Watched Not Forgotten tonight (with Charlie the bulldog snoring while
draped across my leg... happiness is a warm bulldog!),

I confess for a minute I thought I was watching a sequel to the
Guardian, with Nick having adopted little Violet and moving to a Texas
border town and marrying some other brunette who was not Lulu. ;)
Yes, that's Chloe Moretz -- little Violet from a couple of episodes in
the third season of The Guardian -- as Toby, Simon's 11 year old
daughter-on-the-cusp-of-womanhood in Not Forgotten.

Simon is respected businessman (and coach of a girls' soccer team)
Jack Bishop in the town of Del Rio, Texas. His first wife (Toby's mom)
is dead and he is remarried to a beautiful young Mexican-American
woman, Maya, played by Paz Vega. Then one day Toby is kidnapped from
her soccer game, and Jack launches his own investigation, which in
turn leads to the revelation of secrets and a different self he
thought long dead and buried, and the unraveling of his carefully
constructed new life. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen some of
what he had left behind, but there are about three twists after
that. ;) It's a story about people not being what they seem to be on
the surface, that violence begets violence, even years later, and the
bad things you did are eventually going to come back to bite you in
the nether regions.

The movie isn't flawless -- it can be rather slow on one hand, and
then feverish and almost hallucinatory on the other. The Mexican
community may not be pleased with its depiction as largely consisting
of deadly religious cultists, prostitutes, criminals, corrupt cops,
and women who sit around watching telenovelas all the time. (My
husband watches a telenovela every night -- nothing wrong in that!)
Speaking of which, as a former Spanish major, I was thrilled to hear
Simon speaking quite a bit of Spanish dialogue. He needs to work on
his accent but really, he did it pretty well. ;)

This is probably Simon's most gorily graphic movie after zombie flick
Land of the Dead. And yet, ironically, he is at his most, er, hot when
he's shirtless, sweaty, beserk and slicing someone up with a broken
bottle. (Much blood ensues, though thanks to crafty editing, you don't
actually see the slicing, you just see the result.) However, the
scariest thing in this movie isn't the violence but a close-up at the
end of the movie. You'll know what I mean when you see it.

Apart from the hot and shirtless thing :) Simon is pretty dang great
in this, transitioning flawlessly from mild-mannered to frenzied and
murderous. You realize something is wrong with this guy when Jack
sees a man who is a suspect in the kidnapping and he starts pounding
on a big glass window that separates him from the man. Everything
he's been holding in for years is suddenly unleashed and he looks like
he's about to go mad. Although Simon has played many emotionally
tortured characters, this performance, with Jack's deliberate
duplicity, rage and homicidal ferocity, is something we haven't seen
from him before. Intense is the word.

The rest of the cast is adequate to good (Moretz is very fine).

Just be warned about the blood. And they cut the head off a chicken.
I'm sure it's a fake chicken but it's still pretty gross.

The movie looks excellent on Blu-Ray, though you can see every crease
in Simon's face. Sunscreen and a big hat are your friends, Simon!

The disc also has a short (6 mins) interview with director Dror Soref
and another man who is one of the producers. These two also have a
commentary, which I haven't listened to yet. That's going to have to
wait until tomorrow night. :)

-- Paula