Last Friday was the first day of my new ritual–movie night. In order to celebrate my new ritual, I went to see “The Glass House.” I was actually somewhat happy with it, probably only because I can count the really good movies of this year on one hand. The basic premise of the movie is this: two children, LeeLee Sobieski (Here on Earth) and Trevor Morgan (Jurassic Park III) lose their parents in a car accident and go to live with their childhood neighbors.
Unfortunately, they soon found that the neighbors may have plotted their parents’ deaths in order to get their hands on the children’s trust money. Not a bad plot if I do say so myself.
The movie is extremely predictable. From the very second that I had a handle on the plot, I knew how the movie would end.
This was Daniel Sackheim’s first turn in the director’s chair, so his pace was slightly trite.
Whenever trouble was afoot, music began, and the scene played out as I expected. Truly, in this day and age, that is expected, so maybe they should have worked it like Jaws, where the music wasn’t always around whenever trouble was.
The other real problem is that the teenagers in the movie are overplayed as bad kids.
I think the director and writer thought maybe all children do bad things explicitly because their parents told them not to.
I’m not trying to be preachy, but most young people just do what they want.
These things together made the movie exceptionally transparent. The majority of actors and actresses displayed no depth of character at all. They were more like action figures than humans, in that you knew exactly what they were capable of when you took them out of the box.
I said that the majority of actors and actresses seemed very fake. The exception to this rule is Sobieski.
Her on-screen presence can easily be compared to Helen Hunt.
She is quiet, yet intelligent, and carries a certain weight. Unfortunately, she is the only cast member with that trait. I imagine that we’ll see more of her in the years to come.
There was an excellent musical score by Christopher Young. He has scored more movies than I can count, and it shows.
The music is a bit intrusive at times, but it always goes along with the film. I personally think that its overuse was probably more the fault of the director.
Lastly, the movie had brilliant camera work and lighting. The majority of scenes had a Hitchcock-style point-of-view camera set up, and the movie aspect almost seemed to disappear from it.
This helped a lot when car chase scenes were going on–that made me sit on the edge of my seat for a while.
The lighting was an excellent diffuse-blue, and that really jumped the viewer into day mode when it changed to a sudden washed-out color set.
All in all, I enjoyed the movie a good bit. Sure, it was sort of campy and a little bit excessive in the acting, but it was a good cross between a teen thriller and a financial thriller like “The Game.