The Age of Commercialism

Absolutely brilliant

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Two hours I will never get back. Why do I do this to myself? Always waiting for it to get better. I need ambian.Do I really have to write 10 lines of text to explain how bad this movie was? I'ts not so much the perverse nature of the film, or the bad acting, or the lame plot. I hate it when a movie doesn't give you any finality. I also don't know what it is that everyone like about Ellie Christianson either. I understand that she is very pretty to look at, but that doesn't sustain you through this movie or any of the others I have seen her in. She is too flat and I lose interest in her quickly. The other reviews that praise her have to be men. I can't imagine anyone would truthfully believe she is a good actress.Also the editing left much to the imagination. Very choppy. I could not find one performance that made this movie worth watching.

I get more and more respect for Julia Stiles, the more movies I see with her. Initially, I considered her rather boring and not even particularly pretty, but now that I've seen a wide selection of her choice of roles, I find her growing on me in a big way! She's been in Shakespeare movies and she's generally not afraid to tackle difficult, uncommercial and controversial material. Save The Last Dance was a great experience for me; I could watch it over and over. So of course I also had to get Wicked. In fact, after looking for it for a long time, I was finally able to buy it as a second-hand DVD from a friend.The movie was something quite different than I expected. I thought it was going to have supernatural elements, but it didn't. Instead it was a fairly low-key drama about how social and especially familial misery is perpetuated. How people continue down bad roads because they mimic what they see their role models (usually older family members) do.The general structure of the movie is that of a murder mystery, and a quite effective one. Ellie's mother is killed, and seemingly everyone in the family and communal vicinity are unstable enough to be suspects. Was it the baby-sitter, the father or the neighbor? Or was it Ellie herself, whose relationship with her mother was particularly bad, even hateful? There seems, from the user comments here, to be differing opinions about who the murderer was, because the end of the movie is not very specific about the first murder. Was it Ellie or her younger sister? In my opinion, it makes by far the most sense if it was Ellie. The younger sister ended up killing Ellie, of course, but there is no logic to her being the first murderer. Instead there is plenty of logic to Ellie being the first murderer, because her younger sister was just mimicking Ellie. In fact, I'm sure this is the case, because of the strangle-hold episode, where Ellie nearly strangles her sister - this would have "inspired" her sister to conclude that this was the proper sort of way to deal with a problematic situation. (Indeed, the first murder *cannot* have been committed by the younger sister, due to her reaction to her discovery of the suitcase containing the murder weapon.)So, the movie was about "monkey see, monkey do", or, as Shakespeare put it, "the evil that men do lives after them". We first have Ellie trying to replace her mother as the woman of the house, incl. all marital duties, and when she partially achieves this, her sister subsequently replaces Ellie's earlier role in the house, starting also to carry out the tasks that she saw Ellie do. Essentially, the youngest sister is trying to replace Ellie, just as Ellie tried to replace their mother, and using most of the same methods to achieve it - even murder.Yes, it is an updated version of the Electra story, and it is also a statement about the dangers of isolation. Taking place in a gated community that is meant to shut out the evils of the world, we see that those evils continue in our midst, because with the gated community we have done nothing but *pretend* that those evils were not part of us - in other words, we have glossed over some symptoms but not dealt with the causes.Even beyond this, there are many interesting non-literal elements to think about in this movie. For instance, the opening, with the blond girl that we think is Ellie driving around (intercut with scenes of Ellie packing), but is really Lena, must be meant to indicate that Ellie's father likes women with that look. So maybe he had a subconscious reverse-Oedipal complex towards his daughter, too. In general, the father was an unassertive and weak-minded man that one couldn't feel much sympathy for.Anyway, the movie is well-acted and quite absorbing on most levels. The one thing that keeps it from a higher rating is that it simply isn't believable that the 11 or 12-year-old young sister is capable of the brutal murder of her older sister - maybe she had the will to do it, but it's highly doubtful that she had the physical strength. However, because of the symbolism and nice structure to the movie, I can accept the ending - but only just.I'm looking forward to a second viewing, where I may notice more details.My rating: A very solid 7 out of 10.

Schlock has its place, but schlock with highbrow pretensions like this mess of a film is just laughable. It's too overblown and ludicrous to even be truly offensive, nonwithstanding the scenes of the fourteen year old Ellie's post-coital spooning with her daddy. The twist ending will be no surprise to anyone who has ever seen a few episodes of "Law and Order." I'll give it two points for some unintentional humour, as when Ms Stiles hisses at her father about the telltale birthmark on his left "butt cheek" (making him whimper like a spanked puppy), but otherwise this film is nothing more than a waste of two talented young actresses.

I loved Julia Stiles in "10 Things I Hate About You" and picked up this movie at the video store because she was in it. I found the characters in this film well developed and convincing...a little bit overly so. The subject matter and plot were very disturbing, yet engrossing...like watching a car accident.I found the film very well directed with good cinematography, well acted and hats off to Julia Stiles for pulling in a very convincing performance of a very disturbed teenage girl and the equally disturbed dysfunctional people in her life. The film was very engrossing, but just as equally unsettling. I would prefer to see all of the individuals involved in this project in something a little more uplifting before I could honestly recommend someone seeing this film to show how far they have progressed beyond this madness.