oldwilli

Based upon the 2007 comments about suspense between episodes, when the series replayed in 2008 I recorded all six episodes so the missus and I could watch it all in one Sunday afternoon sitting. This felt very much like an afternoon soap opera with a murder twist that stole some bad plot lines from '24'.

First of all there were just too much bad history with Mike in this town for him to have moved back there - any sane human would have found a job where there was less history. Then there was so much bad blood between Ray and Mike. In a small town where you have a history, wouldn't you check out the neighbors before you buy a new house - even if it is a bargain? Then comes the '24' factor. HERE BE SPOILERS! We stopped watching 24 because there were just too many scenes where a danger/effect could have been averted if the character just did as they were told. ("Wait for me here and don't move", "Stay in the car", "Call me right away if he/she ..." and so on.) Same thing here - Mike tells his wife to avoid Ray because he's a crime suspect. What does Audrey do? She invites Ray into the house and let's him wander, she accepts a gift of lingerie from Ray, she asks Ray to do a home chore that Mike said he would do even though he's too busy to get to it right away. And Mike is not without fault - if had admitted up front to knowing Nathalie and why he could have avoided suspicion and subsequent problems later. SPOILERS OFF

The too many loose ends that created the tension in the first couple of episodes became tedious in the remaining episodes. If this had been more than six episodes we likely would have given up and skipped to the ending which was far too quick and left too many issues unresolved.

After that rant, why did I rate it a 7? Most of the technical aspects were excellent. The filming, the pacing, the music and the acting was great - especially by Laurence Laboeuf playing Sadie. We really believed the actress was closer to the 16 years old or so of the character. The sound was generally good but there were a couple of scenes where I was glad the program was recorded as the character's speech was so muffled I had to back it up and turn on closed captioning to catch what was being said.

Overall, it was an OK viewing and if one has four or so hours to watch it ad-free I would say go for it but if it was a full season of 13 to 16 episodes the story needs more life and less "soap opera suspense".

... because my wife and I hated the movie. I've seen almost every Cronenberg movie from Shivers up to A History Of Violence and enjoyed them all on various levels from WOW to "What the heck was that?".

My wife never engaged with any of the characters and after fifteen minutes was asking "What's next?". I stayed with it for an hour before I gave up. The characters seemed wooden and never got into their parts, like my wife I felt no connection to them, the Russian accents were really bad mixed with mumbling in Russian, and the actors felt like they were just "doing the script" with no life or engagement.

I really want to like the movie because of the director but this time I just can't do it - I was so bored I can;t even relate the plot, if there was one.

Apologies if this repeats comments already made but with over 240 comments I don't have a month to read them all.

My wife mentioned to an office co-worker that we were going to rent this movie on the weekend. The co-worker, who was born in Kyoto and spent the first 25 years of her life there, told my wife to wait until we had read the book before seeing the movie then loaned us the book. I'm really glad she did so for we would have found the movie terribly confusing without the background of the book.

As numerous others have commented, it was technically wonderful, but keeping it down to two-and-a-half hours still left out the details to make you appreciate the politics and difficulties that the geisha had to persevere to be the best.

For example, a two-minute scene shows Chiyo wincing in pain as her hair is being made up, falling asleep on an uncomfortable looking "pillow" surrounded by salt then waking up exasperated when she realizes she has let her hair off the pillow and it's full of salt. What it doesn't describe is that the hair-do took hours to create and she will have to endure several hours of having her hair painfully redone again as a result.

In another scene when Dr Crab "wins" Chiyo's virginity via a fixed auction, the movie simple shows Chiyo preparing herself and laying back for her deflowering then jumps to the next scene. In the book (in an amusing/disgusting scene) it is revealed that Dr Crab is a "collector" of sorts and carries a small kit with memoirs of each young lady he has deflowered and explains why he bid so aggressively during the auction.

WW2 created significant difficulty and deprivation for the Gion geisha that covered several chapters in the book - this was reduced to about twelve minutes of boredom in the movie.

When the movie finished my wife's comment was "At least the $5 rental saved us $22 of boredom at the cinema". While interesting, the 2+ hours did an injustice to the book. A 10-hour TV movie miniseries would have allowed the detail that made the book so interesting to be fleshed out properly.

