Last year, between the two of us, we watched an average of 317 movies.
This year our goal is to top that by watching at least one a day.
And as an extra special torture, we've decided to write about all of them.

15 August 2008

He Was a Quiet Man, dir. Frank A. Cappello (2007)

NIKKI says:
Oh, it started out okay, but then I just didn't care. The premise is great -- a man, Bob, decides he can take no more of his depressing, stifling, degrading work environment and plan to go postal. Only the day he finally goes to do it, someone else does it first. Instead of doing the killing, he ends up doing the saving and becomes somewhat of a hero to his colleagues and doors finally begin to open.

Not only that, but he becomes involved with a woman, an attractive women who's life he saved. She is paralysed and in a wheelchair and Bob takes to looking after her, and developing a relationship with her. But Bob the man who almost shot up his workplace has not been entirely eradicated by this new hero-persona, and so complications continue.

As far as a meditation of who we are and how we're affected by environment and self-delusion, it's fairly good. But it gets bogged down in parts, and I wasn't very compassionate towards Elisha Cuthbert's paralysed co-worker character. I felt that instead of Bob authentically feeling weighed down by his past issues, he was forced to confront them because this new world wasn't so different from the old one. 

I don't know, by the end, I just didn't really care. I'd recommend watching Office Space instead.

2/5

STEVE says:
Yeah, I didn't really "get" this one.

It started off okay, with Slater at his desk, muttering to about his idiot co-workers, while trying to load a gun - talk about grabbing the audience's attention in the first couple of minutes, this movie does it in the first frame. But then it just got all weird.

We were too much inside this guy's head, with the exploding building that didn't really, with the talking fish. Too much with the fantasy life for me. The only part that really worked was when (through the "magic" of CGI) we go inside Bob's head and see him in a wheelchair, and his previously-wheelchair-bound girlfriend dancing around before him, beckoning him to join her. Heavy-handed, sure (she's helping him break his emotional paralysis, get it?), but it was the only bit of fantasy that seemed like it fit. All the rest was like it was from another movie.

2/5