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Reviews
Cold Case Files (1999)
Serious stories, laughable delivery
A&E's prime-time whodunit show is chock full of mysteries, but perhaps the biggest puzzler came in late 2003, when the program received an actual nomination for an actual Emmy Award. While nobody claims that the Emmys represent the paragon of mankind's artistic achievement, the fact that "Cold Case Files" managed to sneak into the Outstanding Nonfiction race was a disservice to all the truly talented folks who work in television.
"Cold Case Files," which examines murder cases solved years after their initial investigations, has no trouble rounding up intriguing tales; the real-life crime world, after all, comes with as much drama as any season of "CSI." The show's problem lies in its presentation.
Most glaring is the writing, which is downright atrocious -- often laugh-out-loud bad. It's purple prose at its most ludicrous, loaded with narrative along the lines of, "Jane Smith and her sister have just driven across a rough patch in the road called life." It's bad enough that "Cold Case Files," like so many of today's documentary shows, tells its stories in a jarring present tense. (What's called the historical present tense, to be precise: "John Jones is sentenced to murder in 1978.") Making it worse, though, is that many of the scripts can't keep up with themselves; you'll hear the present tense followed immediately by the past tense, despite no shift in the story's actual chronology. It's almost understandable: Events that took place in the past should be recounted in the past tense, and it's easy to imagine writers occasionally slipping during the struggle against this natural instinct.
Whatever the case, it's bad, bad writing.
There's an air of melodrama, too, oozing out of "Cold Case Files." The show's most inadvertently funny device is the occasional use of dark re-verb on the voices of interviewees, intended to transform certain sound bites ("That's when I knew we had a homicide on our hands") into chilling comments. Instead, in my family room at least, the cheesy gimmick serves as a reliable cue for hearty guffaws all around.
For solid real-life crime drama, Court TV's nightly lineup is a far better bet. Even A&E's own "American Justice" -- produced, inexplicably, by the same folks who botch "Cold Case Files" every week -- is a masterpiece next to this unintended chuckle fest.
3: The Dale Earnhardt Story (2004)
Solid for TV, but ultimately lacking
My biggest fear with "3" is that its release will now prevent the possibility of a bona fide Hollywood feature biopic -- a treatment the Dale Earnhardt story certainly merits.
Earnhardt's real-life tale is already a perfectly written script, so it would have been difficult for the makers of "3" to produce a wholesale screw-up. But there's something missing from this latest in ESPN's noteworthy series of sports films. It would have been easy for "3" to go overboard in any number of directions -- too much on-track action, too much melodrama, too much hero-worship. Instead, you get the feeling that filmmakers sensed this danger and wound up with the opposite problem: too much restraint.
There are several strands of storytelling running through "3," and because none of them is done justice, the film ends without any impact (quite literally, in fact). The themes of father-son bonding, of growing into yourself, of separating yourself from the pack -- all are ultimately shortchanged by a movie that can't quite seem to figure out which tale it wants to tell.
As a Sunday night TV movie, "3" stands out: Barry Pepper largely succeeds in his portrayal of a Carolina boy gone big-time, and Elizabeth Mitchell does well as Earnhardt's patient and intelligent wife. It doesn't do anything disastrously wrong; it just doesn't quite do everything right. Here's hoping Hollywood still sees an opening for a full-scale picture that gives Earnhardt's story the penetrating delivery it deserves.