Customer Reviews

Rockabye [VHS]

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This TVM directed by Richard Michaels and based on the novel by Laird Koenig begins without much promise. We get the cliched indifferent residents of New York City and the tabloid sensationalism of Valerie Bertinelli having her 2.5 year old son kidnapped. Bertinelli's shag haircut doesn't fill you with promise either. However the appearance of Rachel Ticotin as a Cuban newspaper reporter with a vaguely lesbian subtext, energises proceedings. She is so manic that she jumps on Bertinelli's lines and scores a laugh with a line to a stranger in a coffee house after Bertinelli exits - "Is that pie any good?"- just out of her timing. Ticotin is so good that the film barely recovers from her seemingly premature departure, though Michaels gives her a homage to the attic scene in The Birds, and she saves Koenig from the hackneyed claim of the reporter only caring about selling papers. Without Ticotin, the resolution is spotty, we have to endure one of those tiresome struggles for the gun that goes off and who got shot moments, and a freezeframe final image. Watch for Jimmy Smits as a cop, Lynne Thigpen as a social worker, and thin pre-Seinfeld Jason Alexander as the police detective in charge of the investigation. It's always difficult to assess the skill of an actor associated with comedy when they attempt a serious role, so here one doesn't know of Alexander is deliberately incompetent (he gets a very George use out of a donut) or it's simply the Seinfeld hindsight backlash.