Cynical Cinema

I picked up The 4400, The Complete Series, out Tuesday the 28th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  And I started watching it.  And then I kept watching.  I stopped taking notes because it was interfering with my viewing of this show.  And I started to pay really, really close attention.  I got through Season One, and went to bed.  The next morning, as soon as I got up, I started Season Two.  By the time I went to bed that night, I had begun Season Three.  I woke up early the following day to complete Season Three.  And then, a couple of days later, I had watched the Fourth and Final season.  This was actually the second time I had watched Season Four of The 4400.  I watched it alone in May, when that season came out on DVD, and I gave it four stars out of ten.  I stand by that review.  As a stand-alone DVD set, Season Four merits four stars.

But now I was addicted.  I was desperate to find out what happened.  I had to know how this series ended.  And I watched all four seasons of this show.  I should have known.  After all, I had already watched the fourth season.  The fourth, and final, season.  And I remember how that one ended.  In that, it didn’t.  It didn’t end at all.  It didn’t answer any questions at all.  It just got cancelled and taken off the air.  I just watched thirty-three hours of this show.  Thirty-three.  Hours.  And at the end…nothing.  I was a little peeved.  But that was nothing compared to the fury of my girlfriend, who had watched all thirty-three hours with me.  She was incensed.  She had just wasted an entire weekend, and 33 hours of her life.

Here’s the basic premise:  Over the past 50 years, people have been abducted from all over the world.  All of a sudden, 4400 people are returned to Earth, all at once, all in one place, without having aged a day.  Each of the 4400 has a special ability - telekinesis, the ability to heal others, pre-cognition, and so forth.  The government gets involved, and tries to suppress these abilities.  We find out pretty quickly that these are not alien abductions, but rather these people are being taken by humans in the future, who are sending them back to hopefully change the course of history and save all of humanity.  And after a while, it looks like a war is brewing.

Then it ends.  It’s over.  If you’re the creator of The 4400, and you want to sell your “complete series” DVD, it seems like it would have been a fairly easy thing to do to film maybe five or six more episodes in order to wrap it up and give the viewers some closure.  The people who had invested in this series and who would purchase a 15-disc set to find out how it actually ends.  In fact, you could well market it to people who had never seen this show before as well.  Because this show was good.  It was VERY good.  Incredibly compelling, like the beginning of Lost.  And watching the first season made me absolutely rabid to find out the secrets and the stories and the result of the whole process.  In fact, you could maybe have created a satisfactory conclusion by filming TWO more episodes.  So why not?

Instead, this is what we get - a fifteenth disc that is full of special features, once the fourth season ends.  One of those special features is an introduction by Scott Peters, the creator of the show.  He talks about creating the show, and how pleased he is with the ardent fans who posted on the internet message boards and discussed the show and so forth.  Which is fine.  By all means, thank the fans!  But…then what?  You must have had some idea how the series was going to end - just tell us what the plan was!  It’s too late to do it now, just tell us the end.  It is no longer a spoiler, it is now the only catharsis available to us, the audience.  Help us out here.

The fact is, I felt incredibly ripped off after 33 hours of watching this with no resolution whatsoever.  Why bother with this, I thought.  In fact, thanks to the wrath of my girlfriend, I was ready to give this show a one-star rating.  After all, I was sour too because she woke me up in the middle of the night to express her anger - she had stayed up four hours later than normal to get to the end, because she too was addicted.  But I reconsidered, because if this show was compelling enough to make us that passionate about seeing an ending, it must have been doing something right.  And the show itself deserves at least nine stars.  But I will not give it nine, because it is false advertising.  The 4400 Complete Series is some great television, but there is nothing “complete” about this series.

Paramount Home Entertainment releases the fourth season of Medium on DVD today, September 9th. There are many shows right now that explore some kind of mystical, supernatural ability, and this one is the best of them all. Unlike, for example, The Ghost Whisperer, which was released last week, Medium has a considerable amount of substance. Patricia Arquette plays the title character, a psychic who dreams about murder. And not the way I dream about murder, where I wake up and wonder whether or not I did, in fact, kill Steven Seagal during the night. But rather, she dreams about real murders that actually happened. Of course, she never sees the entire murder happen at first, or the show would be very short. As she continues to dream, more and more of the murder becomes clear, until at the end of the show she can put it all together and catch the criminal.

Season four opens with Arquette having lost her job with the office of the district attorney. At the end of the previous season, the DA was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had been using this psychic to help him solve cases. I guess the public wasn’t willing to buy in. Not enough of them watch shows like Medium. Her husband has also lost his job, which means that money is tight and times are tough. An opportunity arises in the form of Anjelica Huston, who is an investigator working with AmeriTips, an organization that helps people resolve crimes on their own, rather than having to resort to the silly police. Huston recruits Arquette to work with her, which means that at least a little bit of money is coming into the house. And while each episode of Medium stands alone, and has a satisfying resolution, Huston herself has a story arc throughout season four that boils down to a very intense conclusion.

