The Door in the Floor, Paparazzi

1. The Door in the Floor (Director: Tod Williams)

Based on John Irving's novel A Widow for One Year, this film explores the breaking relationship of Ted and Marion Cole (Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger) and how it is affected by a young man named Eddie O'Hare (Jon Foster), who has been hired to be famous writer Ted's driver. The couple has recently experienced the death of their two grown sons, a tragedy that none will speak of and causes Marion to go nearly comatose at its mentioning. Ted and Marion have obviously tried to fill the void with a new daughter, Ruth (Elle Fanning, Dakota's sister) and while they love her very much, cannot find solace in her existence. Of course, the virginal Eddie experiences love and sex for the first time by way of Marion, while Ted has entered the role of womanizer, something he has apparently done before in the wake of the tragedy, painting nudes of women who believe he's trying to enter into a new career when in fact it is just a way for him to bag lots of chicks.

Jeff Bridges is always good, and gives yet another fantastic performance. Kim Basinger, who can be hit-or-miss, actually might be giving her best performance ever here. Jon Foster plays a good naive kid, and Elle Fanning proves that the Fanning family must be a bunch of geniuses because she's only six and acts well beyond her years. I can't say much about the directing, actually, but if Tod Williams can pull these kind of performances out of people then he is at least good at that--I wonder what he would do with lesser material, however. There are a lot of these guys who come out, like John Madden with 1998's Best Picture Shakespeare in Love, who then direct Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Good performances and story almost always win out, and I can't help but feel that this isn't a GREAT movie by any means--I think it needed to be a little bit more interesting in the way it was filmed.

2. Paparazzi (Director: Paul Abascal)

First off, let me give you some insight into Paul Abascal's credentials. He was a hair stylist for many, many action films for nearly 15 years (including 3 Lethal Weapon films), and in the middle of that he started directing a lot of series for television, usually short-lived series. He did a couple of TV "diaries" highlighting Mel Gibson in 1991, who I guess has finally returned the favor and helped Abascal in his first feature-film release by helping produce it.

The plot is simple. Bo Laramie (Cole Hauser), rising action star, is beginning to get a taste of what it's like to be famous as photographers clamor for his pictures. One group of photographers, led by opportunist Rex Harper (Tom Sizemore) is out to get pictures of his family, and if that means taking a punch for an easy, lucrative lawsuit, he does it. When it starts getting out of hand after a Princess Di-style paparazzi session ends in a wreck that sends his boy (Blake Bryan) into a coma and the removal of his wife's (Robin Tunney) spleen, and the law isn't on his side, Laramie takes a cue from action pictures and begins to take part in street justice, picking off each photographer one-by-one. In the middle of all this is Detective Burton (Dennis Farina), whom Laramie hired to find proof of wrongdoing in the wreck incident. As the killing starts taking place, Burton begins a Columbo-esque case against Laramie.

It is the movie's choices that have me bothered in an otherwise solid B-action film. The Laramie revenge, in film terms, is completely justified and as an audience you love seeing what he's going to do next. There was a direction I hoped the movie would take and it didn't, sort of going by the tried-and-true formula, but a look on Farina's face at the end shows he's not entirely happy with the way this ends, either. Cole Hauser is best known for character roles, as one of the friends in Good Will Hunting, one of the football players in Dazed And Confused, and recently had a bad-guy role in 2 Fast 2 Furious, plays Laramie with a certain dignity that is winning. Tom Sizemore, who is best known for beating up Heidi Fleiss and drug convictions, usually plays intense characters (like Scagnetti in Natural Born Killers) and this isn't an exception, although he seems to kind of wimp out after awhile. Overall, decent, and has numerous cameos.