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BERRY GOOD?: Halle Berry is nice, sweet and harmless pitching cosmetics but her movies are something else.
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THE topic in the movies this week is anxiety. Even though I have had no prior professional training in this field except what my shrink tells me every Thursday at 5pm, I'm still going to dispense valuable wisdom on how to cope with that affliction.
First, I'm going to tell you how to deal with an anxiety about Siamese twins, or more precisely, the lingering spirit of one.
That's the principal premise in the Thai horror flick, Alone.
I went to see Alone with somebody because I didn't want to be alone.
This was because it's made by the two Thai guys who directed Shutter in 2004.
If you know that scare fare, you'll understand why to this day I'm still spooked by photographs, dark rooms, weighing machines, Thai gals with long hair and the idea of having a monkey on my shoulder.
Of course, monkeys don't get on my shoulder very often but ghosts might, so I try to be a good person doing only good things.
Those Shutter fellas didn't make me shudder with their only-so-so Alone this time but their concept did.
They have two conjoined sisters, one of whom dies and keeps returning to haunt the other suddenly in very dark places in the way George Bush and Tony Blair were joined together and kept popping up here and there.
By the way, the Brits have said that President Bush and the new British PM Gordon Brown are not joined at the hip, so surgery is apparently not necessary this time.
Anyway, because I saw the twist in Alone coming long before the dumb guy in the show who married the surviving sis did, I kept myself entertained in my mind by replaying the entire movie of Stuck On You.
That's the Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear 'American, not Siamese twins' show which made me laugh so hard I was stuck to my seat for an hour after that.
Maybe it's just me, but I kept wondering why the haunted folks in Alone didn't see that comedy because it'd have helped them deal with their pesky spook problem better.
My shrink always tells me to confront my fears head-on, ideally with a laugh track.
The second anxiety I'm going to discuss is the anxiety with neighbours.
As you know, neighbours are exactly like your relatives, except that you're totally not related, unless you're living in a Taiwanese soap opera where amazing surprises happen.
Who else can stay so close to you, stare at you every day, slam the door in your face, steal your newspaper and freak you out big-time because you know absolutely nothing about them?
To deal with this anxiety, my shrink recommends leaving my neighbours alone.
However, he said that if I can't do that, then I might as well get the full story next door by using Iraq War night-vision goggles, or at least the binoculars Shia La Beouf peeps through in the exciting thriller Disturbia.
Shia does that because he's just starred in Transformers and knows another robot as something disguised as a car or something else when he sees it.
This time it's a serial killer disguised as his neighbour and Shia, although he's really 21, plays a teen who tries very hard to instigate the transformation and expose the killer, despite people - primarily his Mum, the police and every sceptical grown-up - disbelieving him at every turn.
Watching the show, again my mind replayed the entire length of 1954's Rear Window starring Jimmy Stewart in a similar Peeping Tom role, as well as an old episode of The Simpsons on TV where Bart, armed with a telescope, was aping Jimmy by spying on his goody-goody neighbour Ned Flanders.
I kept thinking how great it would be if Shia, Jimmy and Bart could combine their voyeuristic skills and do a big busybody movie called The Simpsons' Rear Window At Disturbia.
My shrink tells me that such a blockbuster would cure, once and for all, my obsessive need to peek at my neighbour's glittering watch collection which is not exactly what the original intention of Neighbourhood Watch is all about.
To nail the bad guy, Shia uses the computer a lot, something which Halle Berry also does in Perfect Stranger.
That's the third anxiety I'm addressing.
It's the fear of following Halle through some kind of trouble.
Now, I like Halle because she's so nice, sweet and harmless pitching cosmetics.
But when she's selling a sexy Internet thriller, personally I find it harder to buy than a Revlon lipstick.
Halle logs onto the Net because she wants to nail womaniser-murderer-cyber-predator suspect Bruce Willis, who graduates from Die Hard to Flirt Hard.
Their dirty e-mails back and forth are supposed to be steamy but I found them very funny since I kept imagining Bruce typing away with a smirk on his face going 'Yippee kaiyay' like in Die Hard 1 to 4, possibly up to 11.
The most interesting bit in the silly movie is a character played by Giovanni Ribisi who's almost the Siamese twin of Shia LaBeouf in Disturbia.
Like Shia, Giovanni likes to peep at people too.
But he does it by hiding in the next room, without binoculars, while Halle is making out hot and heavy with her boyfriend.
My shrink says that's the sickest thing anybody can do.
He wants to know every detail the next time I try that in my neighbour's home.
stlife@sph.com.sg
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