Stay

A quite famous song aside, this movie is quite wicked to say the least. It really needs your full concentration. You need to be there for the whole thing. You can't just watch this while doing something else. Although some might say it's the beginning and end that really matter (no pun intended) - if you miss what happens in between, you are missing out on the whole tale! The thing the director tried to tell you - to spin you right round with (I know another song, I thought while in Rome ..).

The actors involved are superb to say the least which makes me wonder how I never saw this before. It totally escaped me until the other day. I struggled with it too - but it was well worth it to say the least. I did have to check online if I was right with what I was thinking, even if I reckon it is quite obvious ... to a certain extent. Really a movie that messes with you and you may understand or empathize ... well hopefully you do! Cheap tricks and all included.

It would be cruel to reveal anything about the story before seeing this film because most of the enjoyment is learning which path the story will choose.

The film has masterful visual style. At times it appears to be a normal picture until the surreal aspects make themselves known with subtlety. The editing is seamless, almost but not quite confusing, and the callbacks to earlier scenes are never overused.

It is not a spoiler to state that early on Something Isn't Quite Right, and there are story elements that the avid moviegoer will know to be central to the conclusion. However, it's the path that leads to the end that makes the time enjoyable.

Naomi Watts, as usual, is perfect, and Ewan McGregor has again picked one of the scripts that was for the art and not the money. Ryan Gosling is effective, and Jeanine Garafolo's three minutes were eerie. I'm certain that Elizabeth Reaser will be seen again.

Not a perfect movie, but definitely worth the time if you enjoy surrealistic stories.

8/10

Ultimately it's a richly textured, multi-faceted look at the relationship between guilt and love, death and life. Suicidal themes run amuck, so, as you can imagine, there are many dark, intense scenes between talented actors. And the performances really are great, as is the mind-bending cinematography. But its way overwritten...the truly brilliant "interesting plot device" mingles but never bonds with the characters or dialogue, so everything falls flat. It's not rewarding, because insignificant elements overshadow details crucial to experiencing the intended impact of the film.

If you want to see an astonishingly filmed, well acted movie, here it is, have fun...But Stay breaks the first commandment of film-making because it takes itself more seriously than its subject. At the end of the day, the message the filmmakers seem to communicate is, "see what we did!" instead of "see what we mean."

Have you heard of Stay? If you're here you must have but I'll bet it wasn't too long ago that you found out about it. It's a movie that came out late last year with little fanfare, was dismissed as a poor movie by critics and quickly ushered back out of theaters.

It's a crying shame.

It was a wonderful movie. My favorite type of movies are psychological horror movies. Favorites include: Jacob's Ladder, Mulholland Dr., Donnie Darko, and in a similar realm, Momento and Fight Club. I love seeing a good representation of the human mind on film and that is exactly what this film shows so well.

It's about a college student (Ryan Gosling) who tells his shrink (Ewan McGregor) that he is going to kill himself on the stroke of midnight this Saturday, leaving his shrink to enlist the help of his formerly suicidal girlfriend (Naomi Watts) to figure out why he wants to kill himself and how to stop him, while his world falls apart.

It's directed by Marc Forster of Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland fame. The movie has been called pretentious, shallow, ridiculous, bewildering, absurd, and empty by many reviewers. Personally I think that they didn't have the patience for it and/or were put off by its extravagant visuals and cuts. I thought it was great and deserves much more credit than it has received.

The movie's visual style is very interesting and jarring in a good way. It had me constantly saying to my girlfriend "did you see that?" Full of slight of the hand camera/editing tricks. Nearly everything in the movie is symbolic of other things or ideas in the movie. The acting is very good, especially among the lesser characters. Everything in the movie feels so unreal, but that is serves some purpose even if one couldn't know what it is right away. A second viewing would reveal many new things. In the end much of the movie is left up to interpretation and my girlfriend and I had a good conversation about our ideas on what things meant in the movie. After thinking about it for a day I'm pretty sure that I could explain everything in the movie, even what the hell is up with Ewan McGregor's pants, Why Gosling wanted to commit suicide and the twins and triplets.

It was fun was figuring out what the rest of the movie meant after seeing its end, the solution. The movie is like a code and the end is the decryption key. It differs from other "sixth sense" type surprise ending movies because everything you would see in the movie before the end would not act as a clue to what it all means or what the ending is. It's more like decrypting a diary than a problem with a solution to it.

Basically, any movie buff owes it to themselves to see this movie. I rented it but after seeing it I fully intend to purchase the DVD.

STAY is a strange bird of a movie, one that you must be rested and in the mood for to watch, and one that asks that you forget the usual linear storyline and stay alert every minute. Directed by Marc Forster (Monster Ball, Finding Neverland, and the upcoming The Kite Runner) and based on a story and screenplay by David Benioff (Troy, The 25th Hour, and the upcoming The Kite Runner!), STAY is more a mind-bending visual excursion that explores some dark psychological questions dealing with life, death, suicide, occult, and a mélange of all of these.

The opening of the film is a twisted visual experience that has to do with a car crashing on a bridge, fire, and a body - all given during the opening credits. We then meet psychiatrist Dr. Sam Foster (Ewan McGregor) as he encounters a college student patient Henry Lethem (Ryan Gosling) whom he is seeing for his colleague, the emotionally exhausted Dr. Beth Levy (Janeane Garofalo). Hesitant to work with a 'substitute psychiatrist' Henry eventually tells Sam he is planning to commit suicide that Saturday at midnight, a re-enactment of his painter idol's absurd life. Sam's artist girlfriend Lila (Naomi Watts) was herself a suicide attempt rescued by Sam and offers her help in dealing with Sam's patient. Sam also gleans advice from his mentor, the blind Dr Patterson (Bob Hoskins) and after numerous attempts to contact his associate Beth for information, Sam strikes out on his own in an attempt to understand Henry before he destroys himself. He looks up Henry's mother (Kate Burton) whom Henry says is dead, discovers when Henry meets Dr Patterson that Henry claims Patterson is his father and is also dead. Ultimately Sam engages the services of a mental institution run by Dr Ren (BD Wong) and gains the promise that the institution will put a hold on Henry so that he will be unable to commit suicide.

In the midst of this race Sam's world begins to crumble, people don't make sense, stories clash, and Sam tumbles around in a state closely resembling madness until the final frames when the entire situation of the film is made clear. Nothing is as it appears when dealing with the thread that separates life and death. The script is clumsy, the camera work is distractingly of kilter, little gimmicks are used to the extreme, and the tiny roles of supporting characters hardly merit the gifted actors such as Hoskins, Burton, and Garofalo. Ryan Gosling is again tossed into a role that is starchy and unidimensional and despite his fine work his character remains aloof. McGregor and Watts do the best they can with the script but end up becoming tropes wandering in from other similar stories.

So why give the film 8/10 score? Because despite all the defects it does engage the mind and forces the viewer to set aside the general principles of understanding and just release the mind to a crazy ride. That is healthy film making and deserves attention. Grady Harp