Suspension (2008)

Wow! Such a good movie.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

***SPOILERS*** Film about time suspension involving this magical camcorder that can freeze time at the click of it's pause button. How this camcorder got these amazing powers is never really explained it only seemed to have gotten them when it and it's owner Daniel Bennett, Scott Cordes, survived a fatal traffic accident that cost the lives of three people. Daniel's wife teenage son and the driver of the pick-up truck that caused , by running a stop sign, the accident!As things turned out time stopped when Daniel accidentally pressed the pause button on his camcorder just at the moment of impact which in effect saved his life before he was to go head first through the car's windshield. It wasn't until later after repairing the damaged camcorder that Daniel started to realize the amazing power that it possessed. The one thing that Daniel really wanted to possess and soon became obsessed with was the pick-up tucks dead driver's wife Sarah Kane, Annie Tedesco, who's picture just happened to be on her husbands cellphone the moment that he ran head first into Daniel's car! In fact it was Mr. Kane's call to Sarah that distracted him from keeping his eyes on the road and lead to he fatal car smash-up!Daniel at first is very kind and helpful to Sarah in dropping a law suite against her dead husband's estate in him causing the accident that save her home from being foreclosed in paying the lawsuit off. It's only later when Daniel started to get the hots for the very pretty 7th grade school teacher Sarah that things started to go downhill for him and everybody else who had anything to do with her especially Sarah's boyfriend fellow elementary school teacher Josh Werlitt. As his obsession for Sarah grew worse Daniel started to use his camcorder to freeze her in time and then take advantage of her while she was stuck in suspended animation. Daniel also took the time to get even with Josh whom he felt was a threat to his relationship, strange as it was, to Sarah by freezing him in place with his magic camcorder and then pummeling him to the point that when he was unfrozen, at the click of the camcorders pause button, he died from massive internal bleeding!In his spear time when he wasn't stalking Sarah Daniel spent his idle hours freezing time so he could pick pocket and rob people of their cash, while being frozen stiff, to pay off his bills. The very sexually charged up, in him knowing he can get away with it, Daniel also spend endless hours in womens clothing department stores changing booths watching young and busty women change and try on womens undergarments. That while at the same time he was stealing expensive clothes for Sarah who with the little money she made as a grade school teacher could hardly afford!***SPOILERS*** Daniel's strange obsession with Sarah started to get out of hand when he used his power of stopping time to try to get romantic with her that she, as a women being abused, frozen in time or not could easily sense! It's when Daniel, by now crazed with lust, tried to really get it on with Sarah that she turned the tables, or the pause button, on him. In fact it was Daniel not Sarah who in the end did himself in by realizing that his little gizmo's, the magical camcorder, actions had caused far more trouble then it was worth that he himself let it, by not trying to get out of the way of a runway wheelchair, finish him off and end all this misery once and for all times.

