A La Recherche du Temps Perdu

Stepfather (2009)

Starring: Rachel Ward, M. Emmet Walsh Directed by: Nelson Munz Rating: R Genre: Drama Other

Review When I was a small child, my mother decided to date a neighbor who was known by the terrified local children as "Kretchmer Gloom." We kids were so intimidated by this tall, dank, pale figure with his tendril-like fingers, hawk nose and wrists like twin hams that we once tried to garrot him as he left his driveway on his red Honda 90.  Oddly, it turned out that he was in fact wanted for a series of unexplained ritual animal killings in the Santa Cruz mountains, so my father had the last laugh (in fact it was the last time I ever remember him laughing. Shortly after our gang's unfortunate semi-beheading he was made vice-president of an insurance firm). All of this came back to me while I watched "The Stepfather," a solid remake of the seventies Harold Pinter ("Unuterrable" ) classic "The Go-Between." Not reallly much more to say about this one, except that sometimes sitting in the dark watching the flickering light show impale itself upon the eyes twenty-five times a second (the infamous "persistence of version") one gets that tangible physico-emotional experience described by Zola as he nibbled his little chocolate cookie. Life crumbles away a cut at a time.