The Giving Tree

This film needs to be re-cut (and perhaps retitled yet again) with a completely new soundtrack. I could have made a better soundtrack to this film with some dental floss and a fork. The non-musical elements of this movie are not without merit, yet the soundtrack biases the entire film for the viewer. Its syrupy sentimentality makes the viewer feel forced into emotions that would easily be achieved otherwise.

The dialogue isn't terrible, the acting is a little better, and the pretty cinematography on top of a sunny mountain in California is actually pretty good. The plot is a kind of hybrid of several tired Hollywood stories, but there are enough quirky (some might say needlessly random) elements to hold interest.

In the end though, it's Christina Applegate's mesmerizing one-scene (and a flashback) performance truly makes the whole movie worth watching.

Christina Applegate Stars in a Drama about a group of friends that meet up after 10 years of high school. And deadly secerts come back to haunt them. I give this movie 5 stars ***** And the movie has 3 different titles to it. The first one is (The Giving Tree) the second one is (Shaded Places) the third one is the video title and it is called (The Brutal Truth).

The film is good, nothing more. acting is pretty good, the only bad thing about this movie is that it has too much of a plot combined all together which makes the movie hard to just stare at and understand, each character has its own story which all stories are combined at the end. just another drama, watch this if its on TV and you are bored, thats what happened to me. watch the 5 five minutes and the closing 5 minutes, that'll sum up the movie for you

This movie was torture... it was one of those things I watched at 2am trying to fall asleep (on Cinemax I think) and my husband snored peacefully. How terribly depressing and it took way too long for the story to unfold. Pretty bad acting all around too... sad to say SOMEBODY paid to make this movie.

This is an unbelievably bad film. It was so utterly forgettable that I spent 5 minutes on here trying to remember the title. It is one of Lifetime's Rape-of-the-Week flicks, apparently done by a director with a John Hughes complex, as it stars Molly Ringwald and the principal from "Breakfast Club" as a blind doctor(?) I am so filled with contempt right now, I don't even know where to start.

Christina Applegate's character (Emily) is forced to witness her two friends be raped after things at a house party get flirtatious to the point of hostile. Thing is though, there are two women in the back of the house that have just been there(?), looking like they're ready to go. Not to mention, in the time it takes Emily to find the bathroom, the two friends have been roughed up, tied up and gagged in a back bedroom. That house certainly seems to have a lot of adjoining doors. Implausibly, one guy would rather rape these two skanks while the other forces Emily to watch. Instead of Applegate! Are you serious? Christina dodging the old nudity bugaboo again.

Anyway, eventually the truth comes out to the assembled friends after the preggers one spills the beans. She then begins to spontaneously deliver and the entire house hoists her onto the dining room table. I guess nobody's ever heard of 911, much less a car. The slow one comes back and notifies everybody that there's a doctor living next door. The guy is blind but manages to deliver the baby. He actually turns out to be Emily's father. In turn, the father of the newborn "takes full responsibility for Emily's death... I am sure there are questions you want to ask me." To which the doctor basically responds "No, I'm good." Moon Zappa looks more like the smarmy guy that knocked-up Jennifer Jason-Leigh's character in "Fast Times At Ridgemont High" every year. Molly Ringwald is "pushing maximum density," as Judd Nelson told her she would in "Breakfast Club," and the guys in the movie look like Maroon 5 or Third Eye Blind rejects.

Oh yeah, and the soundtrack sounds like it was done back in the early '70s. Excuse me now, I am going to rinse my eyes out with chlorine.