest three or four Saw movies. Like those popular “torture porn” flicks, The Collector delights in elaborate mutilation devices and ridiculous, gory ends for its characters. Now, I’m not against graphic and over-the-top horror in principle—when it has a brain, or a sense of humour, I’m all for it (I’ll still defend Eli Roth’s Hostel flicks).

This movie does not have a brain or a sense of humour, just a bag of rusty tricks. Arkin (Josh Stewart) is a handyman who decides to rob a wealthy client’s home one night to save his girlfriend from her mob debts. When he shows up, he finds that the family isn’t on vacation, but rather trapped by a mysterious masked “collector” who’s outfitted their home with a truly spectacular amount of booby traps and torture devices. The would-be robber thus finds himself an unlikely saviour, at least in theory, because to me it looked like everything he does in this movie just ends up making things worse for the family, and their poor cat.

Did I mention the cat? One room is full of cheap-looking bright yellow acid… stuff… and there’s a truly atrocious scene where the family cat is like, rolling around in it, only to somehow get flung across the room and into a window-turned-makeshift-guillotine, which slices it in half. That was the last straw for me; no one chops up a cat in my town and gets away with it! (MS)

AMELIA IS NOW IN THEATRES;
THE COLLECTOR OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 30