Hide and Seek
Saw it this weekend. Interesting movie. Dakota Fanning was excellent, as she was in War of the Worlds. Her performance was what really sold the movie. On the other hand, it's amazing how much a bad performance by a child actor can foul up a movie. Here's a good example. Darkness Falls was a movie with some potential, but the horror that was Lee Cormie's performance took care of that. One more thing about Dakota Fanning: apparently she's in every movie, including Hide and Seek, War of the Worlds, Man on Fire, Sweet Home Alabama, I Am Sam, and Cat in the Hat. And those are only the major movies; there were a couple of others that I hadn't heard of. That's a lot of movies for an eleven-year-old-girl.
Enough about Dakota. Hide and Seek's other "D," Robert DeNiro, was also good in the movie. In fact, if there was one thing I was really surprised with this movie was how well it was made. All the main characters were recognizable actors, including Elisabeth Shue and Famke Janssen in supporting roles, and the direction was nice and crisp and took painstaking care from the very beginning to set an uneasy mood.
I'm not going to provide any spoilers, because this is a "twist" movie. I will say this, though. The first half to three-quarters of the movie was great, so much so that I was amazed this wasn't one of the biggest hits of the year. Then came the twist. My first reaction was disappointment, I think because the build-up had been so fresh feeling that I thought the surprise would be something really unique. It wasn't. Still, it wasn't bad, and now that I have reconciled myself to it, I have to admit that there is a certain intriguing nastiness to the twist if you go back and imagine the situations earlier in the movie now that you know how they must have been.
I strongly recommend this movie. It seems to me that viewers should value movies like this, where the makers of the movie really rolled up their sleeves and tried to make something excellent. In the end, they did not quite succeed in achieving excellence, but in falling short they still created a fine picture.
Enough about Dakota. Hide and Seek's other "D," Robert DeNiro, was also good in the movie. In fact, if there was one thing I was really surprised with this movie was how well it was made. All the main characters were recognizable actors, including Elisabeth Shue and Famke Janssen in supporting roles, and the direction was nice and crisp and took painstaking care from the very beginning to set an uneasy mood.
I'm not going to provide any spoilers, because this is a "twist" movie. I will say this, though. The first half to three-quarters of the movie was great, so much so that I was amazed this wasn't one of the biggest hits of the year. Then came the twist. My first reaction was disappointment, I think because the build-up had been so fresh feeling that I thought the surprise would be something really unique. It wasn't. Still, it wasn't bad, and now that I have reconciled myself to it, I have to admit that there is a certain intriguing nastiness to the twist if you go back and imagine the situations earlier in the movie now that you know how they must have been.
I strongly recommend this movie. It seems to me that viewers should value movies like this, where the makers of the movie really rolled up their sleeves and tried to make something excellent. In the end, they did not quite succeed in achieving excellence, but in falling short they still created a fine picture.
posted by Unknown at 10:18 PM
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