'Twas the night before Christmas and all that was on TV was … dreck. There was the usual complement of the usual Christmas movies that I've seen dozens of times before. We had a few rented DVDs to watch but I needed something to amuse me that didn't require my full attention while I prepared Christmas Eve dinner for the wife and me.

I checked out our cable on-demand station and found more dreck. When I saw "Thrill Of The Kill" starred Shiri Appleby I figured that it might prove interesting and, if nothing else, provide a little eye candy. I haven't noticed Ms Appleby in anything since Roswell where I thought she did a very capable job of portraying Liz. And, here in TOTK, she does an admirable job of playing Kelly Helms whose sister, Allison, was brutally murdered several months ago. The police have no leads and the murder is a cold case.

Kelly reads the titular book written by crime fiction novelist Graydon Jennings (Chris Potter) which describes a murder with striking similarities to that of Allison's. Kelly contacts Jennings and asks for his help in solving Allison's murder. Reading Allison's diary makes it apparent she would crawl into bed with nearly any guy but was actually in love with someone she referred to as "Cicero". With some more sleuthing, the pair determines that Cicero was a US senator. After confronting the senator, the usual sort of bad stuff starts to happen around Kelly.

Plot starting to sound familiar ? It should – this things pulls up almost every stupid heroine cliché. Kelly doesn't call the cops when she should, several times. There is a jealous admirer whom everyone ignores. Who, in their right mind in the 21st century, confronts a politician about an affair and possible murder without wearing some kind of recording device ? I guessed the ending about ten minutes into it. My wife paid attention for about ten minutes in the middle of it and knew the ending. Potter's acting was no great shakes ( I kept expecting Zoe Busiek to pop up) and, apart from the sisters, the characters could have been played by mannequins – I think some of then actually were ! ;-) If you want to turn your brain off for a couple of hours, this is your movie. Otherwise, bypass it widely.

New Year's Day. The day after consuming a few too many vodka martinis and Cosmopolitans mixed with a bunch of bubbly at midnight, my wife and I discovered the local cable company is offering up the digital specialty channels for free for the month of January. We had a choice - do we make use of the freebie channels or do we start watching the eight seasons of X-Files on DVD that we received from our daughter for Christmas?

We elected for the digital freebie since the DVDs are going nowhere and we need something like ten twelve-hour days to watch all the X-Files beginning to end. The Drive-In channel was offering a horror classic three movie marathon: Asylum (1972), House of the Damned (1996) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). Asylum is well-reviewed here and the Pit and the Pendulum was on too late for us to watch which meant we could really only be properly critical for House of the Damned.

To be honest, we tried to be serious about the movie since its stars have reasonably good acting credentials - Greg Evigan (William Shatner's over-written Tekwars) and Alexandra Paul (the only Baywatch babe who could act although she has the body of a ten-year-old boy). Unfortunately, we soon dissolved to giggles, under the influence of a little hair-of-the-dog, as we each shouted out the names of movies from which this dog borrowed its scenes: Poltergeist, The Shining, Hell House, House On Haunted Hill, Ghost Busters!

The acting, especially by Evigan's real-life daughter, wasn't too bad considering the silly script they had to work with. The CGI, for 1996, was hilarious - at its worst point in the final scene when it should have been the most horrific it was so bad my wife and I dissolved in laughter.

Overall: Acting 4/5, Script 2/5, SFX 0/5

I was looking forward to a taut suspenseful two hours but the only taut thing was Katherine Heigl's sweater.

A group of university almost grads decide to build an atomic bomb without a detonator just to prove they can. Of course, there's a little problem of getting enough plutonium to make the bomb viable - enter the bad guys. Most of the group thinks the plutonium was stolen from the stock at the university but of course the school doesn't really have that much and there is a more sinister backer in the wings.

The bad guys ultimately steal the bomb and add not only a detonator but a timer and anti-tamper protection which heroine Katherine has to bypass. The acting by all was credible but the story was just too much for a two-hour TV movie and never really developed a sense of tension.