ENEMY is a bizarre tale of a man who finds an actor who looks exactly like him, but the actor turns out to be both the man’s worst nightmare and his salvation. ENEMY has a bizarre ending and last shot that leaves viewers hanging. The acting is good, but the execution of the story leaves something to be desired.
The movie opens with some men voyeuristically watching women perform some bizarre and intimate acts in a dark room. In one tableau, a woman is abusing herself sexually. In another one, a covered dinner plate reveals a large tarantula spider. As the spider steps off the plate onto the platform, a woman in high heels looks as if she’s going to squash the spider with her heel.
Cut to a history professor named Adam Bell, who’s in a relationship with a blonde woman named Mary. On night while watching a movie recommended by a colleague, Adam spots a minor actor who looks just like him.
Obsessed with his desire to meet his double, Adam tracks down Anthony Clair, an actor with a pregnant blonde wife, Helen. Eventually, Adam convinces Anthony to meet, but Adam begins to feel uncomfortable and abruptly leaves. At this point, Anthony, who’s been having marital problems, starts to go unhinged. He decides to pose as Adam and convince Mary to come away with him for a weekend. In the hotel room, Mary suddenly notices the impression of the wedding band on Anthony’s finger. Things go from bad to worse, leading to a bizarre, anticlimactic ending.
Set in Toronto, Canada, ENEMY is based on a novel by Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, titled THE DOUBLE. Apparently, the movie’s story follows the novel’s, but the director has added some bizarre images of tarantula spiders in the movie. In one shot, for example, a giant tarantula spider is shown walking nonchalantly around Toronto. Also, an image of a tarantula spider suddenly appears in the movie’s last anticlimactic shot. These brief images don’t add much at all to the movie or its story. Also, the movie’s tone seems not as lively as an excerpt of the novel MOVIEGUIDE® read.
Eventually, in the movie, Anthony tries to replace Adam by seducing Adam’s girlfriend. This doesn’t end well for Anthony or Adam’s girlfriend. However, after Anthony’s failed seduction attempt, Adam invades Anthony’s life and starts to become Anthony. Unlike Adam’s girlfriend, however, Anthony’s wife seems pleased by the new Anthony, even though she realizes it’s really Adam.
ENEMY probably will enthrall only a few moviegoers, if any. Most moviegoers will find it too slow, too monotone, and unnecessarily bizarre. The actors and actresses (including Jake Gyllenhaal as Adam/Anthony) do a good job, but the material they have to work with is slight, somewhat pretentious, and occasionally creepy. The point of the whole exercise gets lost in the telling.
Sadly, ENEMY also contains some graphic lewd content. So, MOVIEGUIDE® found ENEMY to be ultimately unacceptable and not really worth the effort to see.


THE RIGHT KIND OF WRONG is a romantic comedy that follows the affable Leo Palamino (Ryan Kwanten), a failed writer, in his absurd pursuit of Colette, the woman of his dreams. The problem is, she happens to have just gotten married to Danny (Ryan McPartlin), the golden child of a local tycoon in a small Canadian mountain town.

The story begins with Leo’s own wife, Julie, dumping him, almost out boredom. She ridicules Leo for his absurd and crippling fear of heights. She’s even created a blog all about him, whyyousuck.com, and it’s a massive hit. Now, Julie’s riding the media circuit and has a book deal.

So, Leo is left mulling in his own misery when his restaurant boss and next door neighbor, Mandeep, sends his two children over to cheer him up. Throwing a football around with the children, the ball flies off course across the street, accidentally hitting Colette (Sara Canning) in her wedding dress, just as she’s about to enter the church and marry Danny. It’s love at first sight for Leo. He leaps into action, cleans up, suits up in record time, and crosses the street, crashing the wedding. Sitting in a back pew, an eclectically dressed middle-aged woman, Tess (Catherine O’Hara) enters and sits next to him. The two hit it off and arein total agreement that this is a terrible match. Tess just happens to be Collette’s own estranged mother. Next thing you know, she’s driving Leo to the wedding reception at the home of her new and über-wealthy in-laws.

Leo shamelessly enters the house, finds Colette, and proceeds to ask her to coffee. “This is my wedding!” Colette says. “We all have baggage,” Leo replies. Colette’s new husband discovers them, and Leo finds himself booted out the front door and walking home. However, he remains smitten and undeterred.
Leo stumbles across a rare “ghost bear,” a creature whose existence in this part of the country is impossible. He takes it as a sign he should pursue his impossible dream and continue going after Colette.

Leo returns to his job where he works contentedly as a restaurant dishwasher. The job gives him what he expects and never disappoints. Meanwhile, as he hides out in safe mediocrity, he’s got a talent for juggling that’s astonishing. With cat-like reflexes, he catches plates flung from out of sight across the kitchen. All the while, he speaks to his boss, Mandeep, formulating plans for his pursuit of Colette.

Enter Neil (Will Sasso) and his wife Jill (Jennifer Baxter). Neil and Jill, married and madly in love, are like family. Neil was Leo’s publisher before his last failure. They have what he wants. He bounces his plans for getting Collette off them. They love him but think he’s nuts. When he discovers Colette runs a local Mountain tour company, he books himself on the next tour and continues his pursuit.

Mandeep decides to help his friend, recommending Leo and his juggling talents to Colette and her tour company. Unaware it’s her current stalker who’s the attraction being recommended, she arrives at the restaurant. Leo demonstrates his juggling magic for her.

