Wish You Were Here

On our EURO TRIP last week we went thru Germany, with all those hours on a train visiting 9 countries we needed entertainment! So we picked up a few new DVD's in a store, Wish You Were Here was one of them, i spotted this movie coz i saw the HD add-on, part of the double disk set. For $22 equivalent it was well worth the money, the high quality crisp picture is really something! great colors, nice imagery and a beautiful actress... it made me think of home in sunny California!

Its very well shot, nicely paced and despite some script flaws, a nice little discovery. The ending really took me by surprise & the smile to camera by the swollen eyed David Character left me with a connection to the story! Its one of those films that probably needed a much bigger budget and would have been screened in theaters alongside blockbuster thrillers, the fact that it is small and unheard of makes it a little, potentially cultish film worth talking about. If you're a technology freak like me, you'll be happy simply with the quality of HD DVD, seeing that it was also shot on HD as the director mentions in the 'making of'. Overall recommended, but I haven't seen available in the States yet A

/edit: take a look at the Demographic breakdowns for this movie. average female vote: 9.0 average male vote : 6.3

and two reviews withn "uu, i love sam page.. uu.." come on girls, get a life and don't spam your reviews with talking of handsome protagonists. his acting is horrible. the movie horrible.

similar Demographic breakdowns for us- and non-us citizens ;).

here the non-pink-elephant-spectacles-movie../edit

i can't really imagine why this little totally uninspired film gets (up to this date) a higher rating than "the usual suspects", "taxi driver", "fight club" not even mentioning the films, that usually attract a quit different audience like "rashomon" and "the third man" when it's coming to the thriller genre: a 9 out of 10! come on, get a life.

so maybe i divide this comment into the positive and negative aspects, but since i can't think of something that is worth mentioning on the positive i better start right away with the criticism.

what does a little thriller make worth watching? with the help of the story and the mastery of the director you have to get involved in the movie, identifying with the protagonist(s) in order to be surprised, to feel them, to be curious what their destiny is running to. since the "introduction" is about ten minutes long, the "cut out of a bad glamour magazine"-actors have no time to develop a relationship to the viewer. i would doubt that if they had 10 hours they would manage this though. they have to be the most boring actors i saw, even for the b-movie genre.

the storyline is horribly shallow and causal. there is not even one little twist in it. one of the baddest scripts there is. a first class student would make a better working concept. so not enough the director tries to force something interesting into it with to scenes of totally uninspired "blood shots".

"Spain surely is one of the world's most beautiful spots, but it has rarely been shown that hot and sexy in a movie." the first reviewer wrote. yeah, and if you were there you could imagine, but with a shot on the villa and one on the beach this is pure bul"""t to say such a thing. you get to see NOTHING from spain.

"They say there's a moment in every person's life. The moment the rest of your life will be judged by. But what if that moment happened and you weren't even in the room." oh god, how i wished i weren't even in the room when this mess was running! believe me. spare your time. it is a clear 1 vote and i never did that before..

and I'll agree with the commenter from Germany....the ending knocks it out of the park.

To be honest, I knew I was going to enjoy this movie because I really like Sam Page. The fact that he played the lead character in this movie assured me that it was well worth the cost of buying this movie and having it shipped from Germany. Beyond that, my expectations were very low. I am honestly surprised by how good this movie actually was.

IN my opinion, one of the biggest problems that most producers face when they are making a thriller is maintaining relevance and realism while telling a truly frightening story. WIsh You Were Here did that as well as any movie I've seen recently.

THe events in the story bore some striking similarities to a recent, highly publicized, news story in the US. That probably made the story more believable and more horrifying to me. I was honestly scared by some of the things that I saw in this movie. Scared by the fact that I felt like this was probably a realistic depiction of how something like this might be if it really happened, and scared by the thought that something similar probably has happened before and probably will happen again.

The movie was very well paced. There was very little padding. There were some scenes in the middle of the movie that seemed out of place but when I saw the ending I understood their purpose.

As it happens in every film, some of the actors were better than some of the others but every actor performed adequately. Sam was great. The actor who played the father also did a very, very good job with his role. THey were the stand-outs for me.

THe biggest drawback to the film was the lack of characterization. Sam's character David was really the only multi-dimensional character in the film. There was some insight into the character of the father toward the end of the movie but the other characters were totally one-dimensional. That is probably as it should have been, since David was telling the story, but my personal preference would have been for a little more character definition, at least for Georgie(the girlfriend) and for the Russian Arab.

Technically, as mentioned in one of the other commentaries , there were some great scenery shots. I really don't think any of this movie was shot in a studio. IT all seemed to be on location. The direction was above average especially in the manner that the different camera angles were used to add to the intensity of the story. At times I felt like the "background" music was almost too loud. In one of the scenes I actually had to reverse because I missed a few lines of dialog but again, it was almost as if this played into the steadily building intensity of the story . Throughout the movie I was wondering how this was all actually going to end. I have to say that I was surprised by the ending. I really wasn't sure how it would conclude but of the several different scenarios I had imagined the one that played on the screen did not resemble anything I had expected.

Altogether, obviously I enjoyed this movie. But, as I said in the beginning, that was a given just because of the lead actor. What I found truly remarkable about this film was the way that a combination of relevant story, good acting, and some inspired directing took what was almost certainly a low budget film and made it into a really entertaining, thought provoking movie. I'll continue to watch anything that Sam Page appears in but I think in the future I'm going to be looking for films done by the director of this movie. He truly deserves a well-done.

I don't want to give anything away, but know that I thought it really well done. If you want to carry on reading I will attempt not to give anything away and to talk generally about the film. This is a film that almost lost me. It starts with a very exciting prologue, that runs you through the tortured and blackly comic relationship of a father and son, then throws us gasping for breath into a holiday from hell scenario, shot so beautifully that you kind of know something will go wrong because it all looks so perfect. However, the film does have a slightly flawed mid-section where some things don't seem to be adding up and David's quest becomes slightly confused. But then you wait for it, and the ending comes and knocks it right out of the park. One of the best endings of its type, it played out completely unexpectedly (at least to me), being shocking, ironic, funny and emotionally shattering all in the same moment. At the film's climax you realise that this was, in many ways, a neo-noir, reminiscent of the classic B-movies, with its protagonists being dragged into the underworld by forces beyond their control. But the difference here is that it is sunny all the time and everything looks like Paradise. Highly recommended