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Hard Candy

Hard Candy (2005)

January. 14,2005
|
7
|
R
| Drama Thriller

Hayley’s a smart, charming teenage girl. Jeff’s a handsome, smooth fashion photographer. An Internet chat, a coffee shop meet-up, an impromptu fashion shoot back at Jeff’s place. Jeff thinks it’s his lucky night. He’s in for a surprise.

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Reviews

Listonixio
2005/01/14

Fresh and Exciting

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Kailansorac
2005/01/15

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

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Juana
2005/01/16

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

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Bob
2005/01/17

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

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crystallogic
2005/01/18

Well now, the profusion of low scores for this title I'm seeing on IMDB are interesting. Some of the reviews themselves are rather revealing, too. I don't blame most of my fellows; I couldn't really give this a higher score even though a part of me wanted to, but on the whole I'm very glad I watched this film and as a work of art that puts the viewer in the position of being the "victim" of a kind of sociological experiment, I think it's an admirable success.A mistake I think many people make when viewing film is to try to ascribe a message to it: a moral you can sum up in a sentence, a payload or political polemic. It's not that people necessarily want to see this in the films they watch, but they can't help but do this sometimes, and oftentime the result of their conclusions leaves viewers feeling angry and manipulated.Make no mistake, then, this film is manipulative. I ask, though, why shouldn't it be? Furthermore, although it's manipulative in a rather extreme, even heavy-handed way, I don't think it's trying to deliver a message to the viewer in a neat little box with a bow. What I believe it is doing is presenting a situation which, after all, is not all that uncommon in the annals of recent human history, and turning it on its head; asking us to examine it from several different angles and perspectives which we might not have considered. So, the one criticism I really have of this film is unfortunately the same one that everybody else who actually liked it (that is, those that aren't utterly convinced that it's trying to shove a feminist message down their throats) have: I don't see how haley was able to do some of the things she apparently did in this movie. The precociousness and intelligence, I can buy, but the physical strength is a bit more of a stretch. Interestingly, every time jeff gets poleaxed and comes to, haley has done something else rather incredible with his body. How does she manage it? jeff must be twice her weight and size. Even if she bench presses that kind of weight regularly, managing to manoeuvre him into a chair, get off his clothes, suffocate him unconscious with cling wrap (in reality I suspect he would have been fighting really hard and it would have taken several minutes to accomplish this, though I suppose he could have been already weakened by being drugged earlier), suspend him from the ceiling -- all that stuff stretches credibility to its breaking point. In spite of having no difficulty accepting her intelligence, too, I did find at a couple of points that I was listening to an older woman speak, and not a fourteen-year-old-girl. This is particularly evident when she is reprimanding jeff for allowing her to drink and accepting her flirtations. I"ts so easy to blame a kid!", she says. "If a kid says, 'hey, let's make screwdrivers!', you take the alcohol away!" I couldn't help but feel this was the screen-writer pointing the finger and not a "kid" talking at all, though Ellen page delivered the whole scene with a lot of feeling and intensity.As for her incredible physical feats, hey, maybe she had an accomplice we didn't even see? We always get those scenes from Jeff's perspective, right, so, you never know! I'm only being half-serious, but the last-moment revelation at the end that jeff in fact had an accomplice and they were responsible for the missing/dead girl together could make for a nice comparison.The lack of other characters in the movie didn't really bother me, though, despite that last-moment reveal of a person of great significance whom we never even heard of up til that point. This after all isn't the point of the film, and in the end I admire it's sheer dedication to minimalism. This could have been a stage play, easily. And some of my favourite productions are two-handers in minimal sets, so this one fits right in. At 100 minutes though, it is perhaps just a little too lenghty, or maybe I would have spent some of that extra time in greater build-up before the two characters met, or background, or maybe even a phone call or two between jeff and Aaron to establish that they had some kind of relationship so it didn't come so much out of left-field. Still, I think it entirely possible that things like that would have taken away from the direct, what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature of the film, and that is in the end one of its most admirable qualities.The other thing to really admire in the film are the performances, which are both top-class in their own right. haley is adorable and, during those moments when we still feel jeff might be innocent, it's easy to see how he could be taken in fully and fighting with himself to stay away from this dangerously precocious and sexually awakened youngster. Jeff himself is put through the wringer of emotions and displays a wide range, but mostly he just comes across as a rather normal, low-key guy in his early thirties, the type whom you wouldn't think twice about meeting on the street. That's part of the genius of it. He has an explanation for everything; he has no harmful urges, he's just a photographer!In the end, I don't think this movie comes down firmly on haley's side any more than it really does on Jeff's. I could wish that we knew a little more about her, because I don't think the role of badass vigilante entirely suits, but I'm ok with a bit of obscurity and appreciate that the filmmakers didn't want to get bogged down in backstory and unnecessary complexities. This is a "what if?" movie, and thus I think it's advisable to suspend disblief at some of its more incredible elements and allow the thought experiment to proceed. The thought experiment in question asks you to imagine "what if this often all-too-real and tragic situation happened this way instead?" "What if the child got the upper hand? What if the child in question had her own particular kind of psychopathy to contend with?" It's interesting, and timely, and although I have some reservations, I'm glad it was made.

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dallasryan
2005/01/19

Hard Candy is a film with a simple setting, it almost feels like you're watching a play. There is a very small cast and it's mainly just a fencing match between Ellen Page's character and Patrick Wilson's. Extraordinary acting between these two and I would say Ellen Page in her best performance to date. She is a phenomenal actress. The picture of Hard Candy explains itself. It's the old bait and switch. A movie of a scenario of how we might like to see things done in real life just like in old John Wayne films or in the Death Wish movies. But even to a more serious level within this filmNot a film for all, not always easy to stomach, but worth the watch for Ellen Page's best performance to date.

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yjudith
2005/01/20

I'm a fan of Ellen Page so I was surprised that not only did I not like her in this movie, I found her to be so annoying that I couldn't wait for the movie to end so I didn't have to hear her voice. The story itself was a good one, but the phoniness of what goes down once Hayley and Jeff are back at his apartment is so over the top and the story just kind of fades.Once he wakes tied up in the chair...fake!!! He has to outweigh her by a good 80 pounds of dead weight and the way he fits in the chair; I found it hard to fathom. This isnt a movie of high, fast-paced drama, so my mind was had too much time to start checking all the far-fetched things that were going on.

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brooke-roberson
2005/01/21

I watched this movie several years ago and was very disturbed by the fact that so many people had complemented it. Basically this girl tortures a man to death on the SUSPICION of sexual abuse. She does this without any proof, no evidence, no names, no nothing. The man tries to reason with this psychopath to no avail. He doesn't do anything to harm her prior and appears to be a true blue photographer. I don't know why people liked this movie but no, it's not "worth a watch" as the first review says. It's smut.

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