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2001 was a busy year for the young actress Leelee Sobieski. She starred in TV´s "Uprising," "Joy Ride" (actually made in 1999/2000), "My First Mister," and "The Glass House." Alas, quantity does not necessarily convey quality, and there´s little of quality in "The Glass House. Sure, it´s clever to have Terry and Erin Glass live in a house made of mostly glass, but it´s not clever enough.
In the movie, Sobieski plays Ruby Baker, a sixteen-year-old girl whose parents die in a car accident on their wedding anniversary. Ruby and her brother, Rhett, are sent to live with Terry (Stellan Skarsgård) and Erin (Diane Lane) Glass, who are the kids´ godparents. Rhett immediately falls in love with the Glasses´ architectural wonder of a house, an angular homage to industrial contructionism. Of course, the tall-for-her-age (and prolly for a girl) Ruby remains skeptical of having to share a room with her brother and the fact that Terry likes to...well, look at her.
Is Terry going to rape Ruby? This is probably the most uncomfortable and needless lechery in a thriller. Since sex isn´t really an issue at all in the movie, why bother with it? Soon, Ruby discovers that the Glasses may want to kill her and her brother so that they can inherit the children´s trust fund ($4 million).
And...that about does it for the story. It wouldn´t be so bad if the movie had simply moved from one plot point to the next with the filmmakers making marks on a checklist, but there are all these unnecessary little tidbits. Ruby has nightmares where she sees her parents´ car falling off of a cliff. There´s an excessively stupid lawyer who´s supposed to be looking out for the children´s interests. The kids´ uncle, their only living relative, is just "there" when he probably would´ve been more concerned about the kids in real life. Of course, wouldn´t you know, the bad guy isn´t really dead until he´s really dead.
Since it´s a studio production, "The Glass House" offers a handful of impressive sights and sounds. The exteriors of the home are artfully seductive, and the interiors of the residence (shot in a studio) reflect the coldness of the Glasses personalities and their lives. The expansive cinematography makes the movie feel a lot bigger than it really is. Still, I´ve never seen a thriller that requires so much on thunder and lightning and rain, artificial crutches all, to create a "tense and moody" atmosphere.
Video:
"The Glass House" DVD is a flipper disc with a single-layer of information on each side. Side A houses a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, and Side B offers a 1.33:1 Pan&Scan image. I believe that the movie was shot with Super 35 cameras/film. Super 35 is grainier than most other 35 mm film, and if you look carefully, you can see the grain fuzzing in the background. However, the video compressionists did a great job in minimizing the grain, so the picture looks sharp and clear when you sit at a comfortable viewing distance from the monitor. On the other hand, the transfer looks a tad too "digital" in a lot of scenes, as if the movie were computer-generated rather than shot live-action.
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[release]9208[/release]