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28 Days

28 Days

List Price: $14.95
Your Price: $13.46
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: SANDRA BULLOCK SHINES
Review: This movie is funny, smart, and well acted. Sandra Bullock is one of my favorite actresses, she just has this likability that's hard to resist, lol. Even though this movie has a lot of humor, it gives you a serious glance inside the life of an alcholic. I loved the acting, the story, and the smart dialogue. See this movie, it rocks!!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Very Good Movie
Review: I wasn't sure how much I would like this movie about rehab, but I was pleasantly surprised. I thought Sandra did great in this movie. It was a feel-good movie.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: overly slick but occasionally enjoyable
Review: **1/2 There comes a time in the career of every performer identified mainly with lightweight romantic comedy roles to take the plunge into more serious acting challenges - in the hopes that we will see beyond his or her pretty face and into the heart of the great actor that resides within. And strangely enough, many of these actors and actresses choose the same exact route to accomplish this feat - that of portraying a person heavily addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. This was the case with, for instance, Meg Ryan in "When a Man Loves a Woman" and Michael J. Fox in "Bright Lights, Big City" to name just a few. Now we have Sandra Bullock attempting to stretch her thespian muscles by portraying an alcoholic in "28 Days," the tale of a young woman's experiences in a detox center located in a bucolic suburb of New York City.

One of the initial problems with such films is that casting such well-known faces in these parts automatically ends up conferring a bit too much glamour on the situation. And "28 Days" is no exception. It's hard to accept Bullock as a particularly credible person in this role. Still, the movie is generally watchable because it manages to make the people and the rituals at the center seem both utterly addled and emotionally endearing all at the same time. When Bullock - feisty, close-minded, smug in her sense of superiority - first arrives after being ordered to the center as a part of her probation, we are as appalled as she is by the touch-feely nature of what is going on there. If anything could keep one from becoming an addict, the threat of being sent to a place like this would just about do it. But then, as the various characters begin to open up and reveal themselves as true hurting individuals, we, like the Bullock character, begin to be won over. But even these people aren't given enough screen time to really grow into fully-rounded, complex characters in their own right.

The film never entirely breaks out of its TV-movie formula. We are treated to all the standard plot devices common to the genre: the inevitable overdose by one of the patients, romantic interludes with a professional baseball player, the clashes between the latter and Bullock's troublemaking boyfriend. One of the problems with glossy studies of addiction such as this one is that, more often than not, we are led to believe that the "cure" is a permanent one - not necessarily because the film shows us that (in fact, it makes a few nods in the direction of showing that it ISN'T always permanent) but because the two-hour time frame and the audience demand for a hopeful, upbeat ending inadvertently leave us with that impression. To be fair to the film, it doesn't tie up all the loose ends into a nice pretty package. We are given cause for hope, but the open-ended nature of the final scenes suggests properly that the struggle will go on.

