Arlington Road
Rating:  -
This movie grabs you from the beginning and only grips you tighter. by the end i felt out of control. Great movie overall.
Rating:  -
Arlington Road starts off with a small boy running down the street and a man driving along happens to see him and notice he's hurt and bleeding, so the guy in the car quickly takes him to the hospital. They rush him to the emergency room, and he explains to the doctors he's not the boys father, but rather someone who just happened to be driving along and seen the boy. The boy survives, and we find out he's the neighbors kid.
Later we discover (through many unexceptional minutes of film) the neighbors father has a different identity, and the storyline is about the other neighbor going out of his way trying to figure out the guys real name and past life and who he really is. As far as suspense goes, this movie is about as predictable as you'd expect a Hollywood film to be (except for in a few spots). You can figure out how the suspense is going to build, and the pacing is just a bit too predictable for me to rate the movie highly. Just a movie to rent and nothing more.
Rating:  -
This is a movie that I think everyone should watch. We watched it some years ago and several times since. Everytime, it is impactful. I started thinking about this movie recently when reading about more terror propaganda in the UK. I was reminded of an article in the papers that described one of the 7/7 bombers as just a "normal, average guy" who had a regular job and loved soccer, "just like many other young Britons, his neighbors said".
That really hits home when you watch Arlington Road. Everybody should be aware that THEY, too, can be manipulated to "carry the bomb into the building." The references to Ruby Ridge and The OK bombing in the movie reflect the time it was made/released, but it is even more meaningful after 911.
The movie may seem to begin a bit slowly - that was my initial impression - and it was only afterward that I realized that this was a perfect metaphor for how "normal life" can totally mask what is really going on. But don't worry, it soon grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go until the final, horrifying revelations at the end.
Jeff Bridges plays his part very well - a guy so blinded by emotion that he is putty in the hands of cold-blooded manipulators. Bridges (as the hero) thinks he's got a handle on what's going on, but in fact, this is hubris. One could say the same for most "conspiracy theorists." You only know what "they" want you to know or figure out.
Some people think the plot is too complex, too far-fetched, but I think that's not the case. You don't need much imagination to see how such an elaborate set-up could easily be achieved in anyone's life. There are plenty of movies that talk about that aspect of things. The only thing is, they all make it seem like such dramatic, high adventure, that we forget that it is the mundane, the ordinary, the ho-hum existence, that veils truly evil things.
The psychological slamming is all there at the end and that's exactly it; how it MUST be in real life. Life is so "ordinary, so boring, so tedious, so commonplace, that it lulls us into complacency. And that is undoubtedly what the filmmaker was trying to convey... that sense of ordinariness, mundane life that covers another reality of conspiracy and evil-doing.
For example, only AFTER the end of the movie do you realize that the bleeding kid at the beginning was all part of the set-up, that the terrorist/parents actually used their own child as bait, and even caused a severe injury to the child in order to make that bait more compelling. Was the kid brain-washed or terrorized? Probably. What kind of monsters would do that to a child?
And that makes the final scene even more chilling, where the terrorists stand there in front of the house for sale and wear their "mask of sanity," saying the world is getting too scary...
Yes, the good guys die and the bad guys continue on... but then, isn't that reality?
Rating: -
This is a movie that I think everyone should watch. We watched it some years ago and several times since. Everytime, it is impactful. I started thinking about this movie recently when reading about more terror propaganda in the UK. I was reminded of an article in the papers that described one of the 7/7 bombers as just a "normal, average guy" who had a regular job and loved soccer, "just like many other young Britons, his neighbors said".
That really hits home when you watch Arlington Road. Everybody should be aware that THEY, too, can be manipulated to "carry the bomb into the building." The references to Ruby Ridge and The OK bombing in the movie reflect the time it was made/released, but it is even more meaningful after 911.
