The Age of Commercialism

How sad is this?

A Masterpiece!

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Psychologist Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver) is giving a guest lecture on serial killers. Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick, Jr.) surprises her in the bathroom and kills her police protection. Thirteen months later, she has become agoraphobic haunted by the experience. There is a serial killer is on the loose in San Francisco and she figures out his m.o. of copying other famous serial killers. M.J. Monahan (Holly Hunter) and Reuben Goetz (Dermot Mulroney) are the investigative officers and they recruit her to help.Sure, it's the same old serial killer movie. It does add a couple of interesting wrinkles and with solid female leads. Hunter is confident and fully realized. Weaver and her point of view deliver a sincere and fragile personality. The movie opens with the memorable bathroom attack. The other memorable aspect is Weaver struggling in her home. The investigation and the serial killer are less compelling. This follows the formula and it does it pretty well.

Back in the 1990s, it seemed that not a month went by when cinemas were not welcoming yet a new entry into the serial killer genre. After a while, the repetitiveness and predictability siphoned off the thrills, so there were attempts to add flourishes. None more so than Copycat, which was one of the few (perhaps the only?) film of the time to feature two leading ladies at the head of the action.Copycat opens with an attack on OCD-afflicted psychologist Sigourney Weaver by serial killer Harry Connick, Jr. While she escapes, it is not unscathed. Now afflicted by severe agoraphobia, Weaver never leaves her apartment and relies solely on computers and her gay assistant to aid her in day to day life. When a separate serial killer (William McNamera) begins a killing spree emulating serial killers of the past, Weaver realizes the similarities and tries to alert the police anonymously, only to be pulled back into the fold by cops Holly Hunter and Dermot Mulroney.Where to begin. I could lament the utter tastelessness of utilizing real-life serial killings as a basis for the murders in this film, but why bother? I will argue about the misleading trailers, which seemed to indicate that Connick was the main protagonist, when in fact he has little more than a glorified cameo here. This is a point of contention because Connick is actually creepy and menacing in his time on screen, while McNamera barely registers, which is a problem when your villain fades into the background.While I commend producers/writers for giving us two actresses in the leads, it sounds better on paper than in practice here. Weaver, an actress I normally love, is uncharacteristically hammy here. Her psychologist heroine feels less like a real person than a grocery store list of tics and neuroses. The scene where she thinks her apartment has been invaded, but her agoraphobia forbids her from leaving is too laughably over the top. By contrast, Hunter is almost disastrously miscast. With her annoyingly lilting Texas twang and designer cop duds, Hunter feels less like professional police officer at the top of her game and more like a little girl playing dress up in mommy's work clothes. She does not convince you for one moment. Even worse, she has no camaraderie or chemistry with either Weaver or Mulroney, her romantic interest/partner in the film.Plus the film's predictability is off the charts. Given this is set in the notoriously less PC 1990s, we know pretty much by rote the moment Weaver's effeminate gay assistant is introduced that he is dead meat and the film has little sympathy for him. Truthfully, the film has little sympathy for any of the victims. Even more repellent is the entire subplot surrounding Mulroney that the film telegraphs way too early. We open with Hunter's character wounding a suspect and her providing rather persuasive reasoning as to why she disarms rather than kills suspects. Mulroney is introduced as her partner/lover (because in TV and films obviously no man and woman could conceivably ever be partners without being lovers, unless one of them is gay, old or ugly), but the relationship seems like an afterthought and the film holds it like its a contrivance. In a completely unrelated moment later, Mulroney is taken hostage at the police station and Hunter wounds/disarms the suspect, only to have said suspect a moment later grab a firearm and blow Mulroney away in front of her. This sets up a bunch of contrived soul-searching as to why she did not just kill the culprit when she had the chance leading to some badly thought out unbelievable psycho-babble dialog between Weaver and Hunter; when truthfully we know this is just setting up for that pivotal climactic moment when Weaver is taken hostage and Hunter will know just how to handle his hash.If any of this sounds exciting, then it must be my wording because the film is nearly devoid of suspense after its opening moments. Director Amiel seems more at home in dramas than thrillers, and it shows here in spades. If you are in to these types of films, there are worse, but there are also far better. You would do well to seek the betters ones out.

In her most famous role, Sigourney Weaver battled a bloodthirsty alien. Part of what was significant about that role was that the role got written for a man, but she convinced them to turn the character into a woman. Jon Amiel's "Copycat" also stars her, and also features a role originally written for a man but changed to a woman (Holly Hunter's character). I didn't find "Copycat" to be a great movie, but I liked how they build everything up. Probably my favorite scene was the video that turns the woman in the bathtub into the dancing hippie, but what Sigourney Weaver's character does during the climax is its own experience.Personally, I wish that there were more movies in which women get tough against danger. If this movie is any indication, Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter would be two of the ideal cast members for such a movie. "Copycat" probably won't be for everyone, but I recommend it.

Copycat is an interesting movie. The plot is about a serial killer who mimics famous American serial killers, which is a frighteningly believable scenario in real life. The main protagonist (Weaver) is a tormented psychiatrist, who suffers from agoraphobia as a result of a near-fatal attempt on her life by a serial killer. The intricate back story draws the viewer in almost immediately. The pacing of Copycat is just right, sometimes crawling (and thereby building anticipation), and sometimes moving at a frantic speed, when things actually happen. The characters of Weaver and Holly Hunter appear realistic, and makes me think that several investigators/forensic profilers were involved in the process of creating them. I recommend watching this movie to everyone who likes cerebral chillers.