VividSimon Simply Perfect

Inmechon The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

yoga-1-996510 I don't believe in censorship, but I do believe in consequences. How's this for an idea: take a generic male character, give him some sympathetic circumstances, slowly add "character" by revealing at a snail's pace nothing but at best irritating instincts and characteristics, then pull a long-telegraphed whammy by undoing the sympathetic circumstances, then have him do something truly disgusting, then have him watch some TV.Or, how about this: just film your own bowel movement? Same difference, and you could have saved us a lot of time.There is not one positive thing to say about this experience, other than I'm hoping it will prove to have been carcinogenic, and that mercifully I'll die soon and the painful memory of having sat through this visual bile along with it. I understand that studios have budgets they have to spend, or they'll get smaller budgets the next year. Dear BBC: next time, buy crack with your end-of-fiscal-year surplus. Do something at least plausibly worthwhile with your cash. How they found a Colin Firth lookalike to sleepwalk through this tripe begs the question as to why they would want to in the first place.

secondtake Trauma (2004)The creepy, mind-bending aura of this very British contemporary film, starring a lonely and confused man named Ben striving most of all to find reality itself, has so many really interesting aspects you can't help but wonder why it doesn't quite sweep you away. Or worse, why it's downright bad by the end, all the building up and forced drama being affectations built on sand.And leading man Colin Firth is one of our masters of brooding, interior acting, which he does extremely well once again, against the odds set up by director Marc Evans. Firth's portrayal of Ben actually makes the most of all the ambiguity of the clichéd plot, and we try to follow his mind as it keeps slipping from one point of view to another. It sounds great, on paper. But this is no Coen Brothers film, nor a David Lynch or David Fincher film, even if there are shades of each of these styles and intentions throughout. The sets are gloomy if sometimes too obvious--Ben decides to live in a nearly abandoned former mental hospital, for example. And the background crime which pins together the various facts, the death of a beloved and lovely celebrity, leads to the usual hardboiled detective (Brit style) and to newspaper clippings and flashbacks and glimpses on crude surveillance monitors.If you are curious about the approach, check it out. I think the first twenty minutes gives a great idea of the whole movie. It just isn't smartly made or cleverly written, and this kind of card game with possible realities, which the viewer is made to play as much as Ben, requires smartness and cleverness, for sure.Ben may actually be insane, may actually have murdered the person we are led to believe he did, and may actually belong in the institution he is shown, or not shown, inhabiting. Yes, it's willfully confusing. He wrestles with where he lives, where he walks. He wonders about the darks stairs leading to the gloomy underground rooms. The camera whirls or blurs, many times, almost as if they run out of motivation and need to switch to a camera effect right when maybe, through some actual writing and thinking, we could piece together some of the implied complexity (the way they do in, say, "Memento"). In the end, we are given the police investigator giving it all a knowing eye.Besides the faltering writing, there are secondary actors who are not at their best (and whose best isn't always inspired, at that). For one, Mena Suvari, who I know from "American Beauty" in a kind of odd role where her blankness works well, is just far to lifeless and wooden to make her mysterious presence across the hall either scary or provocative. And so, heads up on this one. It's not what it seems, or could have been.

Chrysanthepop Marc Evans 'Trauma' may have been a little too much for some people to take in. I admit that it is confusing at times but what I liked about it is that it's the kind of film that's open to interpretation and there is no real right or wrong answer because many possibilities are plausible. What really happened? How much of it was a fabrication of Ben's tortured mind? Evans makes very efficient use of the budget. 'Trauma' doesn't have any lavish sets or expensive special effects which is just as well because it looks authentic the way it is. With skilled camera-work and an inventive setting that looks raw, the film manages to contain and maintain a very tense and chaotic atmosphere. Colin Firth does a stupendous job in one of his most complex roles as the tormented Ben who's endured losing his parents, Aunt Charlotte, failing art school, getting fired, a failed marriage and then is led to believe that he's responsible for his wife's death. Mena Suvari is quite likable. 'Trauma' clearly isn't made for everyone but it's definitely a movie that one will be thinking about (and perhaps discussing) after the closing credits have rolled. On an additional note, I liked and appreciated that the ants and their stunt doubles were credited during the end credits.

MBunge You're always hoping for something good. Whether it's a movie or a song or a plate of spaghetti, you're always hoping it'll be satisfying or fulfilling. That doesn't always happen, of course, but even when things aren't good, they can still be enjoyable. And not just in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 "Let's make fun of how bad it is" way. Sometimes a failed attempt can be more entertaining than a seamless success.Trauma isn't good, but it also isn't bad. Trauma just…isn't.The movie starts out with Ben (Colin Firth) apparently losing his wife in an auto accident that throws him into a coma. He emerges from the coma to find the rest of the world mourning the death of a famous pop singer, leaving him to grieve while surrounded by indifferent grief. That's not an unpromising beginning for a story but it's followed by a whole lot of nothing. I'd almost defy anyone to watch the first half of this film and try to figure out what it's about. There are moments in the first half of Trauma when reality starts to seem unreal to Ben, but those moments don't relate to anything or signify anything or make any sort of point.Things do start to happen in the second half of the film, yet happen is all that they do. Telling a story is like building a chair. There is an almost unlimited number of ways to do it, but some of those ways work a lot better than others. I f a story starts at point A and A leads you to B and A and B flow into C and all three propel you into D and so on and so forth, that's one of the best ways to tell a story. That's the way most stories are told. Folks have been tinkering with that approach, trying to find different ways of getting from A to B to C to D. But whether they go from A to D or D to A or C to X to Q, most good stories start in one place and build a road that takes you to a different place.Trauma is uninterested in building that road. There's no sense that things are unfolding in Ben's life in any particular direction or for any particular purpose. When the film starts to upend Ben's view of reality, it doesn't mean anything to the audience because the revealed truth doesn't alter or have any connection to what Ben and the audience thought was the truth before. This movie is like a 90 minute long, bad twist ending. A good twist ending makes you look at what came before it in a different way. A bad twist ending tells you all the stuff you've been watching, didn't actually happen that way.For all that, though, if you really liked Colin Firth in some of his more high profile roles as the repressed Englishman that hopelessly romantic women eventually realize they should be with, you might enjoy watching give a completely different performance. Firth's Ben is a man descending into madness in a decidedly untheatric fashion. He's not terribly interesting on his own, but it's certainly not the standard "sanity slipping away" acting role. Mena Suvari is also quite lovely and manages to make a shallow character into a real person.This is a British film and like a lot of other British movies, it's an odd visual mix. Modern British cinema, at least in my somewhat limited experience, mixes very ordinary and pedestrian visuals with strikingly artistic images. Sometimes that can be quite compelling and sometimes that doesn't work at all, like when Trauma suddenly lapses into a scene that is a blatant rip-off of the movie Jacob's Ladder.All in all, I can't say that Trauma is a bad movie. It's just that it never amounts to anything…and I'm not sure the filmmakers even wanted it to be anything.