For this week’s Bad Movie Review, Margaux and I are joined by GAMbIT’s own Samir Roy. We take a look at 2001’s The Glass House, which – spoiler alert – sucks.
Trevor: Okay, fuck The Glass House. The family’s last name is Glass, the house is made of glass, WE GET IT. I’m surprised the music isn’t by Philip Glass. You know how much cooler this would be if the family wasn’t named Glass? Or if the house wasn’t made of glass? Picture this: a movie called The Glass House, and nothing in it was glass. Viewers would be wondering, what does the glass house refer to? But alas, we don’t get to see that movie, we get to see this fucking thing.
Margaux: And you said The Glass House wasn’t as bad as The Third Wheel.
No, but really, I agree with your point, Trevor. You almost forgot about the deeply meta opening credit sequence, the glass shattering slowly – like a windshield cracking. GET IT CAUSE DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE.
Along for the bad movie ride, Samir!
Trevor: Everything in this movie was so obvious. It bugged the shit out of me. I mean, from scene one. No one talks like that, least of all teenaged girls! “Meryl Streep she is not.” What the fuck? Even I don’t talk like that, and I’m some kind of asshole.
Samir: Well, the whole movie felt like it was based solely on a treatment of a script rather than an actual script. So much of it felt like filler and the random threads of various plot points or twists that were given up on at a table meeting.
Margaux: I was just surprised that Leelee Sobieski had that many friends to go to the movies with. Her atonal performance didn’t do anything to elevate the terribly written script.
Trevor: Well, you don’t go to see Prom Nightmare without your gal pals, Margaux.
Also, to your point, Samir, everything about this movie felt rushed and half-formed. For instance, the editing. It, uh, sucked a hundred dicks. I’m speaking of that scene where the cops tell Ruby (Sobieski) that her parents were in a crash. It was fucking terrible.
Samir: And what, pray tell, is wrong with dicksucking? But to a more important point, there was so much that was left out of every turn in the story. And so obviously forewarned so that nothing is a surprise when it does happen, except what happened in between. It’s a weird imbalanced balance, where the empty champagne bottle is a clear sign that perhaps the drive home will not go smoothly, but then we never see the crash and their car is mysteriously taken?
Margaux: Trevor has no problem with dicksucking at all, if anything, he’s probably late for some right now. But back to The Glass House…
The flashbacks they offer, as a sort of non-explanation through out at odd times and seemingly for no reason, are arguly worse than the reenactments in Celebrity Ghost Stories. They were so comical and gave no real insight as to why, other than being forced through the script, her parents shared bottle of champagne ended up with them careening off a cliff to their deaths.
Samir: And even stranger, why was Ruby having these flashbacks? She wasn’t even there – she was watching Prom Nightmare. So they were more like hallucinations than actual records of the event.
Trevor: Can we talk about the fact that Ruby didn’t sit next to her brother at their parents’ funeral?
What the fuck.
Samir: Was she even crying?
Margaux: SINGLE TEAR! It was a strange side profile shot of Sobieski and she squeezed out a literal tear that looked misted on by a PA.
At first, I thought Rhett sitting with who I assumed was Grandma, was because she was going to end up being their guardian (at least, at first), but nope – bears no relevance other than to demonstrate she’s a shitty Catholic school girl?
Trevor: And a total bitch! Did you see how she talked to Uncle Jack? Who ends up saving them, BY THE WAY.
Samir: Yeah he just reappears, to explain what happens after the ridiculous third act.
Trevor: But there’s another elephant in the room: Stellan Skarsgard looked pretty good in this movie. He was trim, had a full head of hair…the last movie I saw him in was Nymphomaniac, and he looks 10x better here.
Margaux: He was the perfect casting for the role, if the role actually had any substance to it. Terry (Skarsgard) had a real convoluted motive for even wanting the Baker children in his care to begin with. But with a wife on pharmaceutical heroin and owing a TBD amount to loan shark or two, shit starts to get a little convoluted in your life.
