Huzzah And Kudos

You know, it's important to appreciate the little things in life....
The smell of a fresh tulip in the morning air...the feeling of a brand new pair of purple corduroy pants...corn....Oh, and factory-packaged Rice Krispies Treats.

Yeah, that last one is my favorite.

(They look like some kind of weird fungus when you see them up close, don't they?)

I love Rice Krispies Treats, and the mass-produced, store-bought kind are among the greatest consumer product innovations of the last 20 years. See, you young whipper snappers may not remember this, but some years ago, readily-available Rice Krispies Treats were not in existence. If you wanted some of those buttery, marshmallowey delights, you had to friggin' MAKE them. In an OVEN. With ingredients.

Waaaay too much trouble for a cat like me, and therefore, simply out of reach. As a kid, I loved few delicacies more than a succulent Rice Krispies Treat, and yet my MOTHER, for reasons unknown, refused to bake them. It was really weird -- Mom would gladly make cookies, cakes, and pies of all varieties, but she NEVER baked me a tin of Rice Krispies Treats. Not once. If I wanted some Treats, I had to wait for some other kid's mom to bake them...and that could take months. I'd go over to my friend's house, and be like, "Nick, DUDE -- ask your mom to make Rice Krispies Treats," and he'd be all, "Man, I'm sick of those things. Ask your own mom to make them..." Little did my pal understand that my mother simply would not.

I guess she just had something against the concept of using breakfast cereal to make a delicious baked good for some reason....Either that, or she associated some horrible memory with Rice Krispies Treats that she would never explain to me. Perhaps her own mother used to beat her with a tray of freshly-baked Rice Krispies Treats on a regular basis. I dunno; I guess it's possible. The point is that I could never get any at home when I was a kid. And that made me very angry. Very angry indeed.


SO, when the fine folks at Kellogg's began selling Rice Krispies Treats, ready made, IN THE STORE, around 1996 or so, I was in hog heaven. I began purchasing the coveted snacks on a regular basis, assuming that the product line was too good to be true. You know how it goes -- some company offers a really neat item, and then it disappears forever after a short time because the average consumer is an idiot who doesn't know quality when it bites him on the rear. That's what I thought about the mass-produced Rice Krispies Treats.

But something wonderful happened: years and YEARS went by, and those beautiful blue aluminum wrappers can STILL be found on store shelves. I consume them on a constant basis to this day, never losing appreciation for the fact that kind people choose to continue the line. I just bought a huge, bulk box of the suckers the other day. Yuh-huh, 53 of them bad boys, all waiting for me to come along and chow down. With each bite, I thank the honchos at Kellogg for keeping the faith. You guys ROCK, Kellogg! Keep the Treats comin'!

And I declare mass-produced Rice Krispies Treats the Snack of the Month. I recommend eating some to distract yourself while watching this thriller.

The Unsaid (2001)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258967/


Netflix description:
Andy Garcia stars as Michael Hunter, a psychiatrist called on to assess disturbed teenager Tommy (Vincent Kartheiser), who's about to be released from an institution. But Hunter struggles with his emotions, as the boy reminds him of his own son, who committed suicide. Shattered by his trauma and estranged from his family, Hunter seeks fatherly redemption with Tommy, whose shocking demons prove difficult to overcome. Teri Polo co-stars.

So, The Unsaid is about a guy whose son goes and kills himself. THEN, he meets ANOTHER kid who seems to know a little too much about the situation. Coincidence? Of course not.

The once-great Andy Garcia plays Doctor Michael Hunter, a hot-shot psychiatrist who gets a lesson in PAIN when his troubled teenage son pulls the old "suicide by carbon monoxide" gag. Mike, being the Mr. Smarty Pants head shrinker that he is, is totally devastated, knowing that he probably should have spotted the warning signs of what was to come. SO, his marriage falls apart, he moves into his own bachelor pad, and grows a beard (always an indication that a man is trying to overcome some kind of trauma). A year or so later, our hero is asked to become the counselor for a teenage boy in some kind of nutty institution, and that's when trouble starts brewin'.

See, this boy is named Tommy, and he's kinda got problems. Seems that Tommy witnessed the brutal murder of his own mother BY his own father, and has never really opened up about it. The shrinks at his facility are concerned because Tommy seems a little too unaffected by the incident, even though it's been several years since it all went down. Tommy's about to be released, and the docs want to make sure he's not bottling up some horrible rage before letting that happen. For some reason, they think our pal Michael can get him to crack, talk about his mother's death, and MAYBE even come up with a reason to keep him in the mental home past his 18th birthday. What a swell bunch of guys!

Well, Michael gets to know Tommy pretty well, and notices several similarities between this kid and his own, dead son. Needless to say, we learn that Tommy is completely psychotic, and it's Michael's job to unravel exactly what happened that fateful day when a ten year-old Tommy walked in on the murder of his mother. There's also some subplot crap about dead teenagers and family drama, etc, etc....

The problem with The Unsaid is that we don't know exactly what kind of thriller it's aiming to be. Is it, like, one of them supernatural deals in which it turns out that Tommy is the ghost of Andy Garcia's kid...OR is it one of them homicide deals in which Tommy is actually the one who murdered his mom? If I had known what sort of low-rent thriller this picture was supposed to be, I could have called its ending after about 20 minutes and spared myself the hassle of watching the whole darn thing.

But maybe I'm not being totally fair there. I mean, admittedly, The Unsaid DOES have one DOOZY of a twist ending that not even I saw coming (it's not necessarily GOOD; just really SICK). Getting to that point, though, is a sort of trying process. We're constantly being thrown all of these *wink, wink* sorts of clues, only to learn within a few minutes that the leads go nowhere.

And another thing: why is Tommy in a mental home to begin with? I just don't get why the kid's been locked up. I mean, sure -- he IS a sociopath...but the authorities don't know that (yet). The kid comes across as totally normal and clean-cut, yet they've got him in some facility for wayward boys or something. Just because he witnessed something horrible as a child??? Doesn't seem fair to me. Then again, I guess the doctors know best. They were able to predict that the lad would be dangerous even before he did anything remotely threatening. That's pretty good work on their part. Go figure.


The drama involving Doctor Michael's personal troubles was a waste of time, as I really didn't care for any of this picture's characters (except maybe Tommy), and a romance that gets a-brewing between Tommy and the good doctor's daughter amounts to nothing. On a technical level, The Unsaid isn't terrible -- acting is capable...imagery is slick...the soundtrack is appropriate (although almost totally stock audio that I believe I've heard on Buffy the Vampire Slayer a thousand times).

Really, this is a rather pointless movie. You might find it vaguely engaging, but that's only because director Tom Mcloughlin leads us down so many false paths. The Unsaid probably should have remained unmade...and unwatched.

See what I did there?

2 out of 5.

b.