Great performance by Quaid, wonderful relationship established between the parents, nice work with the police investigation, good performances all around. I'm not as bothered by Cavaziel in general as you are, but I did wonder about the "my dad died young so my life is a failure" aspect. I think maybe we left some of that development on the cutting room floor. Did his girlfriend walk out because---like his hero-father---he took too many chances on the job? We don't ever really know.
I was bothered by some of the cinematography-----there are a couple of scenes specifically the triumphant bicycle one and then in the bar on the anniversary of dad's death where I just got kind of sick to my stomach with the endless spinning and "montage" aspect. Could've cut that in half at least. It happened a couple other times in the film but nowhere else stood out as much. I'm not prone to motion sickness but I actually had to look away from that and I was irritated because I didn't see the purpose. It just looked like bad film-making to me since the scene is so dark you can't tell what anything is. It was like some pot-head editor started tripping all of a sudden.
I specifically didn't poke at the time-inconsistencies and don't want to now. They broke their own rules a little bit---or rather they didn't really properly define their rules, but I enjoyed the other aspects of the film enough that I don't care to pick that apart.
Abso-fuckin-lutely brilliant age make-up!!!! I wasn't really sure at first if they had gotten a similar looking but older actress to play the mom 30 years later. This isn't just a make-up artist thing either----the lighting and camera angles helped this immensely. I don't think I've ever seen it done as well. It points out for me the marked lack of interdisciplinary communication in a lot of film and television. ----Everyone is so specialized and compartmentalized--largely due to union influence I think--that no one really knows how to work in a complimentary fashion. You get a brilliant make-up job that's poorly lit or shot and it'll look like crap every time. Frequency is a wonderful exception to that!
