realcreature

I really, honestly believe about 90% of the facts quoted in this movie, however, the reason it grated on my senses was due to the background music. It seemed that no matter what topic was being discussed the music that accompanied the topic was some form of synthesized keyboard repetitive "melody" (not really melodic, just annoying repetition of a few notes) that seemed to have been performed by a bored eight-grader using a home computer.

I believe the visual production quality was at least as high as most modern documentaries so I cannot understand what happened with the music, only that it may have been an afterthought. My advice: if the music becomes an afterthought then make it nonexistent. I would have preferred to listen to my own chewing sounds, some street traffic or quiet computer hum, rather than an electronic da da da da, over and over while some narrator droned on about how bad everything but marijuana is, which is really true, I believe...just not with that "music".

This brings me to the other point of this production: where did you dig up that mock fifties-style narrator? Why parody the thing you hate with the thing you hate? I was so bored listening to those high school documentaries that I nearly always fell asleep in class, and God forbid it would be a warm day - no escaping a classroom snooze. Perhaps some less sanctimony would be appropriate in this type of factual information documentary.

Way too long, but some extremely funny delivery. Some EXCELLENT topical coverage - social reality and somewhat dry, non-juicy romantic quasi-reality. Good job getting a lot of topical variety. This movie could have been edited for speed of topical transitions and because the action is reality-based it would not have hurt the viewing cohesion. When the major, major stars are on (and there are many of them, which I always really enjoy) they really produce exactly the right amount of focus so this director really has hit their stride when it comes to scene delivery using the giant talent.

There was coverage of high school age premarital relations that seemed very sensitive but the dialog was over-mature for the age level (there may be some people that mature at that age, but not likely)...might better have been treated as a fantasy sequence, or a parental fantasy scene (what my daughter should be saying...). There was a token assortment of cultures that were treated a bit superficially, but as a reflection of society this movie does a great job showing how people see each other in general. This movie helps the viewer consider the variety of romantic relationships all around us, but in a very tidy reality.

With a combination of EVERYTHING BAD ABOUT MOVIES, including a combination of bizarre acting styles by the same performers during the same scenes, this huge POC is not worth the time it takes to load into your movie player. It is truly a seemingly never-ending nightmare that I wish would have been over before I watched it. How could anyone take every potentially exciting aspect of film and convert each one into something so BORING? The face shots (900 millisecond film time) of Janeane Garofalo in the final scene was the best part of this POS, but her facial expressions say it all about this disaster ("Hopeless"). If you can, try to imagine yourself a really, really stupid person and suspend all ability to think for the duration of this sludge and you might get through it. The only reason I can think this waste of pixel memory received a rating higher than a "2" is that all the cast and crew were offered tiny shares of total profit and told to go online to vote it up.

This movie was so disappointing as a thriller or a mystery or a romance, but it does make a person think about how easy it is to take life for granted...and how you should never pull a U-Turn on a hill with an obstructed view of oncoming traffic or use a cellphone while driving. Sandra Bullock is an incredibly beautiful person, but her beauty was not utilized and she became the typical, boring, irritating housewife/mother. Script and direction should have enhanced her role, both in the aspect of her stunning good looks and how that should have played a part in helping her husband's business interests as well as showing how she might have been susceptible to excessive vanity in order to enhance the contrast when she spirals downward. Making her husband's torrid romance/close call infidelity more interesting - as though he was really onto something profound - could have added credibility to the advancement of the plot and the eventual moral of the story. This movie should be remade with more attention given to development of relationships and characters' motivations.