Not A Review: "Shutter Island"

I'm not a huge horror movie person, admittedly, but I've been interested in seeing this one since I saw a short trailer for it last month. I'll freely admit that the idea of Martin Scorsese tackling a psychological thriller/haunted asylum story is intriguing, and I'm a sucker for period pieces, so sign me up, I'll give it a whirl. Then today when I was perusing my usual blogs on my lunch break, I happened across a piece of trivia I wasn't aware of: the screenwriter for it is a woman, Laeta Kalogridis. Okay, vaguely interesting, but I've never heard of her so I have no opinion one way or the other, really. Except that I am familiar with some of her work without even realizing it. It turns out that she worked with James Cameron for something like eight years on the script for Avatar, only she doesn't have a credit for it in the movie. Okay, I still haven't seen it, but from everything I've heard, even from people who liked it, that the script itself is no great shakes, it's the visuals and experience that make the movie worth watching. So hmm, not sure how I feel about that, but it's just one movie, and I don't know how much she had to do with the end result, right?

Turns out she also wrote Oliver Stone's epic, Alexander, too. I didn't see all of it, but I did catch part of it on TV when I visited Greece a few years back and despite it being the only thing on in English, I kept changing the channel because watching talk shows in Greek was more entertaining. But hey, maybe I didn't give it a fair shot, and it's not like the script is the be-all end-all of the end result of a movie, right?

So she also executively produced the TV shows Birds of Prey and the reboot of The Bionic Woman. I didn't watch the second, but I have yet to come across someone who did and liked it, and I tried so hard to like Birds of Prey when it was on, I really did. It just... wasn't good. Not even so bad it was entertaining, it was poorly handled on just about every level save for a few of the casting decisions. But hey, maybe she's a better writer than a producer.

She also worked on the Tomb Raider movie and Scream 3 in some unspecified capacity. Now, I will admit that I do own a copy of the Tomb Raider movie, but I also freely admit it's not a good movie. It's one of those guilty pleasure movies that everyone has where you love it against all better judgment and you're not able to explain why. Scream 3 I saw and I remember being bitterly disappointed in nearly all the way through.

According to IMDB, she also wrote the screenplay for Night Watch (the Russian movie, not the Ewan McGregor, Nick Nolte movie from a while back), and Pathfinder (based on a Norwegian movie, this one is about a Viking boy left behind after his clan fights with a Native American tribe and later on becomes their savior in fending off more Vikings-- sounds vaguely familiar...), neither of which I've seen so I can't say anything about them. They might be good, I have no clue, but I have to say, so far I'm not impressed with her resume. I'm still going to see Shutter Island and hope it's better than the other movies she's written have been on average, but still, yikes.