The Appearance of a Man Hollywood Movie 2009
Cast And Crew
Director: Daniel Pace.
Cast: Michael Tassoni, Slade Hall, Tom Basham,
Richard Glover, Katherine Stewart.
Rating: Not rated. Some violent imagery.
Note: At Harkins Valley Art.
Released Date, September 11th, 2009
Reviews
The night of March 13, 1997, strange lights were witnessed flying over the Phoenix sky. For years the lights have remained a mystery, which have led to a number of hypotheses, ranging from UFOs to military exercises to weather balloons. But there was something more. That night, under the cover of strange lights in the sky, a “man” appeared in Phoenix unleashing a series of mysterious events. Who was he? Where was he from? Why did he come? This is the story of the Appearance of a Man and the Phoenix Lights Mystery.
On March 13, 1997, unexplained lights fly over Phoenix and a mysterious man appears, unfolding a series of extraordinary events.
Please, do us a solid. Just park your spaceship or your interdimensional chariot on the White House lawn, call up CNN and say hi. Not only would this provide a welcome distraction from mundane news about the Afghan elections and Jon and Kate's divorce, it would rescue us from the sort of mushy-headed New Age musings that masquerade as a story in "The Appearance of a Man."
This made-in-Arizona film purports to "decode the Phoenix Lights mystery," referring to a 1997 incident in which a V-formation of bright objects was reported in the skies above the Valley. In the movie, the lights spark a tedious series of non-coincidences involving a taciturn priest and an enigmatic stranger who's perfectly capable of sitting down and having a conversation but who prefers to traffic in Egyptian symbology.
"The Appearance of a Man" is playing at Harkins Valley Art Theatre, which has become a mecca for this kind of nonsense ever since the surprise success of "What the Bleep Do We Know!?", a 2004 "documentary" on quantum metaphysics.
The latest example is even worse than it sounds because, although it's very, very bad, it's not bad in a fun-to-make-fun-of way that would let you improvise your own version of "Mystery Science Theater 3000." Instead, it's a ufologist's variant of "The Da Vinci Code," except without all the action and faux scholarship. That leaves little more than flat dialogue and overdone atmospherics - ominous drumbeats, ostentatious camera angles and a long sequence of surreal special effects that rip off "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Writer-director Daniel Pace seems to have read a great deal of Whitley Strieber without ever developing a sense of plot. Events in the film don't lead to other events, they just happen, and the characters have no significant choices to make that might affect their fate. The average conspiracy theory is better constructed.
The acting isn't much better. Playing the priest, Michael Tassoni looks a bit like Robert Downey Jr. but sounds like Keanu Reeves at his deadpan worst. There's no discernible personality in the role. It's just Father So-and-So, the guy to whom stuff happens.
