Eric writes about Blown Away, and I too felt the same way. I found myself simply enjoying the action (and the suspense was quite good) without caring about the people in the film. The one major problem was that the entire Boston Irish-American immagrant story was very pooly done. It seemed to me to attempt to capture the spirt of the wedding scene in Derr Hunter, and fell far short of the mark. One of the most annoying elements was the very poor attempts at a Boston Irish-American accent, esp. Lloyd and Jeff Bridges. I think that as a more general trend, the technology of film making and special effects as reached such a level in the past ten years, that film makers have gone to such an extreme in special effects at the expense of good acting or writing. I was, as I am sure most were, quite impressed with the special effects in T2, or Jurassiac Park, or Forest Gump. The problem is, when the technology (in this case, the computer) becomes the star of the film, everying else seems to suffer. we now find ourselves seeing flims for gee-whiz f/x rather than old fasion acting and origional scripts. (i think if i see one more baby boomer remake i will scream) -drew