BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

jb-307 One writer wrote that Sedgwick and Bacon "show both heart and tenacity, and as a result this misguided person rated the film a 10. But a 10 means SUPERB, Outstanding, out of this world, a one in a million, no, in 10 million. But this film isn't any good at all, it barely rates a 2. It fails to entertain, it fails to make sense, it fails to even interest us. Less than 60% of the viewers could even stand the movie or the review of it. A score of 10 is worse than ridiculous.There were several writers who liked the movie, in varying degrees. I didn't. It was missing on a number of points. The writing was terrible, the story didn't speak to me. What person could possibly treat their son, their own flesh and blood that way? I suppose that I should treat the woman Emily as th pitiful character she plays. But the huge disconnect is too great. I cannot make the jump because NO human could possibly be as bad off as Sedgwick. The boy child has 100 times more maturity than the Sedgwick character. How could anyone believe any part of this story.In summary, the movie left me worse than flat, worse than before I began watching it, sorry that I wasted my time on this. THAT is why this movie is NOT a 10. I was generous in giving it a rating 2, but I felt that as 1 would not be fair, because 1 needs to be reserved for a really horrendous movie. This was just bad, not horrendous.

petersdraggon This movie was entertaining although a little weird. It was interesting to see Kevin Bacon & Ms. Tomei dressed in 70's garb. They played the part of a married couple totally engrossed in each other and alomist unaware they had a daughter, played by a young Kyra. There were flash-backs to when Kyra was the young daughter who was for the most part ignored by her parents, then flash-forwarding to when she was an adult. Kyra played the part of a woman obsessed with getting pregnant and becoming a mother. She used men as sperm donors only. Not much skin shown, however during the first half of the movie Kyra was running around in her panties with her headlights on for the most part. She really is a well put-together woman. For that it was almost worth the time; otherwise it was a story about a far-fetched mother's obsession with her son. The boy playing her son did a good job and was a cute child actor. Wasn't a total waste of time but not a blockbuster by any means.

Rick Shur Loverboy brilliantly lays parental love out on the table for all of us to observe in two of its twisted, unbalanced forms. The first is that of young Emily's parents, played sublimely by both director Kevin Bacon, and Marisa Tomei, who think that parenting consists of modeling love by bathing together with the door open and constantly cuddling in front of the child, as though she would be nurtured by having a pair of super-sexed hippie babysitters for guardians. The two are a riot, as is Sosie Bacon, playing with her real-life dad, a girl who sings a Bowie song in a school show in order to shock her parents into caring about her. These flashbacks are intricately woven together with the scenes of the adult Emily, played by Bacon's real wife, Kyra Sedgwick, as she raises her six-year-old Paul (Dominic Scott Kay) on her own, calling him Loverboy. Master Kay holds his own as the increasingly suffocated son, trying to escape his mother's web of the other kind of unbalanced love, being kept "safe" and "smart" and unsullied by society. We feel deeply for Paul, hoping that he will be allowed to stay in school as Emily descends heartbreakingly into madness, fearful that the school is poisoning her child. We pray that Matt Dillon, as a friendly fisherman, will be allowed to take Paul for a "boys only" fishing trip, but even then, the desperate Emily stands on the shore screaming at them to be safe while they're trying to have a few bonding moments together. The movie moves and looks like a dream, and like a dream, it has an explosive, cathartic ending that you have to wake up from. The Bacons in every way have put together a searing work of art, beautifully acted, shot and mounted, that should haunt anyone who can identify with its universally tragic themes.

Juliette2005 Kevin Bacon is a fine actor, and I was looking forward to this, his debut as a director. He's certainly worked with some of the best in the business, and one would hope that he'd picked up some great lessons in film making.But this film, sadly, doesn't offer us much.I believe the two main reasons it doesn't work are the script, and the casting of Kyra Sedgewick, Mr. Bacons real life wife.The script is pretentious and humorless and forced, and Ms. Sedgewick, a fine actress with a beautiful body (shown off here quite often) is almost fetishized by her husband in this film- to the detriment of the story itself.It's a film chock-a-block with celebrity cameos, everyone from Matt Dillion to Sandra Bullock to Campbell Scott and Marisa Tomei, and no one really survives it.I will say this though- it is a BOLD failure, and I do look forward to what Mr. Bacon can do with a half decent script. He (and we) deserve better.