Medium has been a good show for a while, but the addition of one of the great actresses in the world for the fourth season, and the story she brings with her, make season four the best of them all. Pick it up on DVD now.

Jennifer Love Hewitt is darn hot.  She has two great boobies, a beautiful face, a sensational bum and adequate acting skills.  After that, The Ghost Whisperer has very little going for it.  Jay Mohr is one of my favourite comedic actors in the world.  But on this series he isn’t funny.  Or interesting.  His character is badly written.  I like Camryn Manheim as well.  But again, on this series, her character is badly written and given very little to do.  I assume Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character is badly written as well.  But I can’t pay much attention to the words she’s saying because of her boobs.  But even if she were given some incredibly scintillating, brilliant and hilarious dialogue, this show would still be pretty weak.

You see, Jennifer Love Hewitt sees ghosts.  Like that kid in the Sixth Sense.  And these ghosts are trying to tell her something so she can fix whatever is bothering them.  In Season Three, out tomorrow from Paramount Home Entertainment, many of these ghosts are her own family.  You see, where this show used to be stand-alone episodes (cheesy, boring episodes, but at least they have a beginning and an end), it no longer follows that pattern.  Although most of Season Three is episodes that wrap up in a fairly satisfactory way, there is also a thread that runs through the series about her lost father and her mother and this big secret…

You remember when the X-Files started to suck?  When it got away from the mutant inbreds that lived out on farms and the creepy stretchy guys who live under escalators and started to do that Alien Conspiracy crap?  Where if you missed one episode you were lost?  Well, that is Season Three of The Ghost Whisperer.  Except more cheesy.  And more lame (they actually do an episode on that Bloody Mary game).  But at least it still has Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Nightmare Detective opens with a scene of a man sitting at a table. Behind him, on the wall, is some super-long, disembodied hair, hanging from a hook like a hat. It takes a while to notice the hair, but when you do, and you realize what it is, you become instantly creeped right out. And that feeling will not leave you until this film is over. It’s the latest offering from Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto, who has been called Japan’s answer to David Lynch or David Cronenberg. And that description is certainly apt. This man knows how to create a mood so creepy that even if nothing at all happens, the sense of foreboding resonates within the viewer. In Nightmare Detective, two things are constantly sources of fear and malice. Bridges and bicycles. They don’t sound so creepy thinking of them now, but these are the scariest bikes and bridges I’ve ever seen in a movie. And that includes that brilliant Emilio Estevez classic, Maximum Overdrive.

We are introduced to the Nightmare Detective almost immediately. You see, the guy with the hair on his wall is having a nightmare. And the Nightmare Detective is able to enter peoples’ dreams in order to explain them to those people, and perhaps they will not be so frightened. However, this man having this dream decides he would rather remain in the dream than wake up, and he chooses to die. This screws up Kyoichi Kagenuma, the Nightmare Detective. He has lost the will to live, after seeing so many scary and creepy things in his life. In fact, we are not sure he has ever had the will to live. And this ties in nicely with the theme of suicides. A series of incredibly brutal suicides have been taking place in the city. Each of the victims have stabbed themselves to death, in bloody and gory fashion, while having nightmares. And just before they do, they have all called the phone number “0″. Which I assume in Japan does not connect you with an operator.

Japanese horror movies love this kind of stuff. Something anyone could do - like playing a VHS tape in Ringu, or dialing 0 on a cell phone. Simple things that are accessible to regular people are scary when all of a sudden they become supernatural. It turns out that the guy at the other end of the phone sucks the people who call into suicide pacts with them, and has the supernatural ability to enter their dreams and go after them. Which is always creepy, scary and gory. The cops go after him, but anyone who calls him ends up committing suicide in their sleep. So they enlist the help of the Nightmare Detective, who is legitimately suicidal himself. The hot-chick cop who convinces him to help is played by Reiko Hitomi, one of the sexiest Japanese actresses in the world, but a relative newcomer to movies with international distribution. She eventually sets up the obvious Nightmare On Elm Street style showdown where she confronts the killer in her sleep, with help from the Nightmare Detective.

The final showdown, while it is obvious from the beginning, is bonkers and difficult to understand, and it goes on for a very long time. But somehow it works. After all, it is a nightmare, and all kinds of strange things can happen in a nightmare that don’t have to make sense. The fact that Tsukamoto is able to sustain terror and tense creepiness for a solid half-hour without making it tedious is a testament to his skill. Nightmare Detective is a solid, frightening horror film that is worth seeking out. It arrives in stores tomorrow, May 27th, from Alliance Films.