"28 Days" is a film with its heart in the right place. In fact our own hearts go out to it, to Ms. Bullock, to all those involved in its making. We realize that it is difficult to make a film that, on the one hand, yearns to be an uncompromising study of a subject as gritty as this one, yet, on the other, feels the need to appeal to as wide a mass audience as possible. The result, unfortunately, is a film that is too lightweight to be taken seriously, too "entertaining" to be real.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Too Predictable
Review: Sandra Bullock gets into a car accident, is sentenced to 28 days in rehab, goes to rehab, everyone hates her, she might get kicked out, then everyone loves her and she leaves rehab all happy and her problems are long gone. This formula is so predictable, yet so wrong. This movie tries to add a few laughs with a gay character, but I don't think this is the type of movie that should be generating any kind of laughs. I didn't like this movie from the start and ended up laughing at it instead of walking away from it knowing that I've learned something.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Surprisingly entertaining
Review: Worth a watch alone for the balanced look at a real problem. Approaching addiction recovery without accuracy, balance & wit can trivialize the subject. Betty Thomas' movie has an empathetic view, presented in a manner to neither scare off skeptics nor alienate those whose lives have been touched. The latter are in for a feast of 'inside' jokes & witty observations.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent movie!
Review: I don't recall this movie being released in Australian cinemas, so seeing it on DVD was a first for me. I'm fast becoming a big Sandra Bullock fan because she is as comfortable with drama as she is with comedy. It's rare that I get to have a good laugh during a movie AND shed a tear (or three!) This is a really enjoyable movie, shot at some beautiful loactions with a nice soundtrack as well. Highly recommended.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: BORING
Review: Although Sandra Bullock does a pretty good job considering her limitations as an actress, I found this film essentially boring. The romance angle is unconvincing as well as are the meant to be colorful members of her AA froup. It's been a while since we've had a propoganda vehicle for AA, e.g., "I'll Cry Tomorrow," "Days of Wine and Roses," so to me, the picture seem dated in that sense. AA is not as successul as motion pictures would have us believe. although it surely is better than nothing.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: A disservice to people in recovery!
Review: Hollywood films have long been the locus both of expression of asocial emotions and their discipline, rather than their genuine taming. This was identified in the case of TV in the 1950s by Theodore Adorno who watched a woman in a "quality" USA program (probably one written for Playhouse Ninety) desire personal liberation, only to realize at the finish that her liberation consisted of...the conventions. Adorno saw a lack of movement found in Jerry Seinfeld's cynicism about his friends' very ability to have meaningful lives, and this lack of movement exists in 28 Days.

28 Days is a disservice to people in recovery from alcohol and drugs. Because of its deep structure it may itself cause people to relapse.

The most amusing part is the first five minutes in which Ms Bullock (an appealing *gamin* with an attractive vulnerability) trashes the wedding of her uptight sister in the company of her drunken boyfriend (apparently an Aussie, Brit or Kiwi who is later punched-out in good old Americano style by a more sober chap.)

Like old Three Stooges comedies in which the Republican dowager gets a pie in her face as a protest of real inequality (for in 28 Days, a dowager gets the canapes on her derriere), 28 Days cynically exploits real, if buried anger, against a classist binarism in which one is EITHER a free spirit, but economically disadvantaged, OR a sober resident in an "upscale" community.

This is hegemonic for it equates spiritual recovery, and salvation itself, with a nice car and house as trashed by one's daemonic, but salvageable, kid sister.

Missing is the very possibility that alcohol and drugs enforce for material reasons (known as "protecting one's supply") a great deal of highly conventional behavior, and that recovery can involve downward mobility.

So attractive is the liberation of the first five minutes that many people in recovery may turn off the new DVD player after Ms Bullock trashes the wedding, go to the nearest bar, put The Clash on the juke-box, and get well and truly wasted.

Recovery is not a matter of images but of texts. It is no accident that recovering people talk amongst themselves and read books, rather than watch videos. As the movie cleverly portrays, the very chemical effect of alcohol, its destruction of short-term memory, causes life to degenerate into freeze frames, at first snapshots of liberation, later on, of horror.

Anne Wilson Schaef has called aspects of our society, as replicated by the Hollywood dream factory, addictive, and the best movie about alcoholism (The Lost Weekend) failed at the last minute; for in the novel on which The Lost Weekend was based, the hero does NOT recover, whereas Ray Milland appears to. 28 Days is in the tradition of this dishonesty and in my (layman's) opinion, anybody who watches this film in early recovery is in danger of a slip. People without addictive tendencies and people with a year of sobriety will be mildly diverted by Sandra's adventures, even in the rather boring recovery home (a home which, it should be noted, is completely unavailable to most addicts and alcoholics.)

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: AN ENTERTAINING MOVIE WITH NO RESTRICTIONS
Review: This is a very entertaining and touching movie, I enjoyed it with my family! Sandra Bullock at her best and Betty Thomas show us that a movie about drunks and alcohol doesn't need to be rated 'R'.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: absolutely amazing!!!
Review: I'm from the UK and every review i read for this film gave really bad review but i was pleasantly surprised. Sandra Bullock pulls of this part brillantly and this film touched me in a big way. With the comedy of Gerhardt it made me laugh but also made me cry at the end. i totally recommend this movie u wont be disappointed


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