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Early word makes it clear the Book of Henry is this year's Collateral Beauty based on the astonishing, you will not believe it even when you read it, last third of the film. The director of this is the dude they gave the last Star Wars movie to why?

My Twitter feed is seemingly alternating between stuff about Trump, Alexandria, and this movie.

I hadn't even heard of it until I saw an ad for it on TV this evening. Oddly the comparison to Collateral Beauty has me morbidly fascinated.

The Hollywood Reporter review spoils the central conceit, for those curious-- it's hard to imagine this not being an instant meme, so it will surely be spoiled for most of you sooner than later anyways

I made the comparison to Radio Flyer when the trailer came out, and the whole movie seems like an exercise in making the audience long for the comparable grace and tastefulness of that movie.

I've now read two reviews that bring it up in the same breath as the Gary Oldman-is-a-little-person masterpiece Tiptoes. I've now looped around and will do anything to see this.

I haven't seen this, of course, but don't suspect Trevorrow will lose the Star Wars gig from it. For one, it's clearly a completely different kind of movie, so any failures Trevorrow might have incurred here are unlikely to overlap with what SWIX will want to do. For another, with Trank it wasn't so much that Fantastic Four was considered a bad movie (I haven't seen it, but it's hard to imagine that it could have been good), but that he seemingly lost control of the set and the production, and acted erratically throughout; there's no reason to believe anything like that happened here, and, in fact, Jonathan Rosenbaum's Letterboxd line on the film praises Trevorrow's direction (while excoriating the script). So I don't know that this film has bearing on the other, especially given that Trevorrow enjoyed commercial success with Jurassic World (again, haven't seen it), a studio big budget effects extravaganza, already -- Trank didn't have anything like that to fall back on, so when he floundered on his first attempt, there was a lot more justification from the Lucasfilm side to pull the plug on him.

I will confess the hostility of the reviews endows me with some morbid curiosity about this film.

This thread made this film go on my to-kevyip list.

I've seen one critic compare it to The Room and Birdemic and after looking over the plot synopsis all I can ask is "How many films won't be made because this was made instead?" People looked at this script and said "This could totally work." Another review that said it was one of cruelest things they'd ever seen.

I hope this becomes a meme.

I just think it is wonderful that with this and Sea of Trees Naomi Watts is making working for David Lynch look positively mundane!

(EDIT 9th July: There is a growing subgenre of 'Naomi Watts at the mercy of the orders of kids' films with the Funny Games remake, Shut In and seemingly this one! Maybe even the spooky kid from the Ring remakes ties in too!)

Now I can only see your username as colintr038er0.

I read somewhere that the script had been in various stages of production for almost twenty years. This was someone's passion project. It's like when we finally saw Cameron Crowe's passion project and realized it was Aloha

I definitely hope this is 2017's Atlas Shrugged, God's Not Dead or Little Boy.

I was sold from "this year's Collateral Beauty" which means I'm looking forward to cdnchris's extended description of the film more than anything.

I could not resist the siren call of such venomous reviews, so I saw this today. It starts off bad with some occasional lapses into pure awfulness (like a scene where Henry and the school principal discuss the possibility of the girl character being molested/abused by shouting $5 words at each other for a minute straight), and it keeps getting progressively worse with each act break until I'm not sure a single good decision from any level of filmmaking or writing was made in the last third. The acting is mostly not the problem (although Dean Norris is phoning this one in big-time and all the girl is told to do is look like Rooney Mara on the poster of Side Effects, despite being the movie's ostensible focus), but the direction and cinematography are so bland and uninspired that this might as well have been shot by Lars von Trier's Automavision. I honestly had a blast, and anyone considering seeing this absolutely should do that.

The Narrator Returns wrote:I honestly had a blast, and anyone considering seeing this absolutely should do that.

That's all well and good but I hope for the sake of good taste that the theater was mostly empty.

I'll be the first and last to admit I actually looked up showtimes after reading this thread.

My theater had three groups of people; myself, and two sets of single parents with kids, thanks to the movie's totally inappropriate '80's Spielberg!' marketing push. The movie has a ton of swearing and was proceeded by a round of trailers for awards season along with It, so clearly the theater at least knew what was more appropriate for this movie.

You can't stop there, Ribs: what did you think of the film?

It's an actually horrid movie unlike anything I've seen in a long, long time. I genuinely do not believe in the school of watching things just to hate them, and am generally on the "lukewarm" side of most films that get routinely savaged, but it's just utterly perplexing from beginning to end (I broke out my lowest-possible 1/2 score on Letterboxd for the first time in 3 years, for the little its worth, though this is probably worse than any of the other things I've given that rating to by some margin).

One part that really made me laugh was when Henry, 11 years old, burst into the principal's office, demanding, "Dammit, Jeanine, what the hell is going on?"

Holy shit. This video description/review of the film is so unbelievable that I might actually have to go see this thing. Seriously, the video is 40 minutes long, way longer than I'd ever sit through for a movie review, and I just couldn't turn it off. It's riveting.

Dear lord does this ever live up to the hype, and I certainly would not have checked it out had it not been for this board. I've so rarely seen a film where literally every moment and emotion was just plane wrong to such a spectacular degree. My entire audience (my girlfriend and I, an elderly couple, and a family of four) all burst out cackling when

Spoiler

Naomi Watts, having begun reading the titular book, shouts at her younger son "I'm not going to murder the police commissioner!"

I've perhaps never seen a climax as ludicrous as

Spoiler

The Godfather-esque intercutting of the talent show with Naomi Watts setting up her military grade sniper rifle in the woods. This all culminates in the school principle, who Henry had warned earlier in the film about his police commissioner neighbor abusing his daughter, an accusation the principal shrugged off due to "lack of evidence", makes the call to report the commissioner after the daughter's talent show dance performance is so emotionally painful that she simply must have been abused all this time!

It's completely insane and I suggest everyone see it with an audience while they can.

Also, even more than the avalanche of what-the-fuckery in the third act, what baffles me the most about the movie having sat on it a day is the very ending.

Spoiler

One would expect a movie about a dead kid to end with one final goodbye to the kid, like the last shot being of a photo of him or Naomi Watts tearfully whispering a goodbye to him or whatever, but this movie seemingly completely forgets about him and focuses on his brother and the abused stepdaughter, who Watts adopts at the end. And the daughter is actively shown to be nicer and less argumentative towards Watts than Henry is, which combines with the lack of mentioning or showing Henry to give the impression that Watts, for her troubles, has traded in that kid for a better one, and that Henry's death was good and cool because it's finally letting Watts get a break. It's maybe one of the most disturbing endings I've seen, all the more so because there's no way the movie realizes it's so disturbing (it's like the bizarre happy ending a lot of people think A.I. has).

As amused as I am by reading some of this, I'm not necessarily sure if the "hype" this is getting is something I can go along with. I can't find entertainment value in something so inherently and obviously bad. Hate-watching is not what I'd classify it as (not easily anyway), but it feels more like the instinct a lot of us have to slow down our cars and gawk at the major wreck on the highway.