Adoration

Reason unmoored . . .
From first frame to last, I had no idea what was going to come next in this thought-provoking film from Canada. Others here may attempt to sum up the plot, but the dream-like, stream of conscious connections that lead from one scene to the next are what I found fascinating. The movement is back and forth in time, until it's hardly clear what the "present" is, while one assumption after another about characters and their motivations is turned on its head. What you think is true turns out to be only sort of so, and each revelation pulls you in even farther.

This is a movie for grown-ups, asking questions about the post-9/11 world we live in and wanting us to make sense of the fear and confusion around terrorism. Characters are not totally clear cut. A schoolboy, his teacher, his uncle, his grandfather, and his dead parents all draw our sympathy at times and then behave in ways that make us question their judgment.

Meanwhile, as a story about the boys' parents,...

Deeply flawed but deeply `deep' as well...
Soaking in Atom Egoyan's `Adoration', I sit here wondering if my analysis is really all that accurate. The film, while flawed in my eyes, is so controversially provocative that I wonder if it is `better' than I'm giving it credit for. It may very well be. I have a feeling that `Adoration' will fare the same way as Van Sants `Elephant'; a film that resonates deeply with me over time yet always feels like a film I should consider a masterpiece can't quite bring myself to.

The film revolves around a kid named Simon who concocts a strange plan to deceive his entire school by placing himself inside a real life story about a failed terrorist plot. When doing an exercise in French class, he gets inspired and begins to translate a news story in the first person, from the perspective of the son of a man who attempted to blow up a plane. His teacher, who also happens to be the drama teacher, eggs him on until he invests so much of himself into this story that it begins to become...

Blow up
I am new to this (Canadian?) director's work, so I can't compare this movie to his previous ones. I don't know if it is better or not, but I do know that it is quite good enough to be worth my time.
A high school student is encouraged by his French teacher (who also does the Drama group) to enact and develop a scenario, which is based in a true story, as if it was his own: the boy's (Palestinian?) father had put explosives into his mother's travel bag on a plane to Israel, while she was pregnant with the boy. The bomb had not exploded. The boy, Simon, reads `his story' to his class and then on the net.
The `drama' grows out of hand and proliferates in chat rooms. Simon lives with the fiction and makes wild statements. He gets feedback from people who were on the real plane that had been supposed to blow up. He is called by Neo- Nazis who proudly parade their Holocaust denial tattooed on their skin. He is called by a young woman who makes her grandmother show her camp number...

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