Disturbia disappoints

By
Cougar Staff
 – May 3, 2007Posted in: A1B, Entertainment

DisturbiaBefore I go on a gigantic tirade about Disturbia, you must understand that I was not in the mood to watch anything like it when I saw it, and that I was disappointed that my friends didn’t want to go see Grindhouse. My judgment may have been affected a little bit, but I’m just going to stick to my case.

This was the dumbest movie I’ve seen so far this year. It was a good concept, a modernized remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where a guy who is bored and stuck in his house watches all of the neighbors through a window in the back and ends up suspecting one of his neighbors of murder. Sadly, it was poorly executed, unrealistic, predictable, and had the kind of dialogue that you can tell was written by an uninformed 45-year-old who thinks they know how teenagers talk.

For the first five minutes, I was into the film. It had a good opening and dramatic segue into the movie. Sadly, I started noticing poor direction by D.J. Caruso and just sloppy errors in the second scene. It took place in a classroom, where the main character gets into an argument with his teacher. Glancing at the top of the screen in one of the shots, I noticed that a boom microphone was hanging down in the frame. The microphone was only there for a couple of seconds, but that’s still just a big indicator of sloppy filmmaking.

The acting was actually hard to watch at some points. I don’t know if it was just the fact that it was poorly written that made the scenes so awkward, or if it was the actors’ faults as well. But whatever it was, it was not entertaining in the way it was trying to be. The main actor, Shia LeBeouf, wasn’t quite as awful as all of the random unknown actors, but was still ridiculous because of the stupid dialogue.

As it went on, Disturbia had a lot of other errors and events that didn’t make sense. An example of this was when a girl is taking pictures of the serial killer on her cell phone and sending them to her friend. When the pictures appeared on the computer screen, they were high quality, as if taken by a professional photographer. I know that noticing something like that is really small and just seems like it would be a pointless and forgivable mistake, but errors like that combined with bad acting and horrid dialogue just make the film unworthy of being projected on the clean screens of American movie theaters.