Prisoners

In the new film Prisoners, it seems like everyone in it is a prisoner one way or another. The audience may feel a little imprisoned by the length, two and a half hours, but unlike some really long movies, this one movied along nicely and I didn’t feel like a prisoner. Hugh Jackman and Terrence Howard play two fathers, Keller Dover and Franklin Birch, whose two young daughters disappear during a Thanksgiving dinner, where the families have gathered at the Birch house. The girls had been seen playing near an ancient rv earlier in the day, and when the two men determine that they’ve been taken, they go in search of the rv. Later that night, the police, led by Detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal), find the vehicle parked near a gas station. When the police approach, the driver pulls out and then smashes directly into a stand of trees. The driver, a young man named Alex Jones (Paul Dano, whom you might remember as the boy in There Will Be Blood), is taken into custody and questioned, but with few answers. The man, or boy, is retarded and doesn’t have much to say. When the forensic specialists find no evidence of the girls in the rv, Alex is released, much to the disgust of Keller Dover, who knows in his heart that Alex Jones knows what happened to their two daughters. The plot develops from there, Keller taking the boy and imprisoning him in an old apartment building he owns, hoping to beat the truth out of him. And believe me, there will be blood. Lots of red herrings along the way, clues about other missing children over the years, a pedophile priest, lots of disgusting snakes, and several drawings of mazes. There seemed to be quite a few unanswered questions in the plot, but overall it was a tense, interesting film. Go see it.

Another shot of our two darling kitties, Tiger and Tuffy. It's hard to tell where one body begins and another ends. That's Tuffy on the right and Tiger on the left. But which head goes with which body?