Very disappointing...

best movie i've ever seen.

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) is a college professor at George Washington University lecturing on terrorism, which conveniently fits into the story. His late wife (Laura Poe) was an anti-terrorist FBI agent who was killed in a botched raid, apparently this was loosely based on the real-life Ruby Ridge incident. Still dealing with the sudden loss of his wife, Michael cannot seem to forgive the bureau his wife worked for. A prodigious mistake where the flags were falsely raised led to the death of an innocent family along with Michael's wife and her fellow colleagues. Michael takes a great passion in his line of work and when he accidentally stumbles upon a suspicious building blueprint at the house of fellow Neighbour Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins) he begins to suspect that Oliver's family may be planning a catastrophic attack. This leads Michael to the terrifying hidden agenda of the 'friendly' Neighbours across the street. After Michael voluntarily begins researching Oliver he uncovers a very dark past, something which Oliver has been trying to hide. After finding this, Michael expresses his theories to his girlfriend Brooke Wolfe (Hope Davies) Brooke is initially not keen on accepting Michael's theories and decides to leave Michael until she notices Oliver and a suspicious package delivery in a garage. Michael eventually concludes that Oliver and his co-conspirators want the FBI headquarters this time and the finale leads to a terrifying and explosive twist. The ending throws all the Hollywood movie rules out of the window and it seems like a good thing for this. At times you think that the things that have happened in this movie must have been a coincidence but at the end when everything is revealed you realise how wrong you were, Michael didn't stand a chance and that they were one step ahead of him the whole time. There are some outstanding performances by both Tim Robbins and Jeff Bridges, the tension builds steadily throughout the whole film as you uncover more of Oliver's dark past until the dramatic twist at the very end. It is well worth the viewing and one of my favourite movies of all time.

As I write this, they are still burying the dead in Orlando, cite of the Pulse night club massacre by Omar Mateen, a jihadi. So don't expect me to be terribly kind to the folks who made this anti- militia, pro-government (sort of) suspenser.We've got a good number of crazy anti-government wingnuts out there, but this movie was rendered obsolete the moment the planes started hitting buildings, maybe before it was even made in 1999. What I found most irritating about Mark Pellington's Arlington Road was that fell into the same old trap that so many Hollywood projects do- -being unable to accept that the greater threat is from radicalized Islam, not nut-jobs up in the Idaho Panhandle, here in Montana, in fundamentalist Mormon communities, Oklahoma City, Waco, Texas. But, gracious, we don't want to offend anyone's sensibilities.As a thriller, AR is pretty darned good, building some real suspense, establishing a solid backstory of Jeff Bridges' wife and Tim Robbins' past. The movie even has Bridges questioning the competence of his late wife's superiors. Heavens! Saying something bad about the Federal Government? An actual attempt to be even- handed?And then Pellington loses control.We get Bridges visiting Robbins' home where a party is going on, and what he stumbles into is more Rosemary's Baby/witches' coven than a lawn party with KC and the Sunshine Band advising everyone to "get down tonight."Then we get the obligatory mad-dash car chase with the laws of physics and common sense being sacrificed for the good of the message.The message being: Those crazy right-wingers are everywhere!Yet, all in all, I'd say Arlington Road was a good investment of 117 minutes. That is, until I turn the tube back to TV, and there's Omar Mateen, ISIS' "Lion of the Caliphate," taking a smirking selfie some time ago. Makes the wingnuts out there in Deer Testicle, Wyoming seem pretty tame.

This was an intense little thriller, dealing with the premise that your friendly next door neighbours might also just be terrorists. Jeff Bridges plays a widowed college professor who (in a gripping opening scene) comes across a bloody 10 year old boy staggering down the middle of the street. He appears to have been in some kind of explosion and Bridges rushes him into emergency. These first 5 minutes set the tone for the rest of the movie; dark, mysterious and intense with Bridges bordering on hysteria.The boy turns out to be his neighbours kid whom he makes friends with, but while having a beer in their living room he comes across some suspicious blueprints which sets into paranoia and soon has Bridges investigating into who these people really are. They seem normal enough, but... Tim Robbins & Joan Cusack play the neighbours, -what a great choice for the bad guys, giving solid performances and very atypical for terrorists which made them even scarier.Bridges does a good job too, he has a lot of scenes without dialogue, just him running around figuring stuff out, freaking out, driving fast, yelling, he does a lot of yelling and running with big facial expressions.I will say that while the whole movie was intense there were also sections that dragged, so that the pacing felt off at times.The ending was.... unexpected to say the least. I think my exact words were "holy sh!t he ----- and that just happened, wow." Very un-Hollywood, including a scary spin regarding the angle the media takes post event. 2/6/15

I had seen this movie some years back, and now have seen it again, on BluRay from my public library. I wanted to see it again mainly because it is fun to see where it is filmed, many places I am familiar with. In fact the final chase scene, supposedly in Washington D.C. and ending up in a FBI building is actually the underground parking area under One Shell Plaza in Houston, the same building I worked in for a number of years right before this was filmed. The movie is set in the areas surrounding D.C. but except for a few location shots was filmed in Houston and surrounding neighborhoods.Anyway, to the movie, a pretty interesting terrorist thriller. Jeff Bridges is professor Michael Faraday. Not many years earlier his wife, an FBI agent, had been killed in a botched raid. This heightened his interest in terrorist subjects in general. When he finds a young boy wandering down the middle of the street in his neighborhood, bleeding, he scoops him up and takes him to the hospital. That gets him to become friends with the boy's parents, neighbors he had not yet met.Those neighbors are Tim Robbins as Oliver Lang and his wife is Joan Cusack as Cheryl Lang. They seem nice enough but Michael's paranoia gets him suspicious of blueprints he finds in the Lang home, and he begins his own investigation into who these people really are.It isn't a great movie but a pretty entertaining one, Robbins and Bridges are good in their roles, as well as Cusack.SPOILERS: Michael soon finds that Oliver Lang was not his original name, but a name he took as a young adult after the childhood friend of that name was killed. Michael digs and finds that he had been convicted of crimes as a teenager and now suspected he was planning to blow up an FBI building in a terrorist plot. In the end when it appears that Michael might have thwarted the plot, he in fact became an unwitting part of it. The car he was driving actually had the bomb, and in the parking garage in the basement of the building exploded killing him and many others in the building.