Well, first off seeing that the writer / producer (director?) of the film took the time to answer someone's post here about stopping time, I can see that they clearly are taking a real interest in what people are saying, which is great. First and foremost, this was an excellent idea! Overall, the mood, feel, and direction, not to mention the acting (which I would expect to suffer in a film like this) was of high caliber and well handled, except... And here comes the painful part and I will try very hard not to give away anything too specific in discussing this. Guys... the turn the film took when he went into the other guy's house... Come ON now!!??? For Goodness sake...! Talk about taking a truly beautiful concept that was handled in a totally lovely way and then about 3/4 the way through completely destroying it. I'm sorry guys, really...Okay... I think I'm gonna hafta mark spoilers here to make my point...***** SPOILERS AHEAD ***** All right, you have this delightful, tender, gentle, poignant, touching, moving story going (I think you get my point) and then what you do when he goes into the guys house is SUCH a total dead end, so TOTALLY unnecessary and COMPLETELY divergent from the entire mood and direction of the film that you had taken ALL this time to set up beforehand! I mean, our sympathies are completely with the guy and you worked it quite BEAUTIFULLY up to there. So, I'm thinking, 'Ah, I bet I know what's gonna happen; he's gonna go inside this guy's house and find out that he is like a serial killer or something like that and THEN he will hafta figure out a way to warn her and you have all this GREAT excitement and THRILLING stuff they go through, and then they end up at least as friends together or whatever in this wondrous new world of theirs.' *** END SPOILERS ***Uh... No... that WOULD have been awesome! To me, THAT would have been a perfect and satisfying way to resolve the story; the audience would have come away feeling like 'Wow, what a great idea and a lovely film!' WHY oh WHY on Earth did you take it in that direction and just have it turn into this, forgive me, stupid ending with him just coming across now as some kind of idiot weirdo. Really...? Your ENTIRE ending rests completely on a TOTALLY unintentional, almost comical ACCIDENT...??!!! And that is what you based that whole last part of the film on...??? GEEZ guys, I cannot even BEGIN to express how disappointing that was. I honestly think that in doing that with the story, it really left you feeling COMPLETELY empty and like, 'Oh, that's it...?' So, for me personally, that destroyed, torched, and ruined the whole thing. It made the difference between keeping the film and tossing it. I'm really sorry, I truly do not mean to be unkind, but I want you to KNOW how passionately I feel about this. I have seen I don't know thousands and thousands of films and I honestly cannot think of another movie off hand that built the first 3/4 so beautifully and then threw it away senselessly like that, Not one...I would LOVE to know why the Makers of this film took the story in that particular direction when you seemed to be pointing everyone in a much different one. I mean it was so tender and touching the way he was trying to help her and reach out to her and connect with her, etc. It just doesn't make ANY sense at all, it truly doesn't. It is quite frustrating when you think of how much BETTER the story could have turned out... That is why I only gave the film a 5 because of the direction it took and the ending; otherwise I think I would have given it at least an 8 or more...

This movie is creepy and I don't think it is intentionally. While the movie is well done (good cinematography, directing and acting), the script seems to me a little bit off. Here you have a guy that looses his family in a car crash and gains the power to stop time through the pause button on a camcorder (no logical explanation ever given in the movie why and how), all he does with his new found powers is to stalk the woman of the other victim in the car crash. And this is where the movie becomes really creepy because she clearly doesn't want his advances. The movie becomes then this really strange action/psycho flick, that I don't think was ever truly the intention of the makers. Or maybe it was? To me the writing in this movie really sucks because there is no clear idea or concept or story line that makes sense. If you make the movie about a man loosing his family in a car crash who then gains the power to stop time, you develop the story with the context of a man trying to fix the past or someone trying to prevent others from experiencing similar traumas (in the movie the main character does try to help others, but always with catastrophic results. The writer/director could have just explored this and the movie would have been fine). Or they could have made the entire movie just about the abuse of power ... in that case the car crash would not have been a necessary element. Or the movie could have been about how you protect yourself from somebody who has these powers and is after you. In that case the movie could have been set in the future where that kind of power might be available (of course only in the movies). Bottom line: there are three stories wrapped up in one movie and that is what makes it so bad. I don't think this movie is worth watching other than for the special effects, which I have seen however in other movies before. And now that I think of it, it almost seems to me that the idea for the movie was developed because of the special effect. That would explain the weakness of the script and the hodge podge of ideas.

Of all the movies I saw concerning extraordinary powers this one approaches the story using another angle. The others are usually more the American style or action movies with many special effects, explosions and of course the necessary love-story. In contrary this one is just different. No fancy explosions, no real action scenes. At some time you could feel a kind of little stress in compassion for certain people, but the slowness of the movie compensates. The 'stop time' principle is really linked to very slow and relaxing moments with soft, slow music. The story itself is not really spectacular, the image quality neither. If you have nothing special this movie I could consider it as 'an option'.