Mike Bookey

I’ve listened to preachers, I’ve listened to fools. Opening with an intriguing and deftly shot scene, Transsiberian
promises a film that will look good, even if it goes sour. And sadly,
sour it goes. Nevertheless, there's something compelling about this
snow-driven trek

A do-gooder American couple (not without their
own problems), Roy and Jessie (Woody Harrelson/Emily Mortimer), depart
for a charity trip, traveling from China to Russia via the historic
Trans-Siberian train. They meet up with a suspicious couple, Carlos and
Abby (Eduardo Noriega/Kate Mara) whose motives immediately become
questionable. After a few misguided episodes, Russian narcotics officer
Grinko (Ben Kingsley) joins in the dreary ride.
What was really
lacking as the movie progressed was a sense of urgency. The time it
took setting up the characters could have been well spent giving us
more clues, or deception around the characters’ real agendas. The
tables get turned a couple of times, but nothing that psychologically
intimidates or fools us. On the whole, the train stops in loophole city
way too often.

Shakespeare in love. Clark Gregg did it. I wouldn't recommend trying, but he did it. This is Chuck Palahniuk we're talking about, after all.

The creator of Fight Club.

The nihilist.
The gross-out artist.
The
guy who famously or infamously or anecdotally inspired multiple people
to drop over in a dead faint at readings of a story about heinous
masturbation-inspired mishaps.
That grotesque, pathetic, twisted guy.
But
Clark Gregg did it. He took Palahniuk's Choke as screenwriter and
director and found another vein. Buried beneath the blasphemy and the
bodily fluids and the self-loathing was a story about redemption.
About recovery.
About love.
Clark
Gregg turned Chuck Palahniuk into a romantic. Or maybe he just pulled
back the covers to expose the romantic that was already there. It's
certainly not easy to see at first in the tale of Victor Mancini (Sam
Rockwell), who's messed up in so many ways that it's hard to know where
to begin. He attends 12-step meetings for sex addiction with his best
friend and compulsive masturbator Denny (Brad William Henke), but
pretty much only so he can pick up women. He visits with his ailing
mother Ida (Anjelica Huston), but her dementia has reached the point
where she doesn't even recognize him. And while he has a job at a
colonial theme park, he supplements his income by shoving food down his
throat at restaurants, finding someone to save his life, and becoming
the beneficiary of his newfound saviors' sense of connection.

There’s a place where I can go…It took Lakeview Terrace to remind me that we didn't know how good we
had it in the early 1990s. The Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall had
crumbled, leaving post-Cold War America without a real international
threat; terrorism was a vague concept. Yet if you were to judge by the
movies, we were all buckets of free-floating anxiety convinced that
everyone around us would stab us in the neck with a letter opener if we
looked at them sideways.

Yes, it was the golden age of the
"fill-in-the-blank from hell" thriller-that time when your babysitter
(The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), your roommate (Single White Female),
your co-worker (The Temp), the girl next door (The Crush) or your kid's
new stepparent (Domestic Disturbance) was a psycho-in-waiting. Lakeview
Terrace appears in an age when paranoia seems just a bit more
justified, and you'd think that there would be room to re-explore the
genre in light of this. Instead, we get more or less what we would have
gotten 18 years ago: middling melodrama too concerned with providing
visceral kicks to uncover anything truly psychologically insightful.