Well Deserved Praise

This is How Movies Should Be Made

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

This film starts out with a big manson and two policemen going into the home and what they observe inside looks like a butcher shop never cleaned up. The dinning room looks like people forgot their napkins. There is a psychiatrist, Mel Harris,(Laurel O'Connor","Purple Heart",'05 who has to deal with a 16 year old named Sharon,(Cadace Cameron Bure), who acts like a lunatic and is being accused of all kinds of horrible deeds. Laurel encounters all kinds of problems trying to help Sharon, who refuses to talk and acts like a Zombie. There are many suspects and some romance, which is a rather brief scene. This film is good entertainment and great to view in the middle of the week.

The new movies have poor voice sounds. It is hard to keep track of the plot because of whispers, mumbling, and music too loud at the wrong time. The old movies, (AMC), don't have this problem. Every word can be understood. Also commercials can be heard. It seems with our new audio skills this shouldn't be a problem. But it is. There were horrible problems with the script. Dr. Laurel found a book on psychiatry in the home of a sixteen year old. Dah! This implicated Sharon in the murder plot. Why? Sharon ran away from the psychiatric hospital and a few minutes later some one in a van was murdered. Due to the poor voice sounds, I'm not sure who was killed but again, Sharon was implicated. Poor writing!

Mel Harris is Dr Laurel O'Connor, a psychiatrist in Charlotte who is given 16 year old Sharon Hartly (Candace Cameron) to assess. Detective Thomas McGregor (Gregg Henry) believes that Sharon has killed her parents, Richard and Allison, and is faking her condition. As Sharon won't talk, Laurel seeks information elsewhere, which makes Laurel a target for burglary and death threats. However a hospital incident allows for a return to the home where the killings took place, and the killer is revealed.Harris is very still here and this stoicism works for her character, with director Michael Scott probably using her iconic face better than most other directors have. At times she looks very beautiful when listening, enacts a shocked surprise more convincingly than others doing the same thing, and has a tiny smile in response to being told `There's not a damn thing in the world that justifies shooting your parents in cold blood'. She also gets to be physical, climbing out of a burning room, jumping through glass, being slapped, and ending up like a ragged doll with black smudges as she sits on a bench. Laurel comments that what attracts her to Sharon is her sense of aloneness. Laurel is accused of the standard becoming too emotionally involved, or maybe it's the length of her hair which recalls Garbo in retirement circa 1946, but at times Harris pauses and we too can see Laurel's aloneness, that no one else picks up on.The teleplay by Mark Homer uses Laurel talking into tape recorder for a form of narration, but the climax reads as too melodramatic, after a teasing ambiguity surrounding Sharon. We never see either parent which undermines the reason for the killer's act, and McGregor's rationale for wanting Laurel to remove herself from Sharon's case is just as inexplicable. Homer's use of the Hartly lawyer Frank Bodin (Alex McArthur) is also a red herring.Scott's tilted camera and slow motion might be passable as a genre cliche if he didn't also add operatic voices to the music score of Philip Giffin, and even Laurel first talking to Sharon to calm an outburst uses Sharon's echo chamber-ed interpretation of Harris' voice.