BEFORE: OK, I don't want to jinx this, but I think I've got a skip day in September, in other words, I've got 21 days left in the month to watch just 20 movies. I don't want to use it yet, I want to hang on to the possibility of taking a day off as long as I can, because there are two very late nights coming up at the theater, one next week and another the week after that. So there may come a day when I can't watch a movie because of work, so let's just save that little skip day in my back pocket and it's there if I need it on 9/16 or 9/24. If I need to take both of those nights off, then I'll have to double-up somewhere else. What I really should be doing is taking a look at the October schedule, if we're away for 8 days visiting my parents then I may fall behind again, which I could counter-act now by watching one of those movies in advance. But it may not come to that, let me get through September and then I'll put October movies on the calendar and see where they fall.
Matthew Sunderland carries over from "6 Days". I'm about to spend four very moody (I assume) days with Adrien Brody films.
THE PLOT: A troubled psychologist returns to his hometown to uncover the truth behind his strange visions.
AFTER: Well, shoot, one of the horror movies appears to have gotten loose from the herd and made its way into September. It's OK, sometimes they go a little wild, but they need to get out once in a while and stretch their legs in another month, what happens is they follow the linking, so this film is serving a purpose tonight, it's linking "6 Days" with the three other Adrien Brody films, which I don't think are horror movies. But if I knew this was straight horror, I might have left it be, it connects with "Daybreakers" and maybe one other horror film - but saving it for an October slot that might never open up for it wasn't going to be the best move, either, because this year's horror chain AND next year's are all booked up, so I wouldn't have gotten to this film until 2027, if at all. Maybe I never would have watched it, so really, it's good that it fits in here.
I just wish I'd known there were ghosts in it, that's all I'm saying. Forewarned is forearmed. But really this film rides a VERY fine line concerning ghosts - you can believe what you want to believe. If you think ghosts are real, that's fine, no judgment here, then the film has your back. Ghosts are real and also they're PISSED, it makes sense, because if the dead people were content, if they were OK with being dead and there was nothing unresolved left over from their life, then they'd move on to eternal peace in the Great Beyond. The fact that they have NOT done that, well, we'd better find out why they're so angry, that would be the only way to get rid of them, right?
But maybe you don't believe in ghosts, that's fine, too. I've never seen one for real, have you? I kind of believe that they appear in some of the greatest works of literature, like "Hamlet" and "A Christmas Carol", and then of course us non-writers all maybe just fell in line with that. Ghosts might just be a literary invention because storytellers needed someone to tell their secrets from when they were alive to the living characters, to get them to enact vengeance, as in "Hamlet", or change their ways and avoid the same fate, as in "A Christmas Carol". Hey, if Dickens invented Christmas traditions, as some people suggest, maybe he helped invent ghosts, too. Like, what is the earliest ghost in literature, maybe Eurydice from Greek myth, trying to come back from the underworld, only her lover Orpheus kind of wrecked that for her? Or Viking warriors who couldn't get into Valhalla, now I really want to know what came first.
If you don't believe in ghosts, then the ones seen in this movie are a combination of dreams and memories of dead people, compounded by the lead character's guilt for something he did when he was a teenager. It's such a bad thing that he's never talked about it to his wife, and he's come pretty close to erasing it from his memory, but his subconscious won't really allow that, so the guilt and the memories kind of re-surface years later in the form of "ghosts", which means the ghosts might just be his imagination, but they're visible to him to convey a message from his inner self that wants him to remember the details of the thing that he's tried so hard to forget.
After the death of his young daughter, Peter Bower, who is a psychotherapist himself, re-connects with an old colleague because he's been having weird nightmares and visions. Meanwhile his wife has chosen to just stay in bed and be very depressed. But Peter's started to see patients again - or has he? The fact that one patient seems to think that it's 1987 and Ronald Reagan is the president is in fact does NOT represent a case of retrograde amnesia, the simpler (and also most complex) answer is that this patient is not real, he's just a figment of Peter's imagination. Or a ghost. This leads Peter to do a little research, and it turns out that all of the patients that were referred to him by his mentor seem to have all died on the same day back in 1987. Maybe Duncan's not real either, so, umm, yeah, Peter might be pretty messed up.
Again, it reads both ways, Peter is either the Ghost Whisperer with a wide variety of ghost clients, or his brain is broken because of a combination of grief, guilt and childhood trauma. Anyway, all of the patients lived along a train line that leads him right back to his hometown, so he hops on a train and goes back to False Creek. Hmm, that name, could be a clue. Maybe it's nothing...
Back in his old hometown, his old house, staying with dear old Dad, who's a retired cop. Peter meets up with his old friend Barry and they start to talk about the thing that happened, which they swore to never talk about. Only not talking about it isn't really working, is it? Not if Peter's brain is broken and it's sending him visions and nightmares, so maybe it's time to talk about it. Yes, please, talk about it so we can all solve this little mystery, and the good news is that Peter's starting to remember more about that fateful night, being home is really triggering those old memories of the thing that he tried so hard to forget about.
Look, I'm not going to spoil it here, I promise that there is a payoff to all of this ghost business, and I kind of found out about the thing while I was dubbing this one to DVD, and then that kind of ruined the whole deal for me. So if you want to learn what happened when Peter was younger and why the ghosts are so angry, you'll just have to watch it. I can't get into any more detail either because I just got home from work and I have to be back tomorrow in the early afternoon, so I have to fit in another movie and at least six hours of sleep, or I'll be a wreck myself.
What's funny for me is how many trains there are in the movie, like even in the beginning there's always a subway train in the background of all the city scenes (I think this was shot in Australia) but I saw Adrien Brody live in person about a year or two ago, and it was on a NYC subway train (I think he lives in NYC). We got out at the same stop and climbed the stairs at the same time, and of course I never let on that I recognized him. I feel like I should have shouted out the name of one of his movies, like "The Brothers Bloom", just to let him know that I knew.
Directed by Michael Petroni (writer of "The Book Thief")
Also starring Adrien Brody (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Jenni Baird, Bruce Spence (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Greg Poppleton (last seen in "Moulin Rouge!"), Sam Neill (last seen in "Music by John Williams"), Anna Lise Phillips (last seen in "Animal Kingdom"), Chloe Bayliss, Emma O'Farrell, Malcolm Kennard (last seen in "The Matrix Reloaded"), George Shevtsov (last seen in "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"), Robin McLeavy (last seen in "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter"), Jesse Hyde, Alexander McGuire, Michael Whalley (last seen in "The Kid"), Alison Benstead (last seen in "Mad Max; Fury Road"), Jeanette Cronin, Rowan Moses.
RATING: 6 out of 10 railroad crossing signals
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