Hitchcock Lite

...Director D.J...

...He spins dramas and theories out of the scenes he witnesses in the windows across and around the courtyard behind his brownstone...

...What makes Rear Window so spectacular is that it makes you experience, in the most vivid possible terms, the isolation of an active man who finds himself in a wheelchair in the midst of a hot summer before air conditioners, and with nothing whatever to do but look out the window...

...His girlfriend is not society fashion maven Grace Kelly but an anorectic chick in a bikini with parent issues...

...Criticizing any attempt to update and re-engineer a classic— and in my estimation Rear Window is the greatest suspense picture ever made—is a fool's errand...

...John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...

...And when he does so, he places her and himself in terrible jeopardy with no way of defending himself...

...At its best it will seem like a Xerox copy...

...The new version is doomed to fail by comparison...

...The characters do things that make no sense merely to advance the plot, which is something that never happens in Rear Window and is inexcusable for a thriller, which must seem rigorously logical if it is not to descend into arrant foolishness...

...It's a game, an intellectual exercise, and a somewhat tawdry one because our hero is violating the privacy of his neighbors for no reason other than boredom...

...So, yes, Disturbia is no Rear Window, to put it mildly...

...Or Going My Way, the sentimental tribute to the Catholic priesthood— only instead of Bing Crosby singing "Swinging on a Star" and Barry Fitzgerald talking in a hearty brogue, we will have swinging young priest Sanjaya from American Idol finding his (shall we say) soulmate in older cleric Harvey Fierstein...

...Not to mention the hilarious musical Singin' in the Rain, with its plot about the secret dubbing of a screechy silent-film actress thrown into a blender with Dreamgirls to become the tragic tale of a hip-hop record producer (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) who replaces the warblings of a socialite wannabe singer (Paris Hilton) with those of his long-suffering girlfriend (Jennifer Hudson) without ever properly explaining how a black woman's voice is emerging from a blonde who sounds like Minnie Mouse...

...If that happens, I am telling you, I'm not going...

...The protagonist is not a rugged Life photographer trapped by his broken leg in a Greenwich Village walk-up (James Stewart's parlous condition in Alfred Hitchcock's peerless 1954 thriller) but rather a delinquent high-schooler who has been placed under house arrest for punching his Spanish teacher...

...It's got thrills and scares and laughs and a frightening villain in David Morse (a largely unsung character actor who enlivens and deepens every movie fortunate enough to have him in the cast...

...And at its worst, it will inspire dark thoughts about cultural decline, cultural ransackery, and the general dumbing-down of America...

...It's worth ten bucks...

...And the dangerous man across the way isn't a pathetic and henpecked salesman who cannot take another moment's criticism from his nasty invalid wife, but a pony-tailed charmer who undertakes an uncomfortable flirtation with the delinquent's mother...

...Still, Disturbia's success will surely bring about more of the same in years to come...

...Perhaps we will see The Philadelphia Story with Jessica Simpson rather than Katharine Hepburn as the fast-thawing ice goddess, Tracy Lord, being courted simultaneously not by Cary Grant and James Stewart but by Tobey "Spiderman" Maguire and Elijah "Frodo" Wood...

...The only question that really matters is whether Disturbia works on its own terms— whether the plotline of the original is so strong and clear that it survives the revisions and emendations of something well nigh perfect to begin with...

...And the answer is: pretty much, at least while you're in the theater and for a few minutes afterwards...

...And yet his game suddenly becomes deadly serious when he begins to suspect a horrifying crime has been committed just a few yards away from him—but he has no evidence to prove his claim and can only deploy his girlfriend to secure it...

...But it falls apart upon a moment's reflection...

...Just because the target audience for Disturbia is between the ages of 12 and 24 doesn't absolve screenwriters Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth from the obligation to work out their plot...

...Caruso does a superb job with the material, and the picture is wonderfully well-acted by the stunningly natural rising star Shia LaBeouf and a languorous newcomer named Sarah Roemer...

...How about Norma Rae with Lindsay Lohan taking the part of Sally Field—only Lindsay doesn't try to organize a union at a textile plant but stages a strike to protest the serving of meat in the school cafeteria...