LOL. WTF? RIP.

[April 11th, 2007] As an employee of this newspaper, I cannot deny the parallels between Halle Berry's character in Perfect Stranger and our own Nigel Jaquiss. Both are top-shelf investigative reporters. Both are astonishingly well-proportioned. And both have spent many hours digging into the sexual misdeeds of famous men. Heck, both of their targets (Bruce Willis, Neil Goldschmidt) are rapidly balding. Coincidence? Don't make me laugh.

The main difference between the two reporters is that one newshound exists in the movies, and the movies have always had a hard time making public records requests appear sexy. So Perfect Stranger opens with Berry's Rowena Price doing everything short of a touchdown dance in the office of an intern-fingering congressman (Gordon McDonald) after a hidden microphone records his confession. Price then explains that she writes under the name of David Shane, the top muckraker for the New York Chronicle. (It is widely known in the business that most investigative reporters write under noms de plume. Nigel Jaquiss' real name is Harriet Crasnik.) The hidden mic feed is rushed back to a techie played by Giovanni Ribisi, who turns it into a front-page headline. The editor grins. Everyone goes out for whiskey shots.

I don't have to tell you that none of this bears even a familial resemblance to the actual work of reporting. (Except for the whiskey shots.) From this opening, Perfect Stranger gets even more preposterous: Rowena/David's best childhood girlfriend winds up dead, and Rowena/David decides that she and the techie will expose the killer—an ad executive played by Willis—via the bold new technology of...Internet Messaging! Imagine the cinematic possibilities: the slow pans between people typing, the sinister power of emoticons. Halle Berry uses a lot of emoticons in this movie.

Which doesn't quite compensate for her lack of actual emotions. Berry is in the midst of a mesmerizing free fall that began immediately after her Oscar for Monster's Ball; since the 2001 win she has starred as a Bond girl, Catwoman and the voice of a sexy robot. Her newest role is edging her dangerously close to Cuba Gooding Jr. territory—she's starting to seem like a very good-looking joke. It's no help that her character is set on proving the hypothesis that the Internet makes you stupid—and possibly dead.

But the Internet doesn't make you stupid. Your screenwriter makes you stupid. And nothing says more about the inanity of Todd Komarnicki's script (and James Foley's direction) than the fact that Rowena/David, ostensibly the best reporter in NYC, is never seen doing any writing. Which stands to reason; no one else involved in the picture seems to have done any writing either.