A little treasure from Canada... Away From Her, which may sound unknown to most, is a film written and directed by Sarah Polley, whom most may know as 'the hot main blonde chick from Dawn of the Dead.' And even more annoying is I've been wanting to see it for a while, but it didn't come to Orlando or Ft. Walton Beach. So I forgot about it, then when seeing Ocean's Thirteen again at a terrible dollar theater, I see Away From Her is playing there. So tonight I was back at the ghetto theater.

This is not an easy movie to watch, the subject matter being the effects of Alzheimer's. An old couple of about sixty, Fiona and Grant Anderson, are in their little cabin in Canada. We get glimpses of the difficulty they have when Fiona washes a skillet, then absently opens the freezer, places it in there, and goes to the next room. Grant watches her in despair, then replaces the skillet under the sink, where all the pots go.

As the plot moves, the dilemma arises of putting Fiona in a nursing home, or trying to care for her himself. Relationships form between a sympathetic staff member and Grant, as with Fiona and other patients. But as time goes on, Fiona forgets who her husband is and becomes more attached to her new friends. But then her memory comes and goes. That's one of the most depressing parts, that one day Fiona is fine and knows what's going on, and the next, 'up in the clouds.'

This would sound like a teen drama, maybe Mean Girls, if it wasn't dealing with specific subject matter in such a delicate way that even a scene where Grant talks to a goth-rocker-teenage girl we get some understanding.

Okay, lost my train of thought. I really want to rant about another movie, so...

6.5/7

Tonight I caught a midnight showing of Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween. My God, what a travesty.

Making this movie experience even worse, I watched the original just before going to the theater. The original is great -- a classic. John Carpenter created a template for countless future horror flicks (some good, a lot not).

To begin with, Rob Zombie's remake spends an excessive amount of time on the childhood years. First he gives us an assortment of cliches and white trash language that is funny, I guess, if you laugh at a drunk man calling his wife a 'bitch' and telling her to 'do the God damn dishes.' We then see Michael Meyers, 10, get picked on a little at school. That's not overdone either... So after school he beats the kid to a pulp, then that night kills his step-dad, sister, sister's boyfriend, and for some reason leaves his baby sister alone. Mom finds the horror.

So essentially after wasting the first twenty minutes, we arrive at the same exact conclusion we got in the John Carpenter version after the first scene. I thought less was more? Apparently not for Rob Zombie.

So we, the audience, suffers so long through watching Michael in prison that I was about to fall asleep, then there's one of the most ridiculous jail escapes I've ever seen. Later his ability to break chains is slyly explained with him being able to lift half a ton by himself. Okay.

After an hour of these shenanigans, the plot follows the original for a while, with some of the same casualties in some of the same places. Obviously there's more boobs and blood and gore, because subtlety and finesse are nonexistent here. Rob Zombie only cares about trying to cram as much R rated material into each scene as possible. Ever notice how in the original characters who have sex die, and the one(s) who don't live? It's even made fun of in 'Scream.' Well, it's true, and that point was a nice find in the original if you paid attention. Here it's thrown at us so hard I don't want to even see a girl in a bathing suit unless I have a loaded revolver. With at least four shots, since Michael can take numerous bullets.

I say this with trouble, but one thing that improved a bit was the ending action scenes. Not the ending. Not any other part of the movie. I just liked having a moderately long chase scene, since it's, you know, a horror movie. But again, not near enough reason to see it.

I only saw this movie because of my love for the original, and I can safely say that John Carpenter, regardless of how the rest of his career turned out, will always be a better writer/director than Rob Zombie.

Rating: 0.5/7