Strong and Moving!

An Exercise In Nonsense

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This rating would be so much higher had the Alison Eastwood expressed any emotion or even enthusiasm for the part throughout the movie. She is just flat. Very cold and unbelievable. Makes it hard to stay interested when the woman playing the main character is so disinterested. Wrecks the entire movie after finding this as a fun book to read.

Mary Higgins Clark writes mysteries that are entertaining, fast reads. She's no Agatha Christie, but she's prolific and when you pick up one of her books, you know what you're getting.It's the same with TV versions of her many stories. Unfortunately, when you flip your remote to one of them, you also know what you're getting: a badly acted, badly directed, slow-moving story that is good for one thing - helping you get to sleep.Alison Eastwood apparently decided to become an actress because she was born of two acting parents. Sorry, but that just isn't good enough. She inherited no talent and worse than that, no presence. Here she plays a young woman, Patricia Collins, whose double is murdered. The victim had her name and address in her pocket, but Patricia had never met her. This story is folded into the death of Patricia's father, whose body was never found. Mysterious occurrences point to him still being alive. When Patricia mentions her dad's name at a fertility clinic with whom her father did business, one of the scientists there becomes frightened and is later murdered. Patricia tries to unravel what's going on. It's not hard to figure out, because in these movies, the criminal's bad acting telegraphs his/her identity early on.By far, the best performance in the film comes from Margot Kidder who comes off like Helen Mirren here, the rest of them are so bad. The always likable Kidder gives an energetic performance with honest emotion. Also, the final scenes of the film are very good.With better casting and a quicker pace, this would have been an okay movie. Patricia as played by Eastwood doesn't come off as smart enough to figure this whole thing out.Great to see Kidder, if you can stay awake long enough.

'I'll Be Seeing You' is another low budget Canadian production based on the Mary Higgins Clark novel (although she receives no writing credit for this one). It is the story of a strange series of events, and probably the result of writers attempting to squeeze too much drama into one story. It is the standard made-for-TV fare, with low budget, zero glamour, and lots of bad acting. Had it been on CBS ten or fifteen years ago, this would be a rerun on the Lifetime TV network.A young woman (Alison Eastwood), Patricia, is asked by police at the city morgue to identify the body of a young woman who looks like her. Working with detectives (you know they're detectives because they're wearing trenchcoats!) to trace the identity of the killer, they soon suspect the murder was committed by her father who has mysteriously gone missing and meanwhile, doubting their suspicions, Patricia does her own investigations which leads to a scheme involving the father's scheming coworkers at a fertility clinic, a family from a double-life, and a subplot involving a psycho stalker obsessed with her. And it becomes so outrageous, part of the mystery is solved by a psychic assigned by the police. And yet, she still manages to find time to chit chat with her mother (who was clearly too young for the part), ride horses in the countryside, and carry on a love story with well-meaning guy who is conveniently always right on time. There is, as another viewer has already noted, lots of terrible acting (like the pregnant girl's confession scene, or the numerous times the villains hold their victims at gunpoint and then go on and on yaking about their motives with enough time for--gasp!--the cops or someone else to show up and intervene). A story of this much drama at least needed a more powerful sense of direction, acting, and script. This was just much too lightweight.I don't know how it fares compared to other films in the Mary Higgins Clark mystery collection, but I will say that by itself, it was mostly laughable nonsense.

I've read several of Mary Higgins Clark's books and seen several movies. Of the two movies on TV the same week, I liked "Pretend You Don't See Her" as the better of the two movies. Nevertheless I liked this one. I am not so particular about the technical details and supposed flaws in movies as others are because if the plot is decent and the story flow moves, I can adjust to small annoyances. I feel like there was a plot and a sub plot in which danger came from two directions. I thought the acting was okay and was glad to see Margot Kidder in the movie. It is good that in spite of her problems she is still able to act. Some may not have thought that two half sisters could look like twins but I and one of my first cousins seemed to be almost identical so much that when he died, many relatives did a double take. So to me for half sisters to be identical was realistic. If the comments between the young potential lovers seemed strange, it is in real life. There were a few twists and turns and I was a little surprised at the ending but it turned out okay. This review was of the PAX presentation on cable January 31, 2005.