Customer Reviews

Beautiful [Blu-ray]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Originally I only purchased this movie because Peta Wilson was in it but was more than pleasantly surprised to find out the entire cast does a superb job of drawing the viewer into it's voyeuristic fantasy of a troubled Australian suburb. If you have ever wondered just exactly what is going on in all your neighborhood homes after watching this movie you may not want to know!

I won't give away any spoilers but I hope the yound male lead in this film makes more movies where he can bring his characters such honesty and realism. Of course Peta was great too in her supporting role. If you like to be drawn into a movie and don't mind getting creeped out a little, "Beautiful" is right up your alley.

I was rather pumped to see this after reading the synopsis and a couple of user reviews. As it turns out, I could have waited.

This is a shame as it's a rather cool idea. They just didn't have the stuff to pull it off.

Here's the scoop. This made for Aussie TV movie is set in a quiet, upper middle class suburb, but something is afoot. A few young girls have gone missing over a couple of years and there is a run down, mysterious house at the end of one of the blocks. A black, muscle car is seen cruising now and then and has some tie to that house. A young boy, an outsider, who lives with his policeman dad and dad's live in girlfriend teams up with a neighbor girl to try and unravel these mysteries.

This is a movie about how things can get out of hand. How a little information can be dangerous. This is a cloistered community where most everyone wants things nice, safe and neat. Appearances count for much and when the hot, spoiled girl is sunbathing in the rain, in a sexy, red swimsuit, well....that just isn't right. She manipulates her young neighbor friend, with her wiles, to worm his way into the mysterious house and get the low down. He does and this really heats up the issues.

The acting and production values are on par with the story. Nothing bad but nothing really outstanding, with the possible exception of the two young leads. What it needed was a better script. Something more subtle and with more finesse. This was just too clunky. And the final scene was so far out of left field I can't imagine what was on the producer's/ director's mind.

This is by no means a bad watch. It just could have been so much better.

Mixed feelings about this movie. In general, it kind of sucks. But Peta Wilson makes the amazing most of a minor role. Her performance was quite moving. I would recommend this movie on her merit alone. The scene where she explains why she is having an abortion, and the scene in the operating room, were both quite moving. She shows a range of emotions in many different scenes and adept at making her character's motivations clear to the audience. Her role didn't call for such a depth of range, so it's all the more surprising that she put so much into it.

Watch this movie, maybe on cable, maybe on DVD, and resign yourself to the expectation of a couple of wasted hours. But look for Ms. Wilson's performance to save the experience.

In a quiet Australian suburb, an introverted teen lives with his policeman father and his father's girlfriend. To the boy, the adult world is unfathomable and full of secrets. His mother died when he was a baby, but his taciturn father won't speak of her. Down the street, a neighbor furtively peers out of her living room window all day, seemingly afraid of something; no one has ever seen her outside. In recent years, there have been stories about local girls who have been abducted, never to be seen alive again. And the beautiful, oversexed, girl next door believes the two of them can figure out what is going on in their neighborhood, for fun.

This movie has several things going for it as a thriller: the dialog and *everyone's* acting are terrific; the plot sets you up for some interesting and unexpected developments; the story is seen from the vantage point of several of the characters, lending it a sort of "Rashomon" feel; and the movie begins at a meandering pace but imperceptibly gains momentum, like a river flowing fatefully to the falls. It builds to a deafening crescendo that ends with a climax as sudden, intense, and haunting as Taxi Driver's.

The movie also has several weaknesses that prevent it from being a great thriller: it borrows atmosphere and imagery from the David Lynch movie "Blue Velvet"; the tone of the movie alternates between sinister and banal in such a way that it obscures its psychologically unsettling and unique observation; and a central character behaves incomprehensibly at the end so the plot can be tied up, but somewhat unsatisfactorily.

The world of adults is full of secrets and misinformation, because people don't talk to each other. And a lonely adolescent is like a loaded gun.

Beautiful is a tragic portrait of two teenagers who suddenly and abruptly have come to the end of the innocence and so they give free ride to their power imagination, when a strange situation of three missing girls ignites the intuition of a 17 girl who uses Frank, a shy 15 boy to spy around his neighborhood to peep what's going on inside every home.

As you may see the script is far from being original, but the way it presents us the mystery behind doors and the inscrutable tension between father and son and the final bet of Suzy for getting what she wants impulses the level of this thriller to unexpected horizons.

Good efforts but far to be a classic of the genre.

Something strange is going on in the neighborhood and it seems like the answer is obvious to one 14-year-old and a girl he obsesses over. The only problem is that she wants to know about it and her answers lead him to believe that she HAS to be right. After a while these things keep slipping into place more and more until, after a while, his crush is gone (the editorial tell yu that much but it happens later in the movie). That's when he decides to try to find out things for himself and when things get really twisted.

This movie tries to go out and do some things different and, for a time, it seems like they might be on to a nice little formula. You have the obsessed teen angle with boy-meeting-girl and boy wanting to do anything to please girl, people vanishing, odd people around, and pictures that seem to paint mental phantoms you can stream together. The only problem here is that this drags on a bit and the boy, even if he were dumbstruck, would have to question some of the things that he's asked to do.

Then his crush is gone and he is not in a good mood. And that's when the movie really dgoes sideways and forgets what it is about for a moment by answering things in, wel, a questionable way that ties everything together, says something on the world, and crushes a few little heart-shaped wishes that come out of the blue.

As I watched this, I did like it. The problem was that the movie didn't know what it wanted to do when it wound down. you could predict the ending if you really wanted to but, really, you won't because its not one of those things you would stream together as cohesive. Could it work? Sure. Does it work? not really. I gave it a 3, meaning I liked it but only that, and that wathcing it was not bad but I'm not going to put on my Beautiful tee-shirt anytime soon.

A story is of an American teen being interested in photography more than in basketball, which lead to tragic results when his play-around female teen friend accused him in an improper sexual behaviour.

Fun, drama, tragedy mixed in horror sex-peppered work is not-easy-to-find-for-a-purchase on these pages.