On word that his ex-wife’s book is now published and a hit, Leo hits the bar to drown his sorrows. Meanwhile, jealous husband Danny gets word of Colette’s visit to the restaurant and sends an “army of children” after him. A junior high school prep club of a dozen teenagers attacks Leo in the street, beating him up, and leaving him bloodied.

A few days later, when the ghost bear appears on the local golf course drawing a crowd, Leo runs into Colette again and they actually have a moment. Her husband finds out and decides to kick things up yet another notch, getting Leo evicted from his house. Now living with Mandeep, Leo picks up his ex-wife’s book Why You Suck, and reads it.

[SPOILER SFOLLOW] Colette’s mom becomes Leo’s advocate. Estranged from her daughter, she’s determined to save her daughter from the mundane life she’s chosen of wealth and privilege. At the same time, having read his wife’s book, Leo decides to prove her and her book wrong, by tackling his fear of heights. He mounts a hand glider and tries to glide the thing all the way to the family ranch – a barbeque fundraiser for Danny’s charity. When one of Danny’s friends fires a slingshot at the hand glider, Leo crashes, spectacularly landing himself in the hospital.

Colette seems to be aware of what’s happening. She visits him in the hospital and is about to speak with him when Danny appears out of nowhere to whisk her away. Feeling manipulated and controlled, the veneer has worn off the new marriage. Reconciling finally with her mother at the barbeque, Colette begins to remember how she was raised.

Danny makes one last effort to thwart Leo’s intentions by attacking Mandeep. If Leo doesn’t disappear and leave Colette alone, Danny will report Mandeep to immigration and have him deported. Leo agrees to walk away, but will Colette realize who her husband really is, and what he’s doing? If so, will she leave him for Leo?

THE RIGHT KIND OF WRONG is at times very funny, with strong comedic performances. On the surface, it’s a quirky romantic comedy with a lot of heart. The problem is an underlying romantic delusion that undermines the institution of marriage with incredible flippancy and promotes vile adultery. Making matters worse, the movie contains excessive lewd content and foul language. So, it’s unsuitable for media-wise viewers seeking something more wholesome to appreciate.



Does FROZEN Promote a Politically Correct Agenda?


By Tom Snyder and Ted Baehr with Ben Kayser

You can find a lot of silly, and even dangerous, things on the Internet these days.

One of the silliest, and perhaps one of the more dangerous, is the recent claim by a pastor and a self-described “Well-Behaved Mormon Woman” that the Disney movie FROZEN is promoting a homosexual agenda of normalization and same-sex marriage.

The press, including the left-wing propaganda website Huffington Post, has jumped all over this story, probably to make people of faith and values look as bad and as ignorant as possible.

Respectfully, MOVIEGUIDE disagrees with the Christian pastor and the Mormon lady.

In the first place, this pastor doesn’t cite any evidence from the movie for his position, so his remarks are easily discounted.

However, the “Well-Behaved Mormon Woman” (after spending a lot of time failing to get to the point) lists a bunch of reasons why she thinks the story and songs in FROZEN are pushing the “gay” agenda of “normalizing immorality,” promoting same-sex marriage, and teaching rebellion and disobedience.

To prove her accusation, the woman, Kathryn Skaggs, focuses a lot of attention on the song “Let It Go” from the movie, where the young queen, Elsa, decides to finally use her powers to freeze things and create snow and ice (the movie is based on the very Christian writer Hans Christian Anderson’s tale “The Snow Queen”).

“No right, no wrong, no rules for me,” Elsa sings. “I’m free!”

By focusing so much attention on this one song from the movie, Kathryn forgets the rest of the plot in FROZEN.

Despite its popularity and Oscar award for Best Song of 2013, “Let It Go” only represents one part of the story, the major turning point where Elsa rejects her sister and isolates herself from the kingdom of Arendelle, which Elsa has trapped in an eternal winter. In the rest of the movie, Elsa must learn how to control her powers for the benefit of others. Also, both she and her sister, Anna, must learn the real meaning of love – and it has nothing to do with “same-sex attraction” as the Mormon critic says.

In fact, the real message of the movie is that sacrificial love is real love, not unconditional love or homosexuality as the Mormon woman suggests in her wordy article.

In promoting the message of sacrificial love, the movie not only opens with a Christian hymn in Danish about Jesus (“Fairest Lord Jesus”), it also includes a symbolic death and resurrection. So, FROZEN actually is promoting Christianity and its definition of truth and true love. In doing so, the arc of the movie’s story rejects both romantic love and selfish love. Also, as noted above, Elsa finally learns how to control herself during the course of the story (self-control is one of the benefits of the Holy Spirit in the Book of Galatians, as is true sacrificial love — see also 1 Corinthians 13 and its definition of love).

Thus, the last two-thirds of the movie is actually a rejection of Elsa’s selfish and rebellious, though very tuneful, anthem in the song “Let It Go.”

That’s why MOVIEGUIDE® saw fit to give FROZEN its Teddy Bear Award for Best 2013 Movie for Families.

Finally, as MOVIEGUIDE®’s COO Robby Baehr has noted, there are more than 512,000 churches in America, plus many para-church ministries or groups. You probably can find a pastor in one of these churches, or a leader in one of these groups, to say almost anything.

One must question, then, the agenda of the Huffington Post to cite this one pastor as representing all of Christianity. Probably not even he himself would claim to represent all of the conservative Christian churches in the United States.

Anna’s character in FROZEN lays down her life for her sister, Elsa. This is holy, sisterly love – a “love thy neighbor” kind of love – not some form of perverted love.

Ultimately, FROZEN is a validation of Christian truth, not a politically correct piece of leftist propaganda.























THE SINGLE MOMS CLUB could have been much better.


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