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Hard Candy, a review by Emma

Hard Candy
Running Time: 100 minutes
Director: David Slade
Stars: Patrick Wilson, Ellen Page

Trailer:

Hard Candy tells the story of 14-year-old Hayley (Ellen Page) and the older man named Jeff (Patrick Wilson) she meets in an internet chat room, after talking online the two agree to meet in a coffee shop, after this they agree to go back to Jeff's home and photography studio. At Jeff's home a confident Hayley tells jeff she will only drink a drink she poured herself and goes into the kitchen to make them both "screwdrivers" a cocktail mixed with orange Juice and Vodka. But Hayley's warning of "never drinking a drink you did not pour yourself" is about to get a lot more important.

Hard Candy has some amazing camera angles and shots, the cinematic look and almost constant blur of the background make the two main characters prominent in almost every shot. There are a lot of close up shots that help the raw emotion in some scenes come out these extreme close up draw the audience in and help the characters seem more believable in a situation which seem far from it, Although its said that the initial story idea came from producer David Higgins who had read stories from japan about school girls who took revenge on the men that had groomed them via the internet.

What is strange about the characters in the film is both Hayley and jeff  are as guilty as each other, at the end of the film we are no closer to discovering who either character really is or what their real connection to any of the major plot points is. both actors give amazing performances as their individual characters something that those extreme close up benefit from greatly.

Interestingly throughout the entire film there is just 9 minutes of music, whats interesting about this is the backing track of the film is generally made up of ambient noise for example breathing sounds, whats more interesting is that the director (David Slade) was originally a music video director. There are just two songs in the film overall.

I really enjoyed Hard Candy, it had me on the edge of my seat, there is a lot of suspense in this relatively short film although i personally felt it could have been shorter, maybe this is because I hate waiting, there is a very long surgery scene" which I admit I thought was too long. For a film with just two characters I can't believe there is just that one point that seemed tedious. overall this film is a great psychological thriller, one id recommend and definitely a great first feature for Slade.



(From Emma's New Film Reviews! on April 15th, 2011)

Jeepers Creepers 2, a review by snowcat

(From Emma's Film Reviews (snowcat) on October 30th, 2009)

Tom's Random Star Trek Reviews, a review by Tom

VOY 3.21 Before and After
Writer: Kenneth Biller (Writer)
Director: Allan Kroeker
Cast: Kate Mulgrew (Captain Kathryn Janeway), Robert Beltran (Commander Chakotay), Roxann Dawson (Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres), Jennifer Lien (Kes), Robert Duncan McNeill (Lieutenant Tom Paris), Ethan Phillips (Neelix), Robert Picardo (The Doctor), Tim Russ (Lieutenant Tuvok), Garrett Wang (Ensign Harry Kim), Jessica Collins (Linnis Paris), Michael L. Maguire (Benaren), Christopher Aguilar (Andrew Kim), Janna Michaels (Young Kes), Rachael Harris (Martis)

Kes is travelling backwards in time from the time of her death to the present. This leads us to see a possible future for the Voyager crew (which will be an alternate future because Kes retained her memories and the timeline will certainly change because of this). So we got to see the Year of Hell, some of the crew dying, Kes' child and and grandchild.
One thing always bothered me about this episode. The producers chose a very bad point to change Kes' hairstyle. I remember the first time I have watched this episode, I thought not much about the longer hairstyle of Kes in the scenes set in the future. I thought that she will let her hair grow in the future. So when she was back at the present time, I thought that she still had one jump back in time left, because she still had the longer hair. As it turned out, they have changed her regular hairstyle between the previous episode and this one. Really bad choice as it just confuses the time-traveling even more. It would have been better, if they changed her present hairstyle after this episode. Then they could have used as a reason for the change, that Kes saw it in the future, liked it and decided to make this change.

P/T moment:
In this possible future, Tom and B'Elanna were a couple until B'Elanna died in the first Krenin attack.

Rating:

(From Tom's Random Star Trek Reviews on September 27th, 2009)