Lakeview Terrace

Point

Jim: Until the police twist this seemed like just another ‘ooh… the suburbs’ movie, in which general distaste for the pursuit of material security, a subcultural narrative in which aestheticized poverty is a virtue, and an irrational, disproportionate, and hilariously self-excepting fear of mediocrity supplants actual satiric insight as the deriding of Them justifies the validation of a nebulous Us– we who go to unpopular museums and small galleries, we who go to shows not concerts, we who describe out movie interests as ‘foreign films,’ as if that was a genre, unintentionally revealing ourselves to be into the identity package more than the contents (to the extent that there are any).

But other than the fact that it will no doubt devolve into near-Collateral levels of tension-killing/movie-ruining action cliché nonsense, Lakeview Terrace seems pretty solid. I feel weird saying it, because the font on the title is terrible, and the cinematography isn’t anything special, and other than Sam Jackson the cast is Gay Peter Weller and Ben Grimm’s Girlfriend and nothing. And maybe it’s because, as a kid, my next door neighbor had an abusive ex-boyfriend who was a cop, and the control and power that police can have in their communities, given their of, if not above, the law status is a genuinely terrifying and somehow under-explored (shocking, given the fact that approximately 106% of all movies are about police) topic for a film.

Or maybe I just have a soft spot for movies in which the escalation of competing egos results in some teeth-gritting mouth-bleeding mutual annihilation, like Chan-Wook Park’s Vengeance trilogy, or There Will Be Blood, or Jingle All The Way- I don’t care what ccthemovieman-1 thinks.

B+

Counterpoint

ccthemovieman-1: I just did not find this funny. Arnold Schwarzenegger as a middle-class suburbanite did not cut it. His accent sounded way out of place. Sinbad - whoever the hell he is - was supposed to be the other funny guy, but failed as well. Nobody in here was particularly good to watch.

F

Jim: cc, we’re supposed to be reviewing the trailer for Lakeview Terrace.

ccthemovieman-1: The film begins with the typical theme of a father neglecting his kids. Have you noticed since the “classic era” ended how fathers are almost always portrayed in a negative light in films? The most popular stereotype is that of the father who is never there for his kid’s activities. Same thing here, so Arnold at least goes out of his way to make it up to the boy to the point of lunacy as the kid makes all these demands!

Jim: cc, that’s still-

ccthemovieman-1: Summary: a very annoying and stupid movie.

What Have We Learned

IMDb.com: Continuity: During the scene where engineer Peng slashes his stomach four times, notice his strokes. He makes a semi-short stroke, then two strokes that are similar in length, and then a very long stroke on the bottom. All of these strokes are relatively straight; although, when you see the close-up of his gashes bleeding, you see that the first stroke is very short and angled down, and the bottom stroke is much shorter than the middle two, even though it should obviously be longer.