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Song of the Day: “In the Absence of Sun” - Duncan Sheik

• Director: Olivier Assayas
• Genre: Thriller
• Year: 2007

Occasionally I will take a chance on a movie I know nothing about, but whose trailer or look may seem promising. Occasionally, I get burned this way.

It is truly a sad thing, particularly when you go into a movie excited and wanting to like it, wanting to give it a chance. You never know which independent film willl turn out to be sleepers and which ones can be swept under the rug. With Michael Madsen and Asia Argento in this cast, I truly wanted this movie to take off, but it only took the very first scene for me to realize the acting would not be up to par, the second scene for me to realize the directing would not be up to par, the third scene to realize the screenplay was as unfocused as it seemed and by the fourth scene I wanted to break my television.

This movie dubs itself a thriller, which is a complete misnomer, because I was not thrilled the least, save for a couple of T&A parts which did managed to get me to pay attention for almost a full minute. Quite remarkable actually. Now…this is the point where I normally tell you about the plot, except that in this case I am having a real hard time figuring out exactly what the plot was, and that is largely the problem. Asia Argento (daughter, I believe, of Italian horror director Dario Argento) plays a woman torn between her former love and her new love to two dangerous men working on both sides of the law. Suffice it to say that all sorts of backstabbing take place, some which make no sense at all but which add confusion to the film and apparently somebody decided this amounted to intelligent interest.

This movie does not know what it wants to be, an action film, a thriller, an edgy romantic triangle sprinkled with low level S&M or something else altogether, but in the end it fails to be all of those, mostly due to a cast that can not deliver, a director that  has a hard time guiding the movie, and an editor that needed to work on his transitions. In the end, you are left with a very barren film with a cool look and enough T&A to keep your eyes on the screen at random intervals, but truly, this is the sort of film you can watch with the sound down and while surfing the net. They tried, you can tell there are parts where they were trying to put the effort and save this film from itself, unfortunately there were too many things working against it. Like a freak car accident, there is simply just “nothing here to see.”

Rating: 2 out of 5
Notes: Violence, nudity, brief sexuality, language. The movie itself is in English for the most part but there are subtitled parts which are in French and what I am guessing may have been Japanese or Chinese (call me ignorant but I am not good enough to tell the difference and the characters were supposed to be Japanese, but they were in China…so whatever….)