Movie #6 - The Tall Man

MOVIE:  The Tall Man

PLOT:  A man the townsfolk have nicknamed "The Tall Man" has been kidnapping children from a small town in the pacific northwest.  No one can find any trace of him until a recently widowed nurse has a late night encounter...

GOOD POINTS:  Good movie, very beautiful scenery along the way, highlighting the rural areas of Washington state, most likely in the fall season, which just makes it even more colorful.  This definitely wasn't done cheaply.  Zero special effects required.  I am pretty sure all the money was spent on fine actors and location shots.  Several of the plot twists were surprising.  Good start followed by some good action sequences.

BAD POINTS:  More of a psychological thriller than an actual horror movie.  No nudity.  Surprised they spent so much actual time at the end explaining what happens after, since at that point it's rather obvious.  So essentially, the main part of the movie only lasted about an hour, and the rest was all wrap-up.

IMPRESSIONS:  Very well done.  Not my cup of tea but it was in the horror section.  At least, I think it was.  I'm a little hazy this evening.  Bad cold.  Maybe it wasn't in the horror section.  I can't remember.  Got a headache.  Worth watching again but kind of already know the plot twists, so maybe just to see if there was anything i missed, but i doubt it.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS:  I really don't want to give anything away.  I hate having to edit even my simplest sentences about a movie so I don't spoil the plot, but I refuse to lie about a movie just to make it sound like something else, so I'm in a bit of a tough spot.  Let's just say I am a little confused, much like the narrator of the movie, as to why one way is better than the other?  And if Jessica Biel's character agrees with my confusion, as she seems to in the end, why did she stick around?  What was the point?

FINAL IMPRESSIONS:  Jessica Biel is hot, even when roughed up and covered in mud.

OTHER NEWS:  So I saw this article about some 12 year old girl somewhere, england I think, who got accepted into MENSA with an IQ of 162.  Apparently that is 2 points higher than both Stephen Hawking and Albert Eintein, which puts her in the top 1% of people in regards to intelligence and in the top 2% of all intelligent people worldwide, if I remember the article correctly.

So... I took this IQ test in high school.  Out of 60 questions, I got three wrong, and two of the questions, when I went over them the next day with my teacher, I had actually come to the right answer but just filled in the wrong circle on the test.  The final question I had panicked on (it was one of those complicated word-math questions) and probably wouldn't have got it right anyway.  But what was my actual score on it, you ask?  160.  Which was probably why they invited me to join MENSA again a few months later (for the second time, and I turned them down again... apparently I'm not much of a joiner).

So what does this tell us?  That I, an unemployed tech support guy, am at least as intelligent as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking?  That IQ tests don't mean a thing?  Would MENSA use IQ scores as a standard for membership if they didn't think they were a good indicator of intellect?  Who knows?  Too complicated for me.  I'm sticking to movie reviews and video games.  But I will say one thing that I recall from my years watching the Discovery channel.  They were talking about animals and brain size, and they said: "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play."  By that standard, my mind must be incredibly complex, because I love to play!  ;-)

See you tomorrow night for the next movie!