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Reviews
An American Haunting (2005)
Spoilers (like it matters)
Rainy night, nothing much to do. I just rented and watched An American Haunting. Well, I wouldn't say watched, but I had it on while I did other stuff. It was just embarrassingly bad, almost as bad as Lady in the Waterbrash, loud, overproduced, clueless actors, pointless, gratuitous, cliché, cheap scares, amateurish and overused point-ofview shots, unintentional slapstick, etc. There were such well-known scenes as Sleepless Teenage Girl Eavesdropping on Her Parents' Very Serious-Sounding and Grown-Up Argument. A complete waste of time, and it took itself far too seriously, and fell flat on its face. No entertainment value whatsoever (for anyone with a brain). Spoilers: The girl, Rachel Hurd-Wood, is secretly being raped by her father, and the "ghost" (the girl's own spirit, apparently) is violently taking out its frustrations on both she (the girl herself) and her father. Whatever.
The Night Listener (2006)
Give it a shot.
This Night Listener is better than people are generally saying. It has weaknesses, and it seems to be having a genre identity crisis, no doubt, but I think its creepy atmosphere and intriguing performances make up for this. The whole thing feels like one of those fireside "this happened to a friend of a friend of mine" ghost stories. One big complaint about the movie is the pacing: but the slow and sometimes awkward pacing is deliberate. Everything that unfolds in this movie is kept well within the realm of possibility, and real life just sort of plods alongno? So there are no flashy endings or earth-shattering revelations, no "showdown" scenes. Thank Heaven. You have to get into the zone when watching this movie, forget your reservations and your expectations of what makes a (conventionally)good movie. Williams isn't terrific, but he easily meets the needs of the story, plus his character is supposed to be somewhat generic ("No One") as he is the Everyman, the avatar by which we ourselves enter the story. Toni Collette's performance should be nominated for an Oscar (even if she maybe shouldn't win it). Give it a shot. For quality and content alone, The Night Listener is surely in the top twenty percent of movies coming out these days.