Samir: For real. A shame it had to be when he was hitting on his teenage ward that we saw Skarsgaard’s bod. I guess he just couldn’t control himself around the mesmerizing beauty of Leelee Sobieski, not when it reverberates all over that damn water, glass and concrete modern mansion monstrosity that portends doom from every angle. And how did Diane Lane get roped into this? OR anything that she’s in just about. How on Earth was she a doctor? Only so the script could explain how they had so many drugs in the house all the time?
Trevor: Haha, well to be fair, The Glass House sexualized the hell out of Sobieski. Was the film trying to make her into some kind of sex symbol? She took her shirt off, she got in a bikini, and the shot of her ass (when she put Uncle Jack’s postcard into her waistband) was completely gratuitous. I know Sobieski was over 18 when this was shot, but let’s not gloss over the fact that her character was supposed to be 16.
Also, no idea how Diane Lane got roped into this. This was the same year she did Unfaithful, which she got an Oscar nomination for.
Margaux: Good thing Diane Lane’s character direction was “high as a kite – silent” because girl looked checked the hell out. Don’t blame her.
Umm, when Ruby takes off her shirt – IN THE HALLWAY, DAY ONE AT THE GLASSES – it’s because she doesn’t want her brother to see her because they have to share a room? It was an indication of the lack of decision making skills 16 year old Ruby possess.
Samir: Yeah, she was being modest so she decided to change in the hall??? Um, this house has bathrooms I think, doesn’t it? Or do those have clear glass walls too?
Trevor: Her brother SUCKED. I can’t tell you how much it bummed me out to learn that the actor’s name was TREVOR Morgan. Which lends credence to my theory that every Trevor in the world, besides me, is awful.
Margaux: The evidence only continues to support this fact.
I’d say the brother-sister relationship was strange, considering they are trying to cope with losing their parents at 11 and 16 (respectively), but honestly – Ruby and Rhett’s hot/cold-ness around each other was the least of The Glass House’s problems.
Can we talk about how Ruby, basically by movies end, commits murder on essentially unfounded evidence that Terry killed her parents?
Trevor: Margaux, this is a thriller, you can take your logic and shove it up your ass.
But I agree with you. I’ve seen so many of these cheap thrillers, but I think The Glass House is the first one that made me think “How is she gonna explain this to the cops? ‘I think he killed my parents but I can’t prove it’?” It’s like Ruby Baker is trying to be a third-season addition to Orange is the New Black, because on paper her reasoning is shaky as hell.
Samir: If I were her, I would have started with “Creepy old dude is perving on me non-stop.” That’s enough of a reason to get the cops’ help. But the revelation of how everything happened doesn’t jibe with Skarsgaard’s character- he’s both a master planner and a total fuck-up at the same time? Just like Nicholas Cage was the World’s best bank robber and gets caught in the first 15 minutes of Stolen?
Margaux: Exactly! His big plan was to kill off the Bakers, after not speaking to them for 10+ years, but still resting assured they still have guardianship to Ruby and Rhett. Then, assume said kids, whose worth upon their parents death is only $4 million and then gain their trust and their literal trust, then kill them and/or ship them to board school? That is a shaky as shit plan, watch ONE episode of CSI and could get a better idea.
Also, why are evil step-parents ALWAYS trying to sending kids away to boarding school, like that’s the worst thing that could happen. Being sent to foster care, THAT’S the worst that could happen.
Samir: And how did these people get so “carefully selected” to be guardians by these kids’ parents? What vetting process did they use to settle on these contemptible freaks?
Trevor: Did you notice that everyone in The Glass House was constantly getting in trouble? Erin gets called to her boss’s office, Ruby gets called to the principal’s, and Terry was under constant pressure from the loan sharks. It was 106 minutes of people just getting called out.
Samir: Well Ruby was an unrepentant plagiarist. And why the fuck did it take SO long for Diane Lane to get fired? The amount of intense drugs that went missing and her frequent reorders of the same things should have raised red flags before now right? And wouldn’t you assume the Glass family, so unlike anything Salinger would have dreamt in his worst nightmare, and their glass business and glass house would be in financial trouble? That much glass is expensive, which begs the question- if he needed money WHY NOT SELL THE DAMN UGLY HOUSE?!!
