'Chase': Worth a second look?

After poking fun of Chase for being a generically titled adventure show, I have a confession: I’ve watched every episode. I know what it’s trying to be — Justified with a woman, complete with daddy-issues — and I know that on those terms, it’s a failure. But if you watch it just for the (duh) chase scenes, which are skillfully staged, and for the way star Kelli Giddish’s mouth turns as southward as her twangy accent, it can be fun.

Grim fun, to be sure, as was proven this week, when House refugee Jennifer Morrison guest-starred as a rootin’-tootin’ delusional woman. On the lam, clutching a gun and little girl’s hand, Morrison was very good in a tricky role.

It’s unlikely that Giddish’s U.S. Marshal Annie Frost is going to last longer on Monday nights at 10 p.m. than Alex O’Loughlin’s   Steve McGarrett on Hawaii Five-O — Hawaii is way more popular, and it’s got a far more lively supporting cast than the collection of cliches that surround Marshal Frost. But Chase always features at least one amusingly elaborate chase scene, such as this evening’s climactic moment when Annie hung from the cab of a big truck as though she was acting in a silent-film comedy choreographed by Buster Keaton.

And in one guest spot on Chase, Morrison was given more opportunities to display various emotions than she was during her final seasons on House.

Is anyone watching Chase?

Follow: @kentucker

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Google TV’s first set-top box: Is it worth $299?

Google TV’s set-top box from Logitech is now available for preorder, and if you want to fork over $299, it looks pretty nice! Nicer than just connecting your computer to your television? Well…not quite. But still! Nice!

Logitech’s Revue Google TV box comes with a full QWERTY keyboard, but you can also control it with your iPhone or Android smartphone. (Fun.) Ultimately, though, the hardware matters less than the software: Is Google TV compelling enough, versus, say, Apple TV ($99) or Boxee’s upcoming set-top box ($199), to make the added expense worth it? I’m not convinced yet. For $299, buy an Xbox and watch Netflix through that. I hear you can also play games on it.

Are you preordering your Revue, PopWatchers? Can you not wait to get Google TV fired up in your living room? Or are you finding other ways of getting web content onto a television screen?

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Review: A new Bogie box set worth checking out

Image Credit: Everett CollectionWhen Humphrey Bogart was struggling to make his name on Broadway in the 1920’s, scalpel-wielding theater critic Alexander Woollcott sized him up thusly: he “is what is usually and mercifully described as inadequate.” Harsh. Then, in 1930, the young wannabe with the scarred lip, snarling lisp, and looks that might charitably be called “unconventional” finally landed a contract with Fox. The studio cut him loose after two years. Most actors might have thrown in the towel and started selling encyclopedias at that point. But Bogart’s best years were ahead of him.

In 1936, the not-so-young-anymore tough guy caught a break when A-list pal Leslie Howard lobbied to get him a part in Warner Bros.’ The Petrified Forest. The film is hardly a classic. But to quote a film that is – Casablanca — it marked the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Over the next dozen years – from 1936 to 1948 – Bogart made a string of masterpieces at Warner Bros. That gilded period, when Bogie became “Bogie,” the hardboiled hard guy, doomed lover, and Greatest Movie Star of All Time is the subject of the fantastic new box set, Humphrey Bogart: The Essential Collection. Comprised of 24 films on 12 discs loaded with extras (plus a thirteenth with a documentary about the history of the studio), The Essential Collection kicks off with 1936’s The Petrified Forest and hits on indelible masterpieces like 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, 1942’s Casablanca, 1946’s The Big Sleep, up through 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It’s hard to imagine a more impressive run of iconic performances.

If you love movies, then you’ve no doubt seen a lot of these films already. But let’s single out three of the best. The Maltese Falcon, which is also making its Blu-ray debut, may be the best of the bunch. It’s certainly the film that catapulted Bogie to super-stardom. Based on Dashiell Hammett’s noir crime novel, Bogart plays tough-talking private detective Sam Spade — a fedora-wearing gumshoe with a gun at his hip, a Chesterfield dangling from his lip, and a wiseguy crack for every two-bit hood or dangerous dame who crosses his path. With John Huston making his debut behind the camera, it’s also as twisty as a pretzel, with character actor turns from Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, and the truly wonderful Sidney Greenstreet as “The Fat Man”.

Five years later, Bogie essentially played the same character with a different name, Phillip Marlowe, in 1946’s The Big Sleep. This time the pulp fiction belonged not to Hammett, but Raymond Chandler, and its plot (littered with kinky motives and dead bodies) is so labyrinthine that director Howard Hawks infamously had to call Chandler personally to find out who killed the chauffeur. Chandler, on the other end of the line, had to admit that even he didn’t know and he wrote the thing! It doesn’t matter. It’s a first-rate film loaded with wiseguy patter (“she tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up”) and double-dealing femmes fatale, including real-life love interest Lauren Bacall, who matches Bogie’s Marlowe quip for sassy quip. They were the Brangelina of their day.

