To Die For (UMD, 2009)

A UMD is not playable on a DVD player. It's made to be played on portable play stations, instead.

When Joyce Maynard chronicled the lurid true story of Pamela Smart, a husband-murderer, I doubt she would've believed what director Gus Van Sant could do with her work.

It is amazing, after all, that Van Sant pulls out all the stops to go after the dumbing of Americans through television tabloidism. Van Sant adapts Maynard's story into a "black comedy" film. The satire strewn throughout the film is brash, blatant & right on the mark. It's not subtle.

Van Sant's adaptation is a film about a power-starved woman, who becomes a weather forecaster for a cable television station. Who better than Nicole Kidman, the Australian Oscar-winning actor, to portray the kind of US woman who is so absolutely focused upon social climbing that nothing is beneath her sly standards?

Maybe it takes a person like Kidman who's lived outside of the US' culture to truly comprehend just how influential television's talking heads have become. Kidman's character will stop at nothing to achieve celebrity status, even if it means embellishing stories or even conspiring to murder the husband she perceives to be good for nothing & her inferior. What arrogance, what superiority. But Kidman wraps it tightly behind a false facade that seems so harmless & earnest.

In order to accomplish her goal to become famous, this weather woman will even sexually over-power a high school boy to carry out her murderous plot. All the while, Kidman comes off as a sickening square, goody-two-shoes in the extreme. But, that's just a cover for who & what she really is.

Took me several viewings to like this film. Kidman's character's goody-goody persona is such a turn off. However, that's one of this film's main points. Beneath the facades of American television's talking heads there certainly can be very similar types of narcissistic people who are influencing masses of the viewing public who do not question what these publicv personalities are presenting.

Now that I've grasped Van Sant's satirical strategy, this film seems nearly brilliant~