Best movie of this year hands down!

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

This one didn't seem like it was going to be very good right from the start; and it wasn't. I found the script to be terrible, and the acting to be even worse."Jo" is in the witness protection program, and like most people in movies about the witness protection program, they never do what they are told. Jo seems intent on doing all the things she used to do in New York in her new home of Montana. She's rude to her foster mother on purpose, and just acts like a complete jerk most of the time. She doesn't seem all that upset about her parents being dead and just has a bad attitude.The bad girls in the movie are a complete joke. The acting is pathetic.I actually rooted for Jo to be found and killed somewhere along the way. If she doesn't care, why should I? There was an annoying scene where Jo draws a detailed sketch of the hit man who is following her. She draws this sketch in less than 30 seconds, when it would take any normal human 30 minutes.There's another annoying scene where Jo spots the hit man in the school's parking lot, but for some dumb reason decides to borrow a friend's truck and heads out to the parking lot alone, she knew the man was waiting for her! The end doesn't make any sense. Jo gets to stay in Montana in the witness protection program. The bad guys who killed the parents are still looking for her. What made no sense was that these bad guys sent the hit man, who found her in Montana. The hit man was no longer a threat, but do you mean to tell me that the hit man didn't tell his boss where Jo was hiding? How is it that he was planning to get the money he was owed for capturing her? It made no sense that the guy in charge of Jo would just assume that the hit man never shared her location. Why would he assume that? No clue.There was one review on here for this movie that really caught my attention. First off, Jo's foster mother was not an "old lady," she was in her 40's, it was made to sound like she was 69 or something. I thought "The old bats" granddaughter, was her daughter, but I could be wrong.

How do I hate ye? Let me count the ways:1. The girlie here is in a witness protection program because she saw her parents shot, and can bring down a crime family in court. She is told not to contact her sole surviving relative, not to speak any Spanish, not to take up any art... basically, sever any contact to her old life at all. Within 30 minutes, she will break ALL these rules.2. You'd think with their entire business hinging on this little madam, the bad guys would send more than one hit-man to finish her off. But that's what they do. And simply by showering an office worker with praise, he's able to discover virtually everything about her. I don't think its quite so easy in real life...3. In her 'new life' she finds herself staying with one of those annoying old ladies who tries to be 'hip', and instead coming across like a patronising boor who won't shut up. Unfortunately, the screenwriter mistakenly think this senile old crank is 'charming', so we get lots of scenes of her dishing out homely advice, telling us what's hot and what's not... AARGH!! SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!! GOD SAVE ME FROM OLD PEOPLE TRYING TO BE 'COOL' AND 'RELEVANT'!! WHY CAN'T PENSIONERS IN MOVIES ACT LIKE THEIR REAL LIFE COUNTERPARTS, AND GLOWER AT KIDS BEHIND HALF CLOSED CURTAINS, BEFORE RETIRING TO BED WITH A COCKTAIL OF PILLS?! GET A CLUE, MOVIE PRODUCERS!! 4. This old bat's granddaughter is a piece of work too... All throughout the film dressing in dowdy clothes and wearing thick-rimmed specs like a junior Ugly Betty. She tells us she doesn't want to be part of the 'in crowd' hence her choice of attire, little knowing of course that by walking around like that, she's just as much of a stereotype as the jocks and the queen bitches. Speaking of them...5. The 'Mean Girls' are introduced with as loud, and unsubtle a piece of music as you're ever likely to hear, as they bump into our heroine, before giving her funny looks which make you think "UH OH, THEY'RE GOING TO BE TROUBLE!!" They've got navel-revealing tops on, and it's one bimbo flanked by two dim-witted lackeys. STOP ME IF YOU'VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE. The bimbo makes a bad joke, her underlings laugh. They pout. They boast. They preen. None of this is done satirically, its all supposed to be their genuine personalities. How insulting to the audience's intelligence.6. But you ain't seen nothing yet. From the first gaze at her in the classroom, we just KNOW who the love interest is gonna be. Yep, it's another one of those Pretty Boy Douchebags I love to hate, with his perfect teeth and tousled haircut. He's the captain of the (American) football team, is completely full of himself, won't stop asking her out and has no character definition at all other than to be as obnoxious as possible. Why do directors think idiots like this are charming? But OF COURSE she's gonna fall for him, and believe it or not their imbecilic romantic chatter together is the WORST aspect of an already TERRIBLE experience.7. There's another love prospect on the horizon, in the form of a raven haired dreamer she meets at an art class (Which, in enrolling in she's completely gone against the instructions of her protection officer... but NEVER MIND.) He's seen as someone who can glance beyond her aesthetic qualities... and marvel at her artistic soul. Ah, but this chappie is purely just a RED HERRING. He has no chance against the Pretty Boy Douchebag who's got abs the size of Jupiter, so he might as well retire to his easel and cry into his palette.8. Did I mention how AWFUL the songs are?! Oh, I must. They're intermingled into nearly every scene, softly-sung guitar strumming crap of the worst kind... filled with pretentious lyrics about love being like an acorn that has to grow, birds with broken wings learning to fly again... DO. ME. A FRICKIN'. FAVOUR. In a leaf taken from the plot, I think I'll hire someone to track down the people responsible for raping my ears. before killing them in a variety of painful ways. No joke.9. Sorry, I thought this was supposed to be a thriller? Well, guess what... 90% of the length is taken up by kissy-kissy interludes about who our main girl will pick and days out at all-you-can-eat buffets and stargazing, while people we don't care about have lots of mind-numbing conversations about nothing in particular and those AWFUL dirges drone away in the background and OH MY GOD I CAN'T TAKE MUCH OF THIS ("Settle down, we're nearly done... Remember you must WARN THE PEOPLE"...My Inner Self)10. So, you've probably forgotten about the dude hired by the baddies to KILL KILL KILL this chick. He finally gets her 10 minutes from the end, but ties her to a chair in a nearby hut instead of killing her outright. He starts boasting about his EEVVIILL plan, while she spots a nearby pen. I'm not going to lie... even someone already used to the idiocity of this abysmal piece of trash was completely thrown by how she escapes a TRAINED ASSASSIN with the help of said Biro. It does provide an epic ending to the dismal experience.I don't normally like waffling on for so long, but once in a blue moon a 'thing' comes along, which embodies EVERYTHING you HATE in a film in SO many different ways, you feel like shouting it from the rooftops. Anyway, I'm done now, so off I go for some therapy and a Double Decker. See ya on the flip side... 1/10