While Bogart, in our memories, is often pigeonholed as these smart-talking sleuths or as the suave Rick Blaine from Casablanca, he could also mix it up. Take his turn as down-and-out scoundrel Fred C. Dobbs in John Huston’s 1948 classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (the other film making its Blu-ray debut, and looking better than ever). Broke and forced to beg for spare change south of the border, Bogart hooks up with Tim Holt and Walter Huston (crusty coot and father of director John) to prospect for gold in the mountains where banditos run wild (“Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”). When the trio strike the motherlode, Bogie’s Dobbs turns into a greedy, paranoid monster. But instead of being broad, Bogart gives a finely calibrated performance as precise as a Swiss watch. It’s arguably his best role, not to mention the last he would give during his miraculous 12-year run at Warners. Humphrey Bogart: The Essential Collection: A

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Let Me In: A Vampire Remake Worth Welcoming - TIME

Chloe Moretz in Let Me In

Any remake is going be judged, at least by film critics (a notoriously persnickety bunch) against its original. Before press screenings of Let Me In, director Matt Reeves' remake of the spectacular 2008 Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, there were plenty of rumblings about the pointlessness of producing an American version so soon after a film that was practically perfect in the first place. The word unnecessary hung in the air. (See 90 years of vampires on the screen.)

I backed that sentiment, having been wildly passionate about director Tomas Alfredson's film, an adaption of John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In. But Let Me In won me over for three reasons. First, it is a good film in its own right, capturing the story's wistful, dark essence if not the spooky art of Alfredson's rendering. Relocated from bleakest Sweden to the wintry American Southwest and reset to the heyday of Ronald Reagan and Boy George, it is still the tale of an eerily beautiful 12 year-old vampire, now named Abby (the remarkably confident and skilled Chloe Moretz of Kick-Ass fame), who moves into a dreary apartment complex with her keeper of sorts, an older man posing as her father (Richard Jenkins, wonderfully sad) and there befriends a boy named Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Owen, also 12, has his own problems; he lives in terrible fear of bullying classmates at his dreary Los Alamos middle school. (See TIME's Kick-Ass review.)

Second, of the approximately 150 films I've seen so far this year, I'd use the term necessary to describe about three of them, which makes Reeves' decision to take his own swing at the material at least as justifiable as, say, Jonah Hex. Finally, and most important, there is the matter of my old friend Tom, who would only go see a foreign film with subtitles if he were invited to a Brazilian blockbuster by Gisele Bundchen and she sat in his lap for the entire two hours, whispering sweet Portuguese translations in his ear. Never mind that film is a visual medium and that once you've seen and loved a movie, you don't remember it in another language; you remember it as you felt it. Some people just don't do subtitles. For them, there are remakes.

Alfredson opened his film with snow drifting out of the night sky and the image of a pale blond boy stabbing the air with a knife and muttering a series of threats into the darkness. Reeves, who earlier directed Cloverfield, opens Let Me In with mayhem. A crime suspect with terrible acid burns on his face is rushed to the hospital in the dark of night. A policeman (Elias Koteas) tries and fails to question him; while his back is turned, the suspect tumbles out of a seventh story window, an apparent suicide. At this point, we go back in time two weeks to learn what brought us here. The character of the policeman is entirely new, perhaps to serve that American liking for having someone on the job, investigating, even though in vampireland there are no tidy endings, no courts to eke out justice. His presence, and the flashback, suggests that Reeves believes he has to get the blood pumping early; this is America, darn it. The mystery and the horror have to be bigger.

Although the overall tone of Let Me In is gratifyingly somber, and some scenes play out the same, almost frame by frame, as they do in the original, Reeves' film does feel more like a horror movie than Let the Right One In. A vampire explodes when exposed to sunlight, and Reeves brings us in close to watch her suffer in bloody agony. Lindqvist's original screenplay made her flameout a deliberate choice, and Alfredson shot it like a surreal hallucination. This feels crass in comparison. When Abby is forced to hunt for herself, rather than drink from the gallon jugs of blood Father helpfully procures, she morphs into a CGI creature that looks more bug-like than girl-like. In vampire form, she sounds like Regan from The Exorcist — a shame since Moretz proves throughout that she's plenty capable as an actress of convincing us that Abby is to be feared (and also, loved). But not all of Reeves' choices are unsubtle. Owen lives with his loving but distracted-by-drink mother (Cara Buono, who plays Don Draper's new girlfriend Faye on Mad Men) and Reeves shoots her at angles that never reveal her whole face. She's only half there, as befitting a mother who can only guess at her child's pain.

Let Me In is not as fantastic as Let the Right One In, which you should rent, immediately. But it is undeniably powerful and made with obvious admiration and respect for the source material. And for the subtitle-eschewing Toms of the world — and there are many — Let Me In is a chance to experience a story about finding courage and making choices in the name of devotion, choices which are strange, awful and also beautiful. Two outcasts, one who lives in the permanent misery of the undead, the other in the misery of middle school, find comfort in each other. The latter would be escapable in the coming years, but Owen, like so many adolescents, doesn't see it as temporary. For him, Abby is the right one to let in, although we see the tragedy that awaits him. I'd still take Alfredson's version over Reeves', but I wouldn't close the door in Let Me In's face either.

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