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Reviews
Married to a Stranger (1997)
Too Much Implausibility For Me
I had a difficult time getting through this movie in one sitting. I had it TiVo'd so I watched it in spurts. The problems that I had with it were three-fold: 1) the idea that a woman could simply hit her head on a kitchen cabinet and go through an amnestic state to that extent was implausible, 2) the unprofessional behavior of the psychiatrist, 3) the chronic anger of her husband.
With regard to the first issue, I just think that it would have been more plausible for her to have had this condition after the trauma of her car accident years earlier, rather than by simply cracking her head on her kitchen cabinet.
Secondly, I am really sick of seeing mental health providers depicted in an inappropriate manner. The psychiatrist takes it upon himself to sit with Meagan and her husband while out for the evening and casually spills-the-beans about confidential information contained in their sessions together --a major violation of psychotherapy that could have resulted in him losing his license to practice psychotherapy. (By the way, psychotherapy is not typically done by psychiatrists anymore. Psychiatry, in the last 30 or so years has focused on writing prescriptions. Psychologists are the docs who do psychotherapy nowdays.)
Lastly, Meagan's husband seemed chronically angry throughout her ordeal, so much so, that I found myself not wanting her to get back with him at all.
Disappearance (2002)
Duped! You will invest a lot of brainpower only to have the movie end with a huge cliffhanger
Disappearance is about a couple who take their family on vacation in New Mexico and find themselves in deep trouble after taking a detour off the main highway to visit a town that was seemingly abandoned in 1948 for unknown reasons. The town of Weaver seems harmless at first and has tourist appeal until the family is stranded there overnight and they begin to have good reason to suspect that others have experienced their same predicament with fatal outcomes. The Henleys watch a Blair-Witch-Project-esquire video diary left by the town's last victim, which ironically demonstrates the best performance of anyone in this movie. Although Hamlin and Dey's performances are much better than the supporting casts', their emotional affect seems "flat" to me throughout the movie.
Disappearance has appeal for most of the movie as there is much suspense and good direction. However, the plot takes unexpected and implausible turns that seemingly make no sense. Worse yet it that there really is no understanding of what exactly is going on in the movie, which makes the bizarre ending less tolerable. It appeared to me that the movie makers were so focused on making a stream of suspenseful scenes, that they threw away all the elements of good story making: plot development, gradual explanation of themes and symbols that lead to a cohesive solution/outcome.
The most difficult aspect of the movie for me was that the first three-quarter of it was spent building up tension and curiosity about certain aspects of the plot that were then suddenly disposed of as if we didn't deserve an explanation:
What was the significance of the Indian symbols on the walls? What happened to the original people of Weaver? What was the connection with the people at the dinner? What did the Sheriff know? What did the missing boy discover if anything?
This was, I believe, a bad move, since it engendered some resentment. I had invested quite a bit of brainpower into hypothesizing some plausible explanations for some of these plot turns and strange events, only to have the movie makers simply end it without giving an answer to any of these things. These are some nice cliffhangers for the ending of a miniseries that is about to pickup again next week, but a totally frustrating and inappropriate ending for a stand-alone movie.