Note the unusually short and to the point list of information about this film. It sums up what you can expect to see on the screen for ninety minutes of murky – sometimes pitch black – claustrophobic suspense: Ryan Reynolds. The entire movie is one big scene, filming in real time 90 minutes of one man locked in a box as he gradually discovers a surprising amount of hidden contraband within the four corners of his wooden prison cell and tries desperately to micro manage the people trying to save him. In fact, Reynolds does a brilliant job of navigating the emotions that you would imagine anyone would go through in that situation, and is completely convincing throughout. There’s a lot of pressure on an actor forced to carry the entire weight of a movie on his back and this is definitely a good example of Reynolds at his best. There’s no argument here that if you can keep people watching ninety minutes of just yourself on screen, you have a lot of talent.

The lighting for Buried must have been an absolute nightmare, but I commend Eduard Grau for how he dealt with the problem. There’s no subtle ambient lighting or night vision here; if Conroy doesn’t have a light, the audience is plunged into darkness. He’s forced to juggle his lighter and his cell phone for the first half of Buried, which adds to the claustrophobia and realism by flooding him with yellow or blue light respectively and clever camera positioning to still get a decent shot of him rather than the blurry and shadowed outlines you might get in a bad porn film.

Unfortunately, my favorite part of Buried was the ending, which is a key part of the film that I’m unable to write about without ruining it for you. Towards the last twenty minutes of the film, things really pick up and finish on a high point that you don’t see coming and which produced quite an emotional response from some of my fellow audience. I suspect that if you have claustrophobia or suffer from a very precise fear of being buried alive, this film might have you terrified and on the edge of your seat, because the director Rodrigo Cortes has gone to such great lengths to keep everything (even the camera for the majority of the film) within the wooden boards of Conroy’s coffin.

Before I watched Buried, I had heard nothing but good things about it. Usually I expect this to bring about one of two reactions: either I find myself loving the film just like everyone else promised, or I’m dramatically disappointed and leave hating it. When anyone asked me afterwards whether I like Buried, however, I found myself repeating: “It’s okay… the ending’s good.” The best way I can explain it is that watching Buried is like watching a play. Don’t get me wrong – I love the theatre, but if I wanted to see a play, that’s where I would go. Unless they have funds pouring out of their ears and a budget big enough to bathe in, most theatre productions have to look for a way around being unable to recreate all the special effects, big scenery and huge props you could find in a movie. The scariest thing I’ve ever watched was a play called The Woman in Black, which involved three actors, a hat stand, a small crate and a creative sound engineer. Buried would have been a very creative plot for a play because you find your action, intensity and emotion in the actor rather than his surroundings, but I found it just a little disappointing as a film. It seems as though people are commending the creators of Buried for successfully keeping an audience in their seats for ninety minutes of a man in a box, which is certainly an impressive feat. But that’s like congratulating someone for baking an edible cake without using any flour. I would be impressed that they’ve made it, but I wouldn’t want to eat it again.

Trailer for Buried The Movie

And how can one ‘fool’ the Immigration system better than marrying someone who’s got all the paperwork done properly?

When Andrew has to visit his family in Sitka, Alaska, he’s joined by his new “fiancee” to his parents amazement. Imagine a well dressed woman (for the NY social events) getting off the plane in the ‘countryside’. Put in the mix some good situational comedy and you have the ingredients for a pretty nice relaxing movie.

Sandra Bullock shows some skin too, while Ryan Reynolds makes it worth the movie for us gals too. Not to mention a very cute white doggie and a well played grandma (Betty White).

Yes, the plot is pretty simple. Yes, you can kinda guess the end (in most romantic comedies the end is clear from the beginning), but the actors do play their parts and the entire experience is a very enjoyable one. Not a movie for someone looking for something ‘serious’, but, if you need to relax those neurons, The Proposal is just what you need. You might even be interested in seeing it again, as I was.