A Brilliant Conflict

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

This is a garbage adaptation of an excellent book. In fact, I thought about throwing the book at my TV set as I watched it. Instead, I chose to vent my frustration in a review. Casting Pierce Brosnan as Mike Noonan was a big mistake. I felt no connection between him and the character in the book. His acting seemed forced and disingenuous. Sara laughs looks like a building built inside a studio surrounded by artificial foliage and set lighting. That pretty much sums the whole thing up, a big fake. Sara isn't laughing in this movie. Instead, she is crying at this dismal rendering of a good book. Whoever put this crap together should apologize to Mr.King and promise never to do it again.

Traveling to a lake-front mansion to get over his wife's death, a distraught writer finds that her ghost is using him to help a local woman battle an evil land-owner who's evil secret goes back to the town's infamous haunting involving numerous disappearances to cover up the original tragedy.Taking the new miniseries as a whole, this one definitely feels just like every other Stephen King story: an isolated Maine town, elders having a deadly secret who the locals are afraid of, lots of melodrama instead of horror with only brief forays into the style to trick us into thinking that's what it really is, and far too many scenes outside the style that just eats up so much time that this could very easily be paired down by well over an hour without taking away anything of any importance in the storyline. The scares are pedestrian and seem to consist of the same thing, a wrinkly ghost-like woman appearing out of nowhere, which gets old very quickly and really hampers this one overall. It's still typical King so it's just mediocre and not unwatchable.Rated Unrated/PG-13: Violence, Language and children-in-jeopardy.

This review may contain spoilers.Pierce Brosnan is not an actor that I've paid close attention to in the past. I've seen bits of some of his 007 movies, and it was amusing to see him singing in Mamma Mia! So, his performance here as bestselling author Mike Noonan came as a pleasant surprise.Noonan plays a writer whose wife, played by Annabeth Gish, is killed at the beginning of the story. Noonan experiences a severe case of writer's block and calls on his wife's spirit to help him. Brosnan does a good job of portraying the grief of a man who suddenly loses the wife who loves passionately. Noonan's antagonist is a wealthy old man, Max Devore, and his wife; their performances are totally over-the-top in the short time that they appear on the screen. The deposition scene in the movie demonstrates that Brosnan's experience as James Bond portraying masculine unflappability have paid off.Brosnan's not quite as convincing portraying fear. However, it's not the essential part of playing Noonan. I have not read this particular King book; however the story is as much about losing the person you love as it is about the horror elements. Bag of Bones reminds us again of King's greatest strength and probably the reason for his phenomenal success. He creates characters that are believable and places them in situations to which the audience can relate.This shared quality connects this fine adaptation with one of the greatest ghost stories ever written: Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca. The very beginning of the movie demonstrates that King was inspired by Du Maurier's classic. I wouldn't call this adaptation terrifying, but it is generally very well done.

I love Stephen King novels, and I love the miniseries productions of his work (particularly SALEM'S LOT and IT). BAG OF BONES is the latest addition to the list, a 2011 production which sees Pierce Brosnan playing a thinly-veiled version of the author himself uncovering ghosts and sinister secrets in a rural town.So far so Stephen King, you might think, and this is very much par for the course when it comes to this type of stuff. Director Mick Garris tries to jazz things up with snappy editing and cross-cutting, but when it comes to the 'horror' it's the same old scare tactics: loud noises, sudden movement, a creepy pair of villains. The usual stuff.The production isn't all bad, and I did find that the three hours zipped past as I watched; I wasn't bored, that's for sure. Brosnan gives one of his dependable everyman type performances (and seems to be wearing that same old blue shirt from DANTE'S PEAK) although Melissa George is slightly wasted in a small role. Really, this is the Brosnan show, with him going all Bruce Campbell as he's haunted in his lakeside cabin.There are a few gory flourishes here and there to keep things moving, and I liked the eventual unravelling of the back story which was highly effective. But for every point BAG OF BONES scores it loses one by doing something silly - such as the excruciatingly twee final scene involving some friendly spirits.