...but having received such short shrift here on the IMDb, it deserves at least one more comment/review. With "made for TV" stamped all over it, it's little surprise that "Hiding" went straight to video; it contains absolutely nothing that demands a big-screen presentation. "Hiding" is make-work all the way, presumably to showcase newcomer Ana "Los Americans" Villafañe (although how she's merits an "introducing" is beyond me, given her resume) and give a lot of 2d-tier people something to do. I'll give props to DP Danny "Blood Ties" Nowak for decent camera-wrangling and lighting, and to rising star Jeremy "Peter Pan" Sumpter for putting the integrity of his resume at risk.The primary failure of "Hiding," of course, is the utterly unsurprising by-the-numbers script that offers up some occasionally witty teen banter and little else. The characters, though not as stereotypical as one might fear, are mostly shallow and under- developed, and the plot is banal and full of holes. Does the witness protection program really leave its charges utterly marooned and isolated and sticking out like a sore thumb with blatantly faked records that even high-schoolers can ferret out? Does a subject like Jo actually take a Spanish class when she's already fluent and been instructed not to reveal it? And do trusted authority figures really reveal key private information to smarmy strangers?No matter. If one of the principals in the cast flips your switches, I suppose you could do much worse than this inadequate teen thriller, but you'd likely have to be fairly easy to please. Anyone looking for quality film entertainment should give this one a pass; they won't miss a thing.

One of my favorite actors, Jeremy Sumpter, leads a mostly unknown cast in the new direct-to-video drama, Hiding. I liked the concept behind this movie, but I don't like the part of the story they chose to focus on. The writers spent too much time on the present, without telling us enough about the past. While we have an idea of what happened, watching the beginning of this film is like arriving at the theater fifteen minutes late and having to play catch up the whole time. Joe (Ana Villafane) witnessed a murder in her home town of New York City. Being that she is the key witness against a major crime family, she is put into the witness protection program, given a cover story, and put into a new life in the middle of nowhere. The film begins with Joe being dropped at her new home, with a very vague description of what happened, what's expected of her, and how long she'll be there. From there the film kind of turns into a CW teen drama, which wasn't very appealing, however the filmmakers used flashbacks and side angles, to stop it from turning into Dawson's Creek. Sumpter plays one of two guys interested in Joe, as always he was dynamic, but here he was also funny and charming, a clear opposite of the other love interest, who just seemed to drone on and on. As for the lead, in her debut role, Ana Villafane was nothing short of terrific. This is not the kind of movie I go for and the focus was not on the part of the script that interests me, but the combination of Villafane and Sumpter, along with flashbacks and side stories did keep the film going. My description probably sounds quite dull, but Hiding keeps on moving and keeps your attention by using some pretty unconventional methods. It's not the best movie I've ever seen, but it was most definitely entertaining.