The movie may seem to begin a bit slowly - that was my initial impression - and it was only afterward that I realized that this was a perfect metaphor for how "normal life" can totally mask what is really going on. But don't worry, it soon grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go until the final, horrifying revelations at the end.
Jeff Bridges plays his part very well - a guy so blinded by emotion that he is putty in the hands of cold-blooded manipulators. Bridges (as the hero) thinks he's got a handle on what's going on, but in fact, this is hubris. One could say the same for most "conspiracy theorists." You only know what "they" want you to know or figure out.
Some people think the plot is too complex, too far-fetched, but I think that's not the case. You don't need much imagination to see how such an elaborate set-up could easily be achieved in anyone's life. There are plenty of movies that talk about that aspect of things. The only thing is, they all make it seem like such dramatic, high adventure, that we forget that it is the mundane, the ordinary, the ho-hum existence, that veils truly evil things.
The psychological slamming is all there at the end and that's exactly it; how it MUST be in real life. Life is so "ordinary, so boring, so tedious, so commonplace, that it lulls us into complacency. And that is undoubtedly what the filmmaker was trying to convey... that sense of ordinariness, mundane life that covers another reality of conspiracy and evil-doing.
For example, only AFTER the end of the movie do you realize that the bleeding kid at the beginning was all part of the set-up, that the terrorist/parents actually used their own child as bait, and even caused a severe injury to the child in order to make that bait more compelling. Was the kid brain-washed or terrorized? Probably. What kind of monsters would do that to a child?
And that makes the final scene even more chilling, where the terrorists stand there in front of the house for sale and wear their "mask of sanity," saying the world is getting too scary...
Yes, the good guys die and the bad guys continue on... but then, isn't that reality?
Rating: -
This is a movie that I think everyone should watch. We watched it some years ago and several times since. Everytime, it is impactful. I started thinking about this movie recently when reading about more terror propaganda in the UK. I was reminded of an article in the papers that described one of the 7/7 bombers as just a "normal, average guy" who had a regular job and loved soccer, "just like many other young Britons, his neighbors said".
That really hits home when you watch Arlington Road. Everybody should be aware that THEY, too, can be manipulated to "carry the bomb into the building." The references to Ruby Ridge and The OK bombing in the movie reflect the time it was made/released, but it is even more meaningful after 911.
The movie may seem to begin a bit slowly - that was my initial impression - and it was only afterward that I realized that this was a perfect metaphor for how "normal life" can totally mask what is really going on. But don't worry, it soon grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go until the final, horrifying revelations at the end.
Jeff Bridges plays his part very well - a guy so blinded by emotion that he is putty in the hands of cold-blooded manipulators. Bridges (as the hero) thinks he's got a handle on what's going on, but in fact, this is hubris. One could say the same for most "conspiracy theorists." You only know what "they" want you to know or figure out.
Some people think the plot is too complex, too far-fetched, but I think that's not the case. You don't need much imagination to see how such an elaborate set-up could easily be achieved in anyone's life. There are plenty of movies that talk about that aspect of things. The only thing is, they all make it seem like such dramatic, high adventure, that we forget that it is the mundane, the ordinary, the ho-hum existence, that veils truly evil things.
The psychological slamming is all there at the end and that's exactly it; how it MUST be in real life. Life is so "ordinary, so boring, so tedious, so commonplace, that it lulls us into complacency. And that is undoubtedly what the filmmaker was trying to convey... that sense of ordinariness, mundane life that covers another reality of conspiracy and evil-doing.
For example, only AFTER the end of the movie do you realize that the bleeding kid at the beginning was all part of the set-up, that the terrorist/parents actually used their own child as bait, and even caused a severe injury to the child in order to make that bait more compelling. Was the kid brain-washed or terrorized? Probably. What kind of monsters would do that to a child?
And that makes the final scene even more chilling, where the terrorists stand there in front of the house for sale and wear their "mask of sanity," saying the world is getting too scary...
Yes, the good guys die and the bad guys continue on... but then, isn't that reality?
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