Before I Go to Sleep

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Good movie!

Good movie!

Good movie!

source: Before I Go to Sleep

I feel sorry for Nicole Kidman. It must be depressing having to work with Colin Firth so much. Here they are again, back together after the OK but not quite good Railway Man in a dire take on the Memento/Groundhog Day riff of memory loss. None of the story really adds up, there are plot holes bigger than those in the Ozone layer and in the end it just sort of gives up. I could spend much time on the turgid script or the complete lack of any character development, but I won't. Instead I will simply note that Colin Firth has cornered the market in middle-class, stick-up-the-rectum English bores without actually requiring any acting skills, which is just as well given that he possesses none. Rather like the other hopeless exponent of diffident English "chaps", the execrable Hugh Grant. His supposed acting prowess, which garnered him an Oscar, A Golden Globe and a Bafta for The King's Speech, is nothing more than him being himself. It is a constant source of amazement to me that these two products of the public school system have been able to fool so many people into believing they can act. But acting has always been the preserve of the more affluent types and those who have achieved some kind of fame in other ways, such as modelling or just being the offspring of someone famous. However... Kidman does her best with the rubbish she's been given to work with, but in the end she fails to rescue this mess from oblivion. It doesn't bode well for her after the excruciatingly bad Grace of Monaco that she appears in dismal rubbish like this, but at least she has a varied and interesting body of work to prove her credentials. Unlike Firth who continues to prove only that he got very lucky. It's lucky for us - and Nicole Kidman - that Firth dropped out of Paddington Bear. Who knows what horror may have been unleashed by a bear voiced by a middle-aged English twit.

As a thriller, BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP works well enough. We know that some sort of twist is coming, and it comes. It is probably predictable to someone who enjoys figuring these things out in advance. I don't. I like to go in to the movies like an innocent little child. What I want to talk about is Nicole Kidman. She looks dead inside. Did she ask her plastic surgeon to make her look like one of the Olsen Twins? From some angles the illusion functions but from others her Botoxed and lifted face looks like a creepy mask. The skin on her hands looks cracked and withered...probably from shoving them down her throat every day to make herself vomit. She looks unhealthy and anorexic. Hollywood transforms humans into monsters. Kidman is a perfect choice to play Christine precisely for this reason. Christine is a battered woman who prefers being beaten to remembering anything about who she is. Her amnesia is a metaphor for the loss of self to which abused women consent by remaining with their abusers. Her life is an endless present. The emotional tonality of the film is flat and depressing without being dark or foreboding. Perhaps this is what it is like to be in an abusive relationship: no color, no variety, no other people, just empty days spent wandering through a hollow life punctuated with blows and hysterical fits. What strikes me about so many films today is the total lack of engagement with Logos of any of the characters. No one in this film has a meaningful relationship with thought, knowledge, faith, reflection, science, philosophy, art, music or any other of the avatars of Logos that alone are capable of extracting us from our mortifying, fusional relationships with our family members. Is anyone else out there sick of the way that spouses and above all children are presented by Hollywood as the unique objects capable of giving meaning to life? I would have given this movie ten stars out of ten if Adam had turned out to be an ugly, disagreeable, pimply teenager who told his mother to go to hell, thereby destroying Christine's narcissistic illusion that she is an eternally beautiful perfect mother with a perfect husband and a perfect son, but of course he weeps with joy when she sings her stupid lullaby to him. Give us a break with this stuff. This stupid scene alone cost the movie a star in my super important rating that the producers will certainly take into account when making their next turkey. www.timothylachin.com

The movie is clearly a mystery thriller kind of movie. But u don't expect this to watch in cinemas, its more likely a TV movie. I would say don't waste your money for this. Nichole Kidman and Colin Firth were very good. but the depth of story was missing from the beginning. I didn't find anything good in this movie except from Nichole Kidman's acting. When I checked for the reviews for the movie in IMDb it show a 8.5 rating, so I thought its gonna be a good one. But don't think this movie deserve anything above a 6 rating. The slow pace was the worst part of the movie. After 1 hour of the movie I was really considering to leave the theatre and watch something else.

Four points are for the fine acting, but the plot simply doesn't work. This kind of amnesia doesn't exist, see 50 First Dates (2004). To a greater extent it cannot last TEN years. It is totally unbelievable, furthermore, that the woman has not been contacted by relatives or friends or anyone for FOUR years! To make the story work, IMHO, they should have used not ten years, but ten months: it could have been a bit more consistent. Can you imagine spending SIX years with someone with a kind of amnesia like that woman? And for what is worth, how could the fake husband have borne living FOUR years in that way? She is beautiful, but isn't it quite boring to repeat every day, about 1,500 times: "I am your husband. We got married in 1999. You are 40. You have had an accident..." and so on? Suspension of disbelief does not mean becoming stupid :)

For the first time since Swordfish I walked out of a movie after about 30min. This movie was so painfully bad that I'm baffled by the somewhat positive reviews. I'm suppose to care what happens to a woman who is basically personless, hollow frame of a human being? or should I identify with Colin's character, a man who supposedly for years has started each day by explaining his wife who she is? There was 3-4 characters in the whole movie, so the man who is responsible for Kidman's attack is either the husband or the doctor. Why would I care who it is? The movie was so painfully slow and Nicole Kidman's expressionless botox'd up face made me sick. In one scene the phone rang(of course she just happened to stand next to it) and she stared at it with her stupid face for ten seconds as if she had never seen a telephone before. The films score was awful, like something from a Canadian sci-fi TV-series and the whole thing looked so cheaply made. The director really screwed this one up. There was absolutely nothing that I found remotely interesting in this fiasco. After about 5min. me and my brother started to goof on the movie, so I guess it gave me some sarcastic laughs.