My guess is they screened a lot of Hitchcock movies before they made "Bird on a Wire," and the parts they liked the best were where Hitch placed his couples in situations that were dangerous and picturesque at the same time; scenes like the Mt. Rushmore climax in "North by Northwest." That was a delicate balancing act when Hitchcock did it; the locations, sensational as they were, couldn't be allowed to upstage the thrills. In "Bird on a Wire," the act loses its balance.
"The Secret of My Success" seems trapped in some kind of time warp, as if the screenplay had been in a drawer since the 1950s and nobody bothered to update it. This is the kind of movie that should star Tony Randall or Gig Young opposite Judy Holliday or Doris Day, and, in fact, they were wonderful in the 1950s classics that "Secret" recycles.
The movie is a bargain-basement version of Martin Scorsese's great 1985 film "After Hours," in which an innocent young man sets out looking for a good time, and encounters one horrible incident after another. Scorsese was able to wind his plot up into a high-energy paranoid comedy that played like a thriller. "Run," on the other hand, takes the same basic premise and turns it into a series of stunts, predictable scenes and loose ends.
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Credit where credit’s due: “Ugly Truth” doesn’t waste any time drawing out the reveal of Joe Hudlin, divorce lawyer and villainous creep, as the one working with Lockyear to bury the murders of the whistleblowers and the man responsible for Felker’s imprisonment of Clarice two episodes ago. She literally just sees the magazine cover with Hudlin on it sitting on Krendler’s desk, and suddenly the whole team knows who’s responsible for what happened to her (her claims are immediately substantiated by Tripathi tailing Hudlin all day and seeing him enter Lockyear’s building). Unfortunately, the show still wants to play this “Clarice and Krendler don’t trust each other” game, despite smoothing it over time and again. It’s like a bad-story device it just can’t stop pulling out and playing with, no matter how little sense it makes. It results in what Roger Ebert called an Idiot Plot: a narrative that could be resolved immediately if these two characters would jus
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