MacBook: Don’t leave home without it

Dealing with a movie addiction may not rank high on any list of supposed emotional illnesses. But I don’t like to undergo the pain of withdrawal. That’s why I brought to Kosovo a dozen DVDs, including some shorts that I hadn’t yet seen. I figured that if my movie jones got too tough to endure, I could just pop a DVD into my MacBook and get my fix.

Which is what I just did. Not feeling at my tiptop, I slept in today. Then, after cruising the Pristina TV stations – it’s cable television so we get stations in Spanish, German, Italian, certainly Albanian and probably other languages that I can’t understand. I even caught the last half of “Cutthroat Island,” the Geena Davis-Matthew Modine pirate movie (directed by Renny Harlin, Davis’ then-husband).

It wasn’t any better than it was the first time I saw it.

So I plugged in the MacBook, pulled out a little neo-noir that I’d missed the 10 minutes it played in Spokane – at least I think it played Spokane – and inserted “Running Scared.”

I can’t believe this movie did more business. It stars Paul Walker as Johnny Gazelle, a low-level hood who, following a bloody shootout, is told by his boss, Tommy (Johnny Messner), to hide a revolver that could be traced back to him. But instead of getting rid of it, Johnny hides the weapon away in his basement, figuring that one day it will be good insurance.

Only thing is, his kid (Alex Neuberger) and the next-door neighbor, Oleg, ( Cameron Bright ) see him stash the distinctive chrome revolver. And the next thing you know, the kid is using it to shoot his abusive, John Wayne-loving Russian stepfather (Karel Roden). Uh-oh.

This starts a big chase. Johnny has to find the kid before anyone else does, especially Tommy, who suspects that Johnny might not have followed instructions. But then the cops, led by a particularly crooked one ( Chazz Palminteri ), join the hunt. As does the Russian mob, which thinks that the kid was put up to shooting his stepfather by Tommy’s crew.

Then there’s the part where Johnny’ wife (Vera Farmiga) gets a call from Oleg who says he has been kidnapped by a couple of weird people … and the less said about that sequence the better.

Written and directed by Wayne Kramer , “Running Scared” is a clever little film that begins with a cleverly shot bloody shootout and ends in a bucolic country setting. To get from one point to the other, Kramer uses every trick you can imagine – from digitally enhanced shots where you follow a bullet in slow motion to mechanically assisted shots where a cameraman is pulled up in the air to shoot a particularly impressive 360 sequence.

But Kramer displays more than just style. There’s a story here that, while hardly in “The Godfather” territory, holds together every bit as well as “Training Day,” which won Denzel Washington his Best Actor Oscar. It’s a throwback to the noirs of the 1940s, melded with a bit of ’70s splash and ’90s renivention of the whole genre.

Pretty-boy Walker is no Denzel Washington, so there’s no chance he’s going to earn an Oscar anytime soon. But grizzled and grim, seldom flashing his famous smile, Walker shows here that he can play more than just the pretty boy as he has in everything from “The Fast and the Furious” to “Into the Blue.”

“Running Straight” is a good Friday-night rental. All watching it lacked, for me, was popcorn. Ketchup-flavored potato chips, one of the vilest food nightmares ever dreamed up but which fill the grocery-store shelves in this part of Europe, just don’t make a decent substitute.