Weekly Standard (2007) - Hitchcock Lite
Details
- book review: Hitchcock Lite
- author(s): John Podhoretz
- journal: Weekly Standard (30/Apr/2007)
- issue: volume 12, issue 31, page 46
- journal ISSN: 1083-3013
- publisher: Weekly Standard
- keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Cary Grant, Disturbia (2007), Grace Kelly, James Stewart, Motion pictures, Rear Window (1954)
Links
Abstract
The protagonist is not a rugged Life photographer trapped by his broken leg in a Greenwich Village walk-up James Stewards parlous 'condition in Alfred Hitchcock's peerless 1954 thriller but rather a delinquent high-schooler who has been placed under house arrest for punching his Spanish teacher. Not to mention the hilarious musical Singin' in the Rain, with its plot about the secret dubbing of a screechy silent-film actress thrown into a blender with Dreamgirls to become the tragic tale of a hip-hop record producer (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) who replaces the warblings of a socialite wannabe singer (Paris Hilton) with those of his longsuffering girlfriend (Jennifer Hudson) without ever properly explaining how a black woman's voice is emerging from a blonde who sounds hike Minnie Mouse.
Article
Hitchcock Lite
Entertaining, yes, but Shia LaBeouf is no James Stewart.
The new hit movie Disturbia is Rear Window with teenagers.
The protagonist is not a rugged Life photographer trapped by his broken leg in a Greenwich Village walk‑up James Stewarts parlous condition in Alfred Hitchcock's peerless 1954 thriller) but rather a delinquent high‑schooler who has been placed under house arrest for punching his Spanish teacher. His girlfriend is not society fashion maven Grace Kelly but an anorectic chick in a bikini with parent issues. And the dangerous man across the way isn't a pathetic and henpecked salesman who cannot take another moment's criticism from his nasty invalid wife, but a pony‑tailed charmer who undertakes an uncomfortable flirtation with the delinquent's mother.
What makes Rear Window so spectacular is that it makes you experience, in the most vivid possible terms, the isolation of an active man who finds himself in a wheelchair in the midst of a hot summer before air conditioners, and with nothing whatever to do but look out the window. He spins dramas and theories out of the scenes he witnesses in the windows across and around the courtyard behind his brownstone.
It's a game, an intellectual exercise, and a somewhat tawdry one because our hero is violating the privacy of his neighbors for no reason other than boredom. And yet his game suddenly becomes deadly serious when he begins to suspect a horrifying crime has been...
