>>Another of my movie recommendations.
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>>This one came out of nowhere. There was not a lot of hype behind it. The screenwriter / director was unknown. The main character was a kid played by Haley Joel Osment, equally unknown. Toni Collette, who knocked it out of the park as the mom, was an unknown Australian actress. Bruce Willis was the closest thing in it to a box office draw.
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>>Without much studio push behind it, it did something like $300 million in box office in the U.S. It went off like a bomb. Word of mouth. People watched it again and again, looking for the little signs they had missed before. At the time I was hanging out on a screenwriters forum on Compuserve, thinking I might write one. There were lots of produced writers there. (One of them, John Hill, talked me out of it. He said if you're over 40 in this town and don't have any produced credits, they're not going to touch you. Write a novel instead). It was a somewhat jaded group and they were hyped up over this movie. It was probably the longest conversation ever there.
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>>A huge secret is revealed about 2/3 of the way in. I sure won't reveal it. Let's just say every last detail of this movie clicks into place like a Swiss watch. If you are lucky enough not to have seen it yet, do yourself a favor.
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>Absolutely true - every word. After the movie was over, I remember sitting back smugly going over all the mistakes they made that led us astray, and darned if I couldn't find a single one. A very nearly perfect movie.

(Scroll way down so there are no spoilers for those who have not seen it).

































The attention to detail is amazing. As one example, Malcolm (Willis) never touches anyone, nor do they touch him. You think he's with them but in fact he's not. The only one who even knows he's there is Cole.

The use of the color red is definitely symbolic. I don't claim to understand exactly what it means but it occurs far too often for it to be an accident.

Did you notice M. Night in one scene? He plays the doctor who treats Cole when he goes to the hospital. For a while he was doing the Hitchcock thing of giving himself a cameo in every movie. (I have lost track of them; they went bad quickly IMO).

The story arc, as they call it in the business, is very satisfying. Even though Malcolm doesn't know he's dead, there is something troubling him. The patient he failed -- Donnie Wahlberg, Mark's brother -- gnaws at him. He doesn't want to let Cole down, too, and he doesn't.

That scene near the end with Cole and his mom in the car, talking about her mother, that one gets me every time. If anyone can watch that without getting a lump in their throat their heart may have turned to stone.