The Mothman Prophecies by John a Keel Review

"The Mothman Prophecies" claims to be based on a true story, which sent me racing to the Web for a niggling research. And, yes, there is a conventionalities among the folks in Point Pleasant, W.Va., that a mothlike creature with red eyes can occasionally be glimpsed in the area. Some say he is a spirit evoked by a long-dead Indian master. Others blame him for a deadly bridge plummet. John A. Keel has written a volume most Mothman, and now here is this movie. The "true story" function involves the possible existence of Mothman; the human characters are, I believe, based not on facts but on an ancient tradition in horror movies, in which attractive people have unspeakable experiences.

Richard Gere stars equally a Washington Post reporter named John Klein, who is so happily married (to Debra Messing) that when they concur to buy a new firm, they determine to test the floor of a closet for lovemaking purposes, to the surprise of the existent-estate agent who walks in on them. If there's ane thing you need in a real-manor agent, it's the practiced judgment to get out a cupboard door closed when he hears the unmistakable sounds of coitus coming from behind it. Furthermore: Gere is 53. He'south in keen shape, just to make love at 53 on the floor of a closet with a existent-estate amanuensis lurking nearly is, I submit, non based on a true story.

Then Klein and his married woman are in a crash. "You lot didn't come across information technology, did you?" she asks, and before she dies, she draws a picture of a mothlike animal she saw flattened against the windshield. Different nigh windshield bugs, this creature has many forms and lives, equally Klein discovers when his life takes a plough into the twilight zone. Driving, as he thinks, to Virginia, he ends up hundreds of miles away in West Virginia, and when he knocks on a door for help, the frightened householder accuses Klein of having harassed him for three nights in a row.

Laura Linney plays Connie Parker, a local cop. She trusts Klein, and together they get involved in a foreign series of events, which culminate in a bridge collapse and a dramatic rescue of the sort that is e'er peculiarly annoying to me, because it displaces the focus of the movie. Is this a moving-picture show about the Mothman, or virtually a daring rescue subsequently a bridge collapse? And since the Mothman presumably still exists, how does the happy ending afterwards the bridge collapse really settle the story? It's lazy for a movie to avoid solving one trouble past trying to distract usa with the solution to another.

The director is Mark Pellington ("Arlington Road"), whose command of camera, pacing and the overall consequence is so good, information technology deserves a better screenplay. The Mothman is singularly ineffective every bit a threat considering information technology is only vaguely glimpsed, has no nature we can empathize, doesn't operate under rules that the story can focus on, and seems to exist involved in infinite-fourth dimension shifts far beyond its presumed focus. There is also the problem that insects make unsatisfactory villains unless they are very big. Gere and Linney have some prissy scenes together. I like the way he takes a shell of indecision before propelling himself into an action. This is Linney's first movie since "You Can Count on Me," which won her an Oscar nomination. I saw it again recently and was astonished past her performance. The melancholy lesson seems to be, if you make a small independent flick for very trivial money and are wonderful in it, y'all can look forrad to being paid a lot of coin to appear in a large-upkeep production in which the talent that got you there is scarcely required.