March 05, 2000
Arlington Road Well, I just finished watching Arlington Road on DVD, after being promised it would fsck with my mind. Well, I wasn't completely dissapointed. This movie stars Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack and they were great. The basic plotline is about Jeff Bridges who suspects his normal neighbors are planning some evil plot and scheme. Well, go figure, he was right (or the movie would be really short). Tim Robbins is great at playing the normal-but-with-fits-of-pure-evil guy, and Jeff is not too shabby in his tranformation from a fun loving teacher guy to paranoid crime hunter. This is a bit of a formula movie. You sort of know what is going to happen... "gee, I bet he really is a bad guy", "gosh, I bet they baddies are going to get rid of someone" etc etc. You do know a bit of what is going on with the movie, who is going to do what, what is going to happen and so on. This is not to say that the movie doesn't have a few twists and turns, and it does screw with your mind a bit. Not as much as something like The Professional or 8MM, but hey, you can't win them all though.

One of the more interesting things that was examined to some extent, but not as much as it should have been (IMHO) was the "right wing" history. You get some of the history behind the groups, and how it's history relates in the movie, but I think there could have been some more about how this all related to the characters in the movie.

While a lot of the plot was formula, I have to give the ending a 10/10 (or in this case, a 5/5). Totally unexpected (to me) and fantastic in how it makes you think about Real Life and how this could reflect how things are in the world.

Like I said, it makes you think.
Posted by Arcterex at 03:52 PM