Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. TRANSSIBERIAN was the last movie I saw yesterday that didn’t stink. Today’s running slow because I have two inconveniently timed interviews that’s screwing me out of seeing the Robert DeNiro/Barry Levinson movie WHAT JUST HAPPENED? and the Josh Hartnett flick AUGUST, but I will be finally catching BE KIND REWIND here in a few hours. The hope is to at least hit 4 movies for today. Anyway, let’s wrap up yesterdays movies with a little look at the Brad Anderson (SESSION 9, THE MACHINIST) thriller TRANSSIBERIAN starring Emily Mortimer, Woody Harrelson and Ben Kingsley. This is Emily Mortimer’s movie. She is the lead without a doubt, playing the wife of a religious man (Harrelson). He’s boyish, kind and loves his wife with all his being. We come to find that he actually saved her from a wild and dangerous life. She even jokes that their meeting was an accident since she crashed into him, head-on, at 40mph while driving drunk. She’s clean now and she loves her husband, but you don’t really know if she’s exactly IN love with her husband. Temptation to go back to that life of drinking and craziness shows up in the form of Carlos (Eduardo Noriega, from THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE), a charming young man traveling on the same train to Russia. He’s attractive, seductive… dangerous. Anderson builds a sense of dread from the very opening (seemingly unrelated) scene where an incredibly intimidating Russian Ben Kingsley finds a corpse on a boat and an empty hidden cabinet that he’s sure once held a shit-ton of heroin. When Mortimer and Harrelson get on the train to Russian in China you know they’re not going to have a good time of it and you begin to suspect everybody. The movie goes to some dark places and Mortimer in particular is put through the ringer. You might get a little frustrated at her character because if she was able to confide in the police or her husband a lot of her troubles go away, but I think Anderson does a good job setting up this world where you really can’t communicate with those around you (because of the language barrier) and those you can communicate with are untrustworthy. We find out early on that cops are not to be trusted, so it wasn’t a big jump for me to see her deal with drugs, death and lies by herself. I wouldn’t say this is as good as Anderson can be, but I really enjoyed it. The mood, the performances, the cinematography… all top notch. As far as I know this doesn’t have distribution yet, but I’m sure it’ll get picked up. It’d be a very solid platform release flick and I know they could cut a helluva trailer (probably with way too much information, but it’d be a great trailer). Be back soon with more! -Quint quint@aintitcool.com
