Perfectly adorable

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

This film came up on my IMDb recommendations and i decided to check it out not expecting much. Wow, was I surprised. The film begins with the pace and feel of an afternoon TV movie, albeit one a bit more dark in tone and mysterious. Ben is a hotel manager and widower, his wife died in a car accident years ago and he is bringing up their daughter as a single dad. His wife's father blames him for his daughter's death, for running away from the wreck. That's a pretty deep jumping off point and from there some mysterious visitors arrive at Ben's hotel and turn his world upside down. I don't like to spoil plots of films too much but from there on in, the film becomes intriguing and gripping right until the end. The cinematography actually really stood out at times too - particularly the scenes after the meteorite hits and the way the story was put together especially the ending is a great example of using cinema as an art form, with minimal exposition and a beautiful, incongruous ending. Highly recommended.

I saw this soon after its original release and would love to see it come out on DVD for Region 2.It is a low-budget gem: well written, very well acted, with an interesting and surprising storyline. The film moves steadily without breaking into much of a sweat until the rapid build up to the revelation to the 'reason'.It is strangely engaging. I had something else to complete urgently but the 90 mins. seemed much more important.I'd love to see it again. If you get the chance, then do so as you'll enjoy it.A gem.

One of the joys I find in film, is the ability to see a movie the way I want instead of the way the market prefers. Because the market likes to sell discrete things, it sustains a metanarrative that you buy one experience at a time and they manage the interstitial connections among those experiences. It is why the celebrity machine is so well managed, as a controlled connection among discrete films.But I like to create my own experience, my own connectives. Among the benefits is the possibility of encountering a dreadful movie like this and seeing it with real relish. Yes, I know there is the "camp" game, and the related nostalgia amusements. But that depends on living in regrets. You can do better.I've been studying baseball, and where its appeal might be. It is a profoundly boring game. It has teams but that is only to organize what is a solitary competition. Each player is not there primarily to win the game, but to beat history. The competitive unit is a career, not a game. The narrative one finds in baseball is not in the packaged, sold unit, but in the connectives that fans can make. These can be as rich as the skill of the viewer over his experience in the game allows.It was a real insight, this, that baseball is a sport that allows creative, freeflowing personal narrative to be constructed — even passed down from father to son — outside the bounds of the marketplace. Its all about statistical connectives. A life in constructed narrative in film doesn't have the advantages that statistics provides for baseball. But it has something as good: overlap in genre and players.This film is a great setup for such an adventure. The plot has to do with observers from the future who can travel from (what amounts to) film to film, watching the explosive narrative unfold. They are not allowed to get involved because that would "change history." We, of course do the same thing, jumping from one time to another, one tragedy to another. In one of these times/films is a hapless Jeff Daniels, who lives in his own drama, carrying his own observer to his pain in the usual device of an alert, knowing daughter. She's the girl from "Jurassic Park" if you would rather play that game than mine. I'm off into genreland skipping from "Plan 9" through Riddick, Fugitive and Waterworld — a sort of tourism that follows Twohy as he visits one resort after another.Our new time traveller, Daniels, is known to me as the guy who jumped from here with his magical passport to "Pleasantville" and then back to "Dumb and Dumber." Once you find this portal among movies, you are free from the expectations of the market and can grow your own life in film.Its a "Purple Rose of Cairo" kind of thing.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

Jeff Daniels does a good job considering the script and the storyline moves along nicely. It's fairly predictable at times, but I still enjoyed it. The special effects are not overly cheesy, which puts it on par with the rest of the movie. The scenes with the time tourists were pretty tiresome.********SPOILERS********The end of the movie was contrived. He naturally goes back and saves his wife also, after saving his daughter and half of the town. What the hell? This guy now has a free pass to change anything he wants for the rest of his life? Why didn't that guy from the future confiscate his passport?Rating: 6.0