"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

action-horror picture which lacks the full-bone theatrics of grand guignol, and the
savvy, John Woo-style action piece audiences have come to expect. One minute
Schwarzenegger is camping it up, the next Todd Pickett, as his unwilling successor,
is playing his scenes as though he's Hamlet on a particularly dreary night in
Denmark. From beginning to end, Gallows is bad noose.н
Everybody going up the red carpet that Monday night already knows what Time
is going to say; Corliss had made his contempt for the picture very plain in a piece
about the state of action movies he wrote two weeks before. Nor does it take an
oracle to predict that there will be others who will not like the picture. But the
extent of vitriol will prove astonishing, even to those who expected the worst. In
the next forty-eight hours, Gallows will garner some of the most negative reviews of
the last twelve months, the vehemence of the early news reviewers empowering minor
names to pull out the stops. Besides the incomprehensible script, everyone agrees,
there is a lackluster quality to the picture that betrays the cast's indifference to
the entire project. Performances aren't simply uneven, they seemed designed for
entirely different movies: a hopeless mismatch of styles. The worst culprit in this
regard? There is no question about that. All the reviewers will agree that the most
inadequate performance comes from its star, Todd Pickett.
People writes that: "Mr. Pickett is plenty old enough to know better.
Thirty-something-year-olds don't act the way Mr. Pickett acts here: his trademark
'young man with a chip on his shoulder and a thousand-watt smile,' which was looking
stale the second (all right, the third) time he did it, seems particularly
out-of-place here. Though it seems incredible that time has passed so fast since
America first swooned to the charms of Mr. Pickettуhe's now simply too old to play
the twenty-something Vincent. Only Wilhemina Bosch, as Vincent's Prozac-chewing
sister, comes out of this mess with any credibility. She has an elegant,
beautifully-proportioned face, and she can turn a line with the snappy, East-coast
smarts of a young Katherine Hepburn. She's wasted here. Or, more correctly, our time
would be wasted here were she not in the movie."
The premiere audience didn't seem to mind it. On occasion there were audible
gasps and loud laughter (perhaps in truth a little over-loud, a little fake) for the
jokes, but there were several long stretches in the Second Act, when the movie
seemed to lose their interest. Even in the Third Act, when the action relocates to
the orbiting space station, and the special effects budget soared, there was very
little real enthusiasm. A few scattered whoops of nihilistic delight when the
villain's planet-destroying weapon actually went off, against expectation, and
Washington DC is fried to a crisp. But then, as the smoke cleared and Todd, as the
new Gallows, proceeded to finish off the bad guys, the audience became restless
again.
About fifteen minutes before the end credits rolled a member of the audience
got up from his seat on the aisle and went to the bathroom. A few people caught a
look at the man's face as he looked back at the screen. It was Todd Pickett, lit by
the light of his own face. Nobody got up to ask for his autograph.
Pickett stared at the screen for a moment only, then he turned his back on
it and trudged up and out of the cinema. He didn't go to the restroom. Instead he
asked one of the ushers if he could be allowed out of the back of the building. The
usher explained that the area around the back had no security.
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Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
"I just want a quiet smoke with nobody watching me," Todd explained.