DeeAnn Thebus Don't miss this one - unless your life has always been perfect and easy.In that case, this movie would not be for you! If you have had sorrow, loss, and disappointment, you will find redemption and compassion in this heart-felt movie.All of the actors are amazing. The story line is precious and so compelling. I am sharing with all of my friends, because I don't have any "perfect" people in my list of friends any more!I wonder how I missed this one, except that I have always been so "behind" everyone else, that I wouldn't have "gotten" this movie 8 years ago. I do now. Guess it's a "maturity" thing. Invest a couple of hours. You will be so glad you did. Although there are incredibly sad elements to this movie, it ends on such a note of completion, that you will come away feeling able to embrace all of the mistakes (or losses) in your life, and to not only forgive yourself, but to applaud your own courage and survival!

Richard Scott I never saw this in the theatre but caught it recently on STARZ. Like Steve, I'm a Southern California boy(Ventura-born)and lived in Pasadena for eight years. But this film touched me as a There-But-For-The-Grace-Of-God story.I grew up in Northern California and saw my wife for the first time on her mother's 51st birthday, Feb. 17,1968, crossing the intersection of Telegraph and Durant Aves in Berkeley. I was not quite 14 and she was dressed in a black silk top hat, long black velvet cape and dress. That girl became the physical template for every girl I'd ever be attracted to.Over the next 21 years, I went through junior high and high school, joined the Navy and hunted the Great Steel Whales, got married and had two children with a woman I knew I didn't love. I was working in San Francisco for A.T.&T. in the 1980's and started riding the Vallejo ferry into San Francisco in the summer of 1989, the same company my Dad had worked for as a deck hand at the time I saw her. Although I didn't know it at the time, the first person I met on the boat that day was her, 21 years later, sitting in my favorite seat outside.We started talking and found out we were both budding writers. Over the next few months, we read each other's work and started writing a spy novel together. We were also both trapped in bad marriages. Then three things happened to me in the last months on 1989. The first was cutting off a killer called the 580 shooter on the Oakland Freeway one midnight going to work. Then 6 weeks later the Loma Prieta Quake hit and while she was on the pier, I headed back into work and kept long-distance phone service working through the emergency. By this time she had confessed her feelings to me and I was hit out of left field. While I processed that, I had to realize that the only time I looked forward to in the day was the time I spent with her. The final straw occurred on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.They had repaired the cable cars by then and we got free cable cars with the ferry pass. We would walk to the California Street cable car from the ferry, hop aboard and ride up to Kearney St. where I would get off. She would continue up to Stockton St. where she would get off. That Wednesday, my daughter was sick so I stayed home to care for her. So, the cable car didn't stop at Kearney and made the light. Forty seconds later, a 50-ton construction crane collapsed into the intersection of California and Kearney, killing six people. When we talked next, we left together. It wasn't until a month later that she told me she used to hang out in Berkeley in the same place, time and wearing the same clothes I had seen her in that day. And if we hadn't had the courage to stand up for love, I would have never known it.That was 19 years ago and we have never been apart since. This film reminds me of what might have happened had I not had the courage that day. The fact that I've driven many of the streets on which the story is set and recognize most of the locations is a special bonus for me.

Poetica The film's use of two voices relaying three narrative threads, artfully woven without confusion while maintaining audience interest and focus, could be used as a textbook for compound story structure. If the story hadn't been expanded from a short film thereby requiring this approach, I'd be heaping superlative praise on its inventiveness as well.Entertaining, well-cast with excellent performances by its ensemble of seasoned character actors, and just quirky enough to offset its sometimes saccharin character, I think this will grow a deserved following when it airs on cable. A solid illustration of the possibility of 'charm' in contemporary cinema, it presented little violence beyond its illustration of an automobile accident site and the language of adolescent boys, and managed a passionate but never prurient love scene under cover of a liberal dusting of flour.Enchanting!

paintbrush_2003 *Warning - no plot spoilers ahead, but movie spoilers nonetheless...* My significant other rented this for me thinking it would be a terrific romance with an all-star cast. Wow - very, very wrong. This movie is an overdone, overwrought, and overly sentimental excuse to theatrically release a student film 15 years after it was shot! The copyright date on the box said 2005, yet during the very first flashback sequence I was looking at the clothes and hairdos that were supposed to be the early 1960s, and noticed that the girls especially were wearing late 80s/early 90s dresses and hairdos. It looked as if it had been shot a good 15 or 20 years before the rest of the film! I tried to convenience myself that it was a flashback, and therefore supposed to look old, but it looked WWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY more 80s than 60s or even 21st century trying to be 60s... then an adult coworker of the lead character turns up, and he looks just like the boy featured in the flashback sequences (yet it's a different, much older character whose youth is featured in the flashbacks). I was completely confused until I saw in the special features the short film included - it was all the flashback sequences, shot in 1990 as a complete student film of the same title as this movie! It also features commentary that includes the little boy all grown up (and indeed acting the co-worker in the 2005 scenes). Thus, this movie is just a shell of story woven around an old, re-cut student film put together as an obvious excuse to get it up to theatrical running time. The shell story, shot in 2005, is mostly about a man who has lost his wife and finds healing and redemption at the dance class that he promises a dying man he will attend in his stead (something about a promise made by the dying man in the early 60's to his girl that they would meet on the "fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the new millennium - an excuse to shoot the segments around the old film in 2005?) These new scenes and plot might have been OK except the awful, overly sentimental score that repeats ad nauseum over almost every single new scene and the clichéd action that permeates the new movie. Don't bother. There's a reason why you've never heard of this movie even though it has a well-known cast - it's terrible.