jportwood3

My first reaction after the film was beautiful, but so what. The cinematography is captivating, even when nothing is happening on screen. And the students are chillingly real. Seeing the film in Spain of course, everyone's like "so THAT'S what American schools are like."

But no, they're not. First of all, they're worse. Rarely would you find a roomful of kids chatting away about homophobia (even though it is inane banter) and there'd be security at ANY school and when fires start, fire alarms go off. So obviously we're not looking at reality, but it's presented as reality in a documentary style. So good ol' Gus is simply playing with us again.

Elephant's young actors are mostly amateurs using their real first names and improvising their own dialogue, and they prove comfortable and credible. They're generally bright, but not in a quippy, artificial way, and they remind us how the troubled teens provided the most graceful notes in Van Sant's "To Die For."

But ultimately I wonder why this movie needed to be made. It's so thinly veiled as a Columbine shooting movie that it lacks a certain creativity. Why didn't he go even further with the experiments and shots than give us a message?

Worth seeing, but not worth swooning over.

It took me a while to get over the fact that there is such a horrible title for this film. MYSTIC river? Oh come on, even someone in a beginning creative writing course could do better than that when trying to extract symbolism.

Some fine acting by Penn and others, but I didn't believe Robbins in his sappy, troubled state. I like Robbins, I think it was just poor casting.

But when did Laura Linney become Lady MacBeth? The movie dissolves into a Greek/Shakespeare tragedy that doesn't sit well with the lower end Boston neighborhood. Try again, Clint.

There's no need to have Spanish skills to understand the story told in this film. Blurring the lines between documentary and fiction (these are real people, telling "their" story, but they've been directed into scenes of "their lives).

At times it gets a bit cumbersome when the "characters" are not talking. You know they would be chatting away over their dinner of rice and beans but they are presented quiet and stoic.

But the story gets told without words and with amazing images of Havana. Having visited, I was overwhelmed by the truth in this movie, and impressed that the subtle political message in this "apolitical" film was able to get out of Fidel's Cuba in the 21st century.

But by the end of the film I was overcome with emotion and sat for moments after the final message, tears overwhelming me. This type of film is manipulative to the extreme, but it's also the type of thing where you don't mind being manipulated.

I've brought everyone I can convince to see it.