One of many recommendations I have gotten from Ebert Presents, my latest favorite TV show (thanks, Dad!). 🙂

Two adult twins, living in Canada, meet with their lawyer after their mom dies, and are given two letters to deliver: one to their father (long gone, they never knew him) and one to a brother they never knew they had. The sister decides to accept the challenge and winds up in the middle east (filmed in Jordan but I believe this is supposed to be Lebanon) digging through layers of time to discover her mom’s younger days (which we see filmed). The brother eventually joins her. The mom was involved in Lebanese civil war, not just politically based but also religious.

This is one of those movies that while afterward there are any numbers of things you could nitpick apart from the plot, the setting, etc., the acting is so engaging that you 100% believe in it while you’re watching, particularly that of the actresses playing the mother and the daughter.

The ending is far more horrible than I remembered the review suggesting; as things begin to unfold, you start to realize there are only a few bad ways things could go…

Felt a little shellshocked at the end, but was really entranced the whole time. Despite various melodramatic tendencies, this totally worked for me.

The best use of 3D I’ve ever seen.

The inside-the-cave stuff in this movie is SO COOL. The cave itself, the drawings in the cave, the way those primitive artists used the 3D bumps and bruises of the cave to enhance their drawings, the calcite stuff that has formed over everything, creating the most awesome stalactites and glimey goopy stuff you’ve ever seen.

If only it was a silent movie….

I mean the narration has a lot of really dumb stuff. I went with two academics and they were both really frustrated by the things the filmmaker chose to talk about (and the things he didn’t). And there were some really REALLY ridiculous parts, especially in interviews outside the cave.

Like when the dude wearing reindeer-skin boots and poncho plays the starspangled banner on a flute made from the tendon of a bat? (I AM NOT JOKING.)

There was one cool interview — with these two people who are figuring out which drawings came when i.e., “so first there was this, then 10,000 years later someone added this, then 4,000 years later, a bear scratched this up here”…but a lot of the interviews SHOULD have been done in the person’s native language and subtitled (as a few were) b/c the ones done in English had a lot of places where the person was obviously struggling to find the right word and ended up sounding much less smart and insightful than they probably really are.

Thumbs up for getting to be inside the cool cave and the use of 3D and the really really cool stuff you see. The cave is AWESOME.

Thumbs down for the narration, most of the interviews, and some really ridiculous speculation. Including, especially, the albino alligator stuff which was just BIZARRE and out of left field.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

I saw a review of this on Ebert Presents (my new addiction, thanks Dad!) and HAD to see it.
Juliet Binoche is really fantastic in it. Her emotions are so on the surface that there are parts where you find yourself cringing, but it’s fantastically played.

There was some discussion in the Ebert Presents review of whether you believe the conceit of the movie, or how you choose to interpret it: 1) are they meeting for the first time? Or 2) are they actually married and playing a “we just met” game in order to have a conversation about the state of their relationship?

T. and I both agreed it HAS to be #2. Has to be. If it’s #1, her character is completely insane. And we’d prefer not to think that, as it’s so, so, so well played.

Oh oh oh oh !!!! Oh, Kevin Smith fans, this movie is SO GREAT. You are going to LOVE IT when it comes out…in September? I think. Or October. It’s So.So.SO!! Good.

And non-Kevin Smith fans? This is an outstanding movie about a very topical issue. Seriously. I know that’s not what you’re expecting but it’s true.

I took a friend to see Kevin Smith live last year (or whenever, I don’t seem to have reviewed it here) and he returned the favor by taking me to this screening.

I really thought this was fantastic. Tightly edited, well-written, keeps you engaged and intrigued and worried…. John Goodman is fantastic. The creepy kid (you may know him as Cassidy from Veronica Mars) is fantastic. The directing is wonderful.

Smith is only going to make one more movie after this (seriously, that’s it) and when you see him talk (he did a Q&A after this) he is SO beyond self-deprecating about his skills as a director. He’s wrong, really wrong, and that’s too bad.

See this when you can. It’s well worth the $$.