He Sees You When You're Sleeping

First off, the title is very misleading. Not about a stalker-in fact this one actually deviates a bit from the usual MHC formula. A selfish man dies and is given a chance to help his family and get into heaven. Cons: Terrible singing and full of odd facial expressions from the cast. A few noticeable plot holes too. Pros: Overall an okay movie for the family with some mild holiday themes.

I was quite underwhelmed by 'He Sees You When You Are Sleeping'. I would even to struggle to classify this as a Christmas film as it doesn't really feel like the holidays. You have a few carols sung but it really feels like it could be anytime in the year.

The plot is unoriginal and dull. Sterling has to try and save his daughter and Annie. The rules make no sense and are all over the place. Sometimes people can see him and at the end he magically appears and is dancing at a party but he's actually dead. A women also comes back from the dead which was ridiculous. The Mafia storyline was unconvincing and weak too.

Movie has provoking ideas about the afterlife, second chances and values. Tries too hard to be crime thriller, melodrama and kids movie, all at the same time. If the plot were not a bit too predictable and saccharine, could be a deep and interesting film. At least the ending is rather unexpected.

"This could happen"?!? In what universe would that be? If Heaven can really wait, why doesn't it? do just that, and spare us all these cloying, wishful thinking movies about the so-called "afterlife." "It's A Wonderful Life" at least had Frank Capra's and James Stewart's extraordinary talents to recommend it. This piece of treacle has only Mr. Mediocre, Greg Evigan, and Erika Elenia, whose relentless Bullockian cuteness can go only so far And It would have been a perfectly serviceable story without all of the "Ghost Whisperer" blather but that kind of thing, apparently, is exactly what all those teenage girls demand and they and their lame, puerile little taste are exercising some kind of spiritless pastel tyranny over the popular culture. The movie also contains more than a few unhappy echoes of "Ghost," the painfully silly beginning of the era of "the-only-good-man-is-a-dead-man movies

It's one thing to put a movie on TV. Another to shoot one and put it directly on TV. Another to shoot a movie as if you never intended to do anything with it other than put it on TV. And man does this one smell of video!

The story's okay, with some adaptations from the novel, but that's no big deal. I can forgive that. I can even forgive the sappiness of the stoy; judge a movie on its own genre.

What I can't forgive is the production. I admit that PAX is no big media centre, but surely they can still draw a little better talent than the casting for this flick. The leads all look like they're doing a commercial for local TV or else hamming it up in a civic theatre. People sometimes seem to forget that when there's a camera involved, they don't need to act out as they might on stage.

What's worse is the cinematography which is framed like a daytime drama, and lit with less creativity than that. The staging is simple -- two people talking should face each other in the middle of the room. The action should be center-stage. Et cetera.

You can bear with it, but the production doesn't do half justice to what the authors of the novel deserve...