Very, very moody and melancholy and slow and drawn out. Really really beautiful photography (cinematography?), particularly during the narration. Lots of Midwestern winter shots, snow covered wheat fields, sun dappled groups of trees. Empty rooms with wooden floors and empty rocking chairs and streaks of sun shooting across them.

Oh and yeah the acting? Brad Pitt is progressively manic (eventually becoming an actually intelligible version of someone similar to the character from Snatch) and Casey Affleck really grows on you, after seeming sort of idiot-savant like at the beginning. Mary Louise Parker was excellent in a (very!) small role, as was Zoey Deschanel. Wished Frank (Sam Shepherd) had made another appearance at the end.

At the end you realize the story isn’t necessarily about what it seemed. Thought the narration would be annoying, but came to love it (gives it a very storybook feel, kind of like the narration in Pushing Daisies, although in a very different genre of storybook).

And as I said, the photography was beeeeaaauuuuuuuuutiful.

If you’re an obsessive, maniacal, ridiculous FNL fan like me, then hey, bonus, off-season sightings of Kyle Chandler and Minka Kelly who both have small roles. (And for Jericho fans, “Emily” is in it as well.) Also the background music is very FNL-feelin’. I don’t know if it’s actually also Explosions in the Sky and, sweet monkey sundae, I’m certainly not going to be bothered to look that up. But it FEELS like the same kind of dreamy, expansive, Texas-horizon, music.

I liked it more than it may have seemed in my previous comment.

I liked this movie, but I thought Peter Berg left the ending a little too ambiguous. I THINK I know what you’re supposed to think, but in leaving it ambiguous I think he left room for people with a radically different viewpoint than mine to say “yup, this [other thing] is what you’re supposed to think.” If the message is what I thought it was, it shouldn’t have been left ambiguous. I don’t want people to be able to prevaricate about that!

And I didn’t think it made that much sense to have Jason Bateman’s character so obsessed with what the whispering was. It was like using him as the plot to find out something the audience supposedly would want to know…except I didn’t think anyone in the audience was actually wondering that. It was a plot mechanism to reveal a similar attitude on both sides, but I think it could have been accomplished differently.

Jamie Foxx’s macho attitude is definitely one of his strengths as an actor so he really excels in parts that let him bring it on. Jason Bateman is great, although totally annoying in some scenes. I really dug the #2 Saudi policeman (the one who gets beaten early on).

I liked a lot of it, despite my aforementioned criticisms. But as the boy working the concession stand told me on my way in “It’s a good movie, but it’s scary. It can really make you paranoid about some stuff.”

Not for the faint of heart. The infamous naked bathroom fight scene was more notable (to me) for its extreme bloodiness (I swear that one cut goes all the way down his spine) than a few random sightings of Viggo nekkid. There’s a throatcutting scene earlier that’s more like a “trying really hard to chisel off someone’s head with a not very sharp knife” scene.

Viggo is so solidly into character here, it’s hard to reconcile in your mind that this is the same boy who played Aragorn. Not a bad flick, a number of interesting items, but I didn’t find myself very engaged with it. More like a spectator from a distance than I usually feel in the theater. And a lot of people in this movie make really bad decisions. You wanted to take them into the hallway and try and shake some sense into them.

Oh it’s the kids are now “adults” part of the series. Never a very interesting plot move. But hey, I’m completely down with Rogue’s decision. I mean, if you’re a romantic, how could you not be?

OK I didn’t think it was good, but I’m not sure why this was quite as panned as it was. I mean, yeah, the woman with the hands for feet was just grotesque… but I really didn’t think the rest of it was THAT bad. Charlize Theron was convincing and the dude that played her man-from-the-past was kinda hot in a Dominic West-hot way.

I’ve certainly seen worse movies than this. And if you got rid of a couple of really annoying things, I think it could have been decent.