![]() ![]() For Tom, that means a years-old murder in his neighborhood is resurfacing in the form of a ghostly young woman who haunts his dreams and his waking hours. well, pretty much anything that happens to be around. After his sister-in-law (Illeana Douglas) calls his bluff on a dare to hypnotize him, she plants a suggestion in his mind that it will become open to. The calling Tom wants finally does come, but not in the form he expected. None of that quiets this nagging sense within Tom that he wasn't supposed to just be a phone lineman, that something else should have called on him by now. His wife Maggie (Kathryn Ebbe) reminds him at several points throughout the film that he has a great life, with her by his side and their young son Jake (Zachary David Cope) looking up to him. That quality is to put to especially good use by writer/director David Koepp in Stir of Echoes, who calls upon Bacon to play a classic genre arc: The skeptic who becomes a believer.īacon's Tom Witzky is a guy working for the phone company in Chicago, who dreams of being a musician and has long-since started to worry that those dreams have passed him by, that greatness in any form has given up on him. There's Americana etched in his face, thanks in part to breakout films like Footloose, but also to the straightforward, tactile way he performs. Like fellow genre icon Bill Paxton, he's a guy you could almost expect to run into at your local bar or at the next pump at a gas station, and it doesn't ever feel like a put-on affectation. Kevin Bacon, you see, has one of those faces. Now streaming on Peacock, it's a film that makes excellent use of Bacon's talents and his place in the public consciousness as a movie star, and serves as a reminder that, while he's many other things, Bacon was and is a horror icon. Though Bacon's horror career is rather diverse thanks to more than 40 years of working in the genre, Stir of Echoes might be the finest showcase of his work in his long association with scary movies. It's a genre that's given him the opportunity to play heroes, villains, victims, and in the case of Stir of Echoes, an imperfect man caught between known and unknown, simply trying to survive an experience that expands his consciousness to reach places he never imagined. It helped launch his career with Friday the 13th, helped him become a cult star with Tremors, and stays with him still in recent projects like You Should Have Left and They/Them. Horror is a thread that runs through almost all of Kevin Bacon's varied career as a film and TV star. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |