I Know Who Killed Me
With a serial killer on the loose, a promising young female student (Lindsay
Lohan) is kidnapped after a high school football game. The police find her in a
remote field some two weeks later, alive but missing some limbs.
Or do they? The girl they find looks exactly like the missing girl, but insists
she is not. She claims she is a crackhead and stripper named Dakota. More and
more evidence piles up showing that she really is the missing girl: (1) they
have the same DNA; (2) her injuries are identical in every way to the pattern
established by the killer, down to details never released to the public; (3) her
mother still has her ultrasound exam, showing only one baby in the womb, so a
twin is ruled out; (4) even if there were a missing twin, both girls could not
have identical injuries; (5) the missing girl's password on her Mac, previously
known only to her, is "dakota," obviously indicating that the missing girl's
subconscious fabricated the other personality. Despite all that evidence, Dakota
insists that she is a different person, and that her injuries just sort of
happened to her out of mid-air, having been done by nobody.
It sounds at least mildly intriguing, but it isn't. It's a "reverse Hitchcock"
thriller. By that I mean that Hitchcock's films often seemed to have some
irrational or supernatural elements which turned out to have perfectly logical
explanations. If you keep your head in the game, assume that the laws of the
natural universe have to apply, and try to think through Vertigo, for example,
you have a reasonable chance to solve the mystery before the protagonist. In the
reverse Hitchcock plot, on the other hand, the mystery at first seems to be
explicable by natural science or psychology, but once the various twists have
painted the plot into a corner, the script has to resort to a bullshit
supernatural explanation which could not possibly be true, and therefore could
not be guessed by anyone playing along at home unless they are prepped with the
same information I am now giving you, which is that when all the possible
explanations have been exhausted, the solution must be something impossible. If
you want to guess along, just go for the craziest possible explanation. I won't
tell you precisely what the gimmicks are, other than to note: (1) the solution
involves in some way one of the most common plot twists used in cheese-fests;
(2) there is no evil dwarf; (3) it was not "all a dream." If you know your
B-movie scripts, you probably already have it!
I think it was Roger Ebert who pointed out that bad scripts require everyone to
act as stupid as possible at all times, because if the characters were as smart
as the audience, the film would be over too quickly. That's precisely what
happens here. The FBI seems to have about half of its personnel assigned to this
investigation, and the entire case hinges on whether "Dakota" is telling the
truth or not. There was a perfectly simple way to find out: ask her which strip
club she worked at, and take her down there to meet her boss. If she is deluded,
she and everyone else would immediately realize it, and she might even snap back
to her "other" personality. If she is telling the truth, then the feds would
immediately realize that Dakota and the missing girl are in fact two different
girls and, since they have the same DNA, must be identical twins. Despite all
the law enforcement personnel assigned to the case, including a psychologist,
nobody ever says simply, "Which strip club did you work at?" Hell, they wouldn't
even have had to go to the club. They probably could have figured out everything
they needed with a phone call. On the other hand, that would have made for a
mystery movie without its central mystery.
That wasn't the only case of the characters having to act as stupid as possible.
Once Lohan and her father (or the other Lohan's father, as the case may be)
determine the killer's identity, they drive off to his torture lair by
themselves because they have "no time" to call the cops. What the ... ? How much
time does it take for the passenger of a car to dial 911 on a cell phone while
the driver continues driving? And what made them think that a suburban dad and a
girl with one arm and one leg would be a good match for a psychopath with a
house full of blades and saws and other weapons?
I have a few more items like that down in my notes, but I can't see any sense in
turning this into a litany of similar items. I think you already have the idea.
The one plot-related item I want to add is that there is one character within
the narrative who possess additional information about whether the missing girl
could have had a twin sister despite that having been ruled out by ultrasound,
but he or she chose to remain silent on the matter, apparently for the usual
reason, that the mystery movie would then be absent a mystery.
The film is not redeemed by guilty pleasures unless you like torture, in which
case there is some occasional gore for your entertainment. If your pleasures
incline more toward seeing Lohan naked, you can forget it. Although she has
three strip scenes while drugged and boozed up in a hell-hole of a sleaze joint,
she dances fully clothed. She also has a sex scene with her boyfriend, and again
manages to stay dressed. Oh, yeah, and a shower scene - with no flesh other than
her head, shoulders and fingers. That modesty is all rather astounding since (1)
the film was already a hard R for language, torture, and drug abuse; (2) other
female characters in the film are naked; and (3) everyone in the Western world
has already seen all the details of Lohan's genitalia in graphic close-up, so
the lack of flesh here can't be chalked up to the actress's prudish and maidenly
airs.
Here are the clips,
such as they are. You will get several looks at the bottom half of Lohan's ass,
but that's it.
Sex and Death 101
I will cover this tomorrow. The general outline is this: a modern Casanova
receives a mysterious e-mail telling him every woman he's ever slept with. This
is only mildly baffling until he scans down the chronological list and notices
that it continues into the future. It includes every women he will ever sleep
with in the future. He thinks it is a joke played by a friend, but the list soon
turns out to be accurate. How should he use this information? What if he finds
his true love and she's not on the list?
It's played for laughs, and there's plenty of nudity.
You can see from the premise that I could easily be writing about one of those
high-concept 1970s Italian sex farces that Tuna likes. It is not. It's a new
movie which made the festival circuit in recent months. For our purposes, the
biggest news is that some of the nudity consists of a topless scene from Winona
Ryder. We've waited a few years for that, and Winona is 36 years old now, but
the ol' chest still looks fine.
Here are some Winona caps I made
And some film clips made by other guys.
I do have the DVD screener sitting here, so I'll watch it and have a
complete overview tomorrow. Oh, yeah ... somebody else did this sample cap of Sophie Monk