Margaux: I was kind of hoping there would be an elaborate glass figurine collection somewhere….
I swear they only dragged out the plagiarism subplot to attempt to make that effing Hamlet subtext stick. It was not working either.
Trevor: You mean the super-impactful zoom-in on the words REVENGE DRAMA? I can’t believe I made it past that. So fucking tacky.
Margaux: Well, the moral of the story is, hormonal teenage girls are trying to kill you. Unless you’re Uncle Big that lives in Chicago.
Seriously, how fucking convenient was that ending? Where the hell was this guy ALL ALONG? Moreover, Bruce Dern, WHY?!
Samir: This was before Nebraska, and he probably got tired of asking his kids for money, you take what you can get!
Trevor: Everyone’s kitchen needs remodeling now and then.
Also, the ending: it was shitty. There, that’s my critical insight. Honestly, I couldn’t get past the fact that the loan sharks showed up in a Testarossa that was missing one sideview mirror. Was that hopelessly distracting to anybody else?
Margaux: I actually thought stupid sports cars came that way and was really the least of my worries in a movie riddled with issues. Like, I don’t know, the two bodies that pile up and NO ONE CALLS THE COPS ABOUT because Sobieski wants to exact her 16 year old revenge on Terry. And finally learn how to drive in the process.
Or that it seems the new dad was planning to park his car in front of the window to the basement where he locked them, get drunk and pass out, for the kids to escape the basement and try to drive away in his car, with the brakes cut somewhere in this sequence of events?
Trevor: I’ll tell you guys something that will make you mad: the guy who wrote this shitpile, Wesley Strick, wrote fucking Cape Fear.
Margaux: Like my screenwriting teacher used to say, it can’t all be art.
Samir: My supposition: he wrote a treatment once upon a time, and someone found it stuck in a drawer when they bought out another production company- this cannot be the work of the same man, unless he himself had a major drug problem.
Trevor: And the director, Daniel Sackheim, went on to do great episodes of The Bridge, The Leftovers, and The Americans. It’s like everyone involved did good shit before or after The Glass House, except Leelee Sobieski, who still sucks.
Margaux: Well, like Leelee Sobieski’s Ruby, hopefully through The Glass House they (director/screenwriter) learned their lesson. And how to drive.
And paid their credit card bills.
Trevor: Hopefully Sobieski learned how to CLOSE HER FUCKING MOUTH. (Not a sexist remark; her lips were open the entire time.)
Samir: That’s how you show you don’t care, she’s jaded and temperamental; remember, she’s a teen.
Margaux: Oh no, to paraphase Pete Holmes, “she has a face like a fucking moon pie.” Close your mouth, Tyra would tell her to!
Trevor: I remember this movie bugging me when I was in eighth grade; thank God I didn’t see it in theaters. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t enjoy it, but it was better than The Third Wheel. But so was 9/11. You guys wanna talk star count?
Margaux: Ah, The Third Wheel or, Trevor and I’s personal ‘Nam. I didn’t enjoy this movie either, it’s pacing and payoff were total garbage. But, not the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Nice house, too bad all those people were in it.
Trevor: It’s kinda like Domestic Disturbance – a forgettable but not completely inept thriller from the early ‘00s.
Samir: Not completely inept, that’s such a recommendation, like this food almost didn’t make me puke, but I kinda did in my mouth a little bit. I’m glad I dismissed this upon the trailer itself until now.
Margaux: Or, this place didn’t give me diarrhea. You could do better but you could also do worse – also, Trevor’s pick up line.
Trevor: Hey, that’s gonna work some day. You guys wanna go with two stars? I mean, Skarsgard and Lane weren’t completely terrible, and there was perhaps the germ of a good movie here, but it just didn’t materialize. It’s more of a missed opportunity than a complete failure.
Samir: I can agree to 2 stars, one for each of Skarsgard’s surprisingly developed pectorals. But this was a dismal failure on all counts otherwise, except for the fun the cinematographer was having with the set, that was nice.
Margaux: Two stars for effort and one and a half for watch-ability. There is no payoff other than our newly formed ska band, Skarsgard’s Surprisingly Developed Pectorals. Book us for your wedding!
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