Mortal Thoughts

Camera crew reflected in the van when Joey drives away from Cynthia.

While Cynthia and Arthur are alone in the house arguing about the murder, you can briefly see a person in a white t-shirt (not a character in the movie) sitting to the left in the dark in the room behind Arthur.

I'm not a big fan of Demi Moore but I have to admit that her performance in this film is very good. Bruce Willis does what he does best that is to say, he's annoying to the point where I was hoping someone would kill him and put us all out of our misery, even though I thoroughly enjoyed his character when he wasn't being mean to his wife.

Alan Rudoph started out as something of a protégé of Altman's in the 1970's, assistant directing on The Long Goodbye, California Split and Nashville. Since then he's made a good number of movies of his own that, from what I've seen, tend to be rather uncommercial, slow, serious, painstakingly realistic, sometimes maybe a little dull, but often very interesting films.

The hairdresser, wife and mother Cynthia Kellogg (Demi Moore) is in police department being interrogated by the experienced detective John Woods (Harvey Keitel) and his partner, Detective Linda Nealon (Billie Neal). Through flashbacks, she reveals how her best friend and colleague Joyce Urbanski (Glenne Headly) married the scum and nasty James Urbanski (Bruce Willis); how hard Joyce's life with James was; and why Joyce became a criminal.

I was pleasantly surprised by this film for its guts to take a story and almost present it all through Demi Moore talking to two police detectives(Harvey Keitel and Bille Neal) in a room - everything we see is via her character's thoughts and perceptions and ideas of truth and untruth and is entirely in flashback form. The story centers around Moore and her friend Headly recently married to a brute of a guy played by Bruce Willis - and goes from there to murder, mystery, and the eventual uncovering of what is the truth behind everything.

Clanging metal doors and a wailing saxophone jolt the viewer to attention. Twists and turns in the tricky plot keep your mind guessing.

I will confess that my personal life and upbringing played a big part in how I reacted to this film. I'm a West Coast boy top to bottom.

Ignore the generic title: this tough and gritty murder investigation is one of the better commercial thrillers to fill a multiplex, and surprisingly cynical considering the otherwise glossy box office appeal of its co-stars. Glenne Headly and Demi Moore portray friends who become accomplices in the death of Headly's abusive husband (played convincingly by, of all people, Bruce Willis).

"Thelma and Louise" was an entertaining movie about two women who shed their men and take off on a vacation in their convertible, during which they kill one man and humiliate and rob innumerable others. It's all okay, though, because all men are brutes anyway and deserve what they get.

First of all I have no idea why this was named "Mortal Thoughts." More appropriate would be, "Fatal Lies" or "An Inadvertent Confession," or maybe "